What I learnt from my mum’s gap year: live for today
2019
A commissioned piece on my dear old mum for The Flash Pack travel company.
People say I take after my mum. When I used to walk around the Manc neighbourhood where she grew up, I’d get stopped in the street by 90-year-old women calling me by her name. With our ‘petite’ height (thanks for the five foot nothing genes, mama), penchant for wearing berets and crippling levels of social anxiety, I could see why.
As well as being my older doppelgänger, my mum is my travel hero (she’s my general life hero, too, but that’s a different article). Travel heroes can too often be #influencer types, swanning about on a yacht with a glass of champagne, forcing their other halves to snap infinite photos of them in swimwear. But my travel hero is a 63-year-old woman with arthritis who always takes a hard-boiled egg wrapped in tin foil for the plane ‘just in case’.
