Give me a break!

Trust me, I've been there - Zoe Williams

You want to book your summer holiday now, in the spirit of being a good-time girl (or boy, of course). But you are not truly exhausted by 2009 yet. You have interior resources of vim. You cannot imagine yourself into the fortnight – it is only about a month away – when all you’ll want to do is lie crucified on some sand.

So perhaps you’re thinking, this year I’ll be more adventurous. More altruistic. This year it’s not about Planet Me, it’s about Planet Planet. And it is in this mood that you might consider the environmental break.

I have only the dimmest notion of what happens on these things. I can picture a load of 18 year-olds in Peru, building a dam for llamas to drink from. I wouldn’t want to do that. Even though I like llamas, and I’m sure Peru is nice. Or else, I can picture a load of women in dungarees – this is what my childhood looked like, pretty much. I honestly don’t know where all the men were – building a dry-stone wall, then eating apple purée afterwards, as a “treat” perhaps?

Naturally, after the tentative peek of a good intention, I now have a flood of reservations. The gap year style breaks, I cannot believe are of any real benefit to anyone. When I was in this age bracket and gap years were still a special interest thing that only cool people did, the emphasis was very much on helping whichever community you fetched up in. The idea of making you help and ripping your parents off for the privilege had yet to be invented. So my friends were always off to Yemen to volunteer in orphanages, and I always got the strong impression that they were about as much use as a chocolate fireguard.

Or perhaps I was just jealous? I’m nevertheless left with the gut sense that wherever there is a collection of highly privileged 18 year-olds doing a task, that task has most probably been cooked up by someone to stop them squabbling with one another or badgering the locals. And also they would all be much, much younger than me.

This leaves us with the dry-stone wall. Of course, first of all, I was hoping another five years at least would elapse before I would enter the dungaree ranks, but never mind that.

You can only imagine this happening in the UK. If I close my eyes and really concentrate, I can picture a dry-stone wall in Provence, but I cannot imagine anyone letting an environmental tourist build it. And once you’re staying in England, isn’t that in itself enough like work? Do you really have to find more work to do on top of it? Can’t you just find a beach, lie back and wish it was a little bit warmer?