Trust Me, I`ve Been There

Guardian newspaper columnist Zoe Williams on picking your holiday housemates Illustration: Tom Percival / Advocate Art

UGH! IT’S SPRINGTIME AGAIN AND MY thoughts turn to the eternal going-on-holiday-in-a-villa question: you fancy an Easter break in a villa (or château, finca, castle… insert your chosen country’s word for “house”), and you want to do it with other people. If it’s just you and your own family, there is no one to blame for any of the many things that, by the laws of the universe, have already gone wrong. Even if you did find some relationship-neutral way to complain about stuff (and good luck with that), you can’t go out to bars and restaurants anyway, so you really end up reading the same book twice and going to bed at 9.30pm.

So who to go with? It is a common assumption that the best house-buddies are people with children exactly the same age as yours. You have this image in your head of the children entertaining each other in intoxicating and yet totally risk-free activities, while you doze and drink mint juleps. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? No, it’s not. Maybe it works like that with babies, but once they’re old enough to have personalities, one child is always rougher/ stronger/more assertive/more evil (of course this depends on which one’s yours), and all the time you are not separating them, you are cornering your man to whisper poison about the other couple’s parenting technique. Now this might actually bring you closer together, but it seems like a poor use for a whole holiday.

The best solution is to go with childless couples. I mean there must be very little downside to this. Sure, they’ll spend a large segment of the day drunk while you’re foraging for children’s entertainment on French radio, but you’ll just envy them. What’s a little jealousy? That’s what most friendships are based on, after all. The only problem I have discovered is that childless couples, who enjoy normal popularity the rest of the year, are in incredibly high demand for holiday season – such high demand, in fact, that however many you know, someone more organised than you will have pilfered them all six months ago. Yes, people with children quite a bit older than your own are an option, but then you’re tied to school holidays. Even though I don’t theoretically mind going away at the same time everybody else goes away, convention demands that I should avoid it for as long as I can. If I willingly stumble, zombie-like, onto the August conveyor belt, I’ll feel like a schmuck.

This year, I’m going to try a new tack: the house-holiday with everybody I’ve ever met. The absolutely ginormous house-holiday. With that many people, tensions are impossible, no? There’s just too much chatter, too much admin. Getting a beer would take 45 minutes. It can’t fail. I’ll keep you posted.