Next departure 3 December LARGE SHORT BREAK OPERATOR: HF HOLIDAYS 0845 470 8558, hfholidays.co.uk HF Holidays specialises in walking holidays but also offers a number of quirky leisure breaks to suit the most esoteric of hobbyists.
But singles holidays are being reinvented for a sophisticated market, offering more thrills and glamour than ever before.
Today at lunch retired US ambassador Frances Cook, who we knew in 1972 when she served in the consulate in Sydney, apologised for slight bruises under her eyes: she and everyone in politics, she explains, have plastic surgery – navy secretaries, congressmen, senators take cosmetic-surgery holidays in Thailand or South Africa.
Perhaps it's that early exposure to religion that made me more interested in baking traditional cakes and breads for holidays.
Is there not a disparity between the commitment of the World Bank president, Jim Kim, to raise the incomes of the bottom 40% of the world's population with his organisation's Doing Business report, an annual study that ranks countries by the progress they are making in cutting corporate taxes, keeping minimum wages at low levels and ensuring that paid holidays and sick pay are not excessive?
The big losers were the Daily Star Sunday, down more than 14%, and the Sun on Sunday, down more than 12% despite a creditable monthly improvement of more than 5%, again boosted by the paper's ever-successful holidays' offers.
The Sun, boosted by its cheap holidays offer, did best of all, recording a 4.57% rise (and, incidentally, we must wait until next month to assess the effect of its dropping Page 3).
8. Pay, holidays, maternity and paternity leave EU law guarantees workers' rights in areas such as maternity and paternity leave, holiday pay and in the event of mass redundancies.
Calum Kerr, the SNP's freshly appointed environment and rural affairs spokesman, describes a "steady flow" of individuals lobbying him on foxhunting since he was elected, with "a reasonable number of emails from south of the border, some of them even offering to come to Scotland for their holidays if we support the ban".
And voters will be spared a Hobson's choice, with the option of coming out of Europe with the loss of investment and jobs that would entail, or staying in but with key rights such as paid holidays, gender equality and protection for agency workers stripped away.
Newspaper publishers were waking up to lucrative possibilities: postwar gloom had lifted, shiny new products were on the shelves; cars, televisions and holidays were within the reach of ordinary people.
