Susie Rushton: The dull truth about holidays at home

When I was little, the best part of a holiday was the very beginning. Awoken while it was still dark, my sister and I would scramble into the car in the early hours, snuggle beneath a rug in the back seat and majestically wait for our parents to drive us to our destination. There were no aeroplanes involved in the trip, and we left our passports at home.

Of the holidays themselves, I remember less. This was the late 1970s and early 1980s; we went for a week in Norfolk, or Wales, or Scotland, staying in a draughty rented cottage while it rained outside, occasionally let loose on a windy beach. One summer we spent two weeks camping at a hippie commune on a farm just outside Swindon. I enjoyed these holidays, although I couldn't understand why, in September, I never had the lovely brown skin of the minority of school friends who'd been taken to Ibiza or Florida. There was the small matter of the price of flights: in 1980, flights for a family of five to Spain cost the equivalent of three weeks' average earnings. I doubt that, if I was a child now, deprived of an Easyjet break, I would be so ignorant of the foreign delights I was missing.

In the past two decades, the thrill of stepping off a plane and inhaling the hot, honeyed air of the Mediterranean or Caribbean became accessible to many more people. As soon as I was old enough to holiday on my own, I travelled as exotically as I could, and I didn't bother with discovering Ibiza, either: the first proper solo holiday I took was to Zanzibar. I chose it because it sounded so excessively faraway and unlike Britain. I paid for it with borrowed money. Like lots of middle-class kids I then made the most of those years of cheap flights and strong sterling, and, in age that was not yet troubled by rising graduate unemployment, flitted off on a round-the-world gap year.

This summer, the hundreds of thousands of Britons who are forgoing holidays abroad – representing the fastest drop in numbers since the 1970s – will be remaining at home in the full knowledge of the delights they could be enjoying elsewhere. So the contemporary domestic holiday – the "staycation", a desperate tourist industry calls it – is an austerity measure. And it feels like it. We know there are beautiful views across green valleys in Britain, and pretty villages with rivers to paddle in, and picturesquely aged old ladies. But the familiar grot remains. And familiar grot isn't half as charming as the foreign kind. Once, a long car journey meant simply closing my eyes in Kent and waking up in South Wales. I'm no longer a child, but the slog of driving is hardly helped by crowded motorways and the firmly unexotic delights of Moto service stations. Then there's the destination itself. British hotels and restaurants have pulled themselves up several notches and have the Michelin stars and glossy-looking websites and northbound prices you'd expect.

But there's no thrill to arriving in yet another market town only to find oneself accidentally turning into the Waitrose car park (isn't even getting lost more fun when you're abroad?). There's nothing easygoing about the way the owner of a B&B, which is situated far from any shop, purses her lips as she refuses to give me an aspirin "on health and safety grounds". And the weather, sadly, is much as I remember it as a child.

Don't judge Mandelson's book by its cover

On the cover of his new memoir The Third Man, our eponymous hero is captured mid-gesture. One hand raised to his neck, Peter Mandelson is adjusting his fashionably black tie. It's an odd choice of photograph. Are we, the observers, viewing him from behind a secret mirror, observing Lord Mandelson preen in his walk-in dressing room? Or are we invisible witnesses to those final fastidious moments before he steps out to perform a gangland execution? Is he thinking, "My God man, you look HOT"? That little movement, hand to the tie, loving stare at one's own reflection, is pop-culture shorthand for a man who has set his mind on a dramatic mission. Something thrilling is about to happen, signals his hand. Alas, he delivers less than one would judge by the cover of his book.

L'Oreal's slogan takes on a whole new meaning

It must be fun being Liliane Bettencourt. Not only can you stir up some jolly trouble with a fortune that size (€14bn), but also because being heiress to a brand like L'Oréal would, I imagine, have its colourful moments. The giant beauty conglomerate was founded by her chemist father, Eugène Schueller, 101 years ago, with his invention of a hair-dye formula. Along the way L'Oréal branched out into mascara, perfume and, for a short time in the 1980s, even movies, but hair colouring is still its core business. Its HQ in Clichy, near Paris, houses what is said to be the world's biggest hair salon, where 300 volunteers a day try out the latest blend of chestnut-brown tint and peroxide blonde.

L'Oréal has also experimented with its brilliant slogan, which began as "Because I'm worth it", then in the mid-2000s switched to "Because you're worth it". Last year, following consultation with a consumer psychologist, the company finally settled on the more democratic "Because we're worth it". One of the most memorable lines in contemporary marketing, who could have guessed just how apt it would become?