This year, for the first time since 1999 - when I bought a gilet, then instantly regretted it - I'm engaging in a fashion trend. I'm having 2008's “hottest holiday” - a “staycation”.

As written about in magazines, this staycation involves a resolution to eschew Disneyland, or Cornwall, and “holiday at home” instead. For the duration of your two-week break, you will try to consider your city not from the vantage point of a trapped, desperate animal, poisoned by adrenalin and carbon monoxide, nor as a potential serial killer, quietly drawing up a list of the first mouth-breathers to “get it”, but as a happy, carefree tourist. Go to that museum! Take yourself out for dinner! Suddenly get confused about where you are round the back of the Civic Centre, turn your street map upside-down and ask seven passers-by for directions to the swimming pool in halting Italian!

You won't need a passport, or suffer an unhappy six-hour wait in a transit lounge at Stansted. Instead your holiday will start the moment you get home from work on Friday evening, close the door behind you and say, to the expectant, happy faces of your family: “Right. If anyone kicks up rough about this staycation stuff, I shall lock them in the airing cupboard until they beg for a staycation from the unhappy sensation of slowly suffocating. Now, get me a big gin.”

Some commentators have recoiled at the word staycation, deeming it a step too far, vis-à-vis the adoption of the slang of our American cousins. Personally, I don't mind it. It sounds a bit more purposeful than the only viable alternative, “home-iday”. I suppose there could also be a future possibility of introducing the phrase “gin-i break”, in acknowledgement of the founding principle of the staycation, ie: you will be spending the price of two air tickets to Barcelona on Sainsbury's own-brand gin to blot out the pain of remaining in Cricklewood for August. But, ultimately, I prefer staycation. It does, after all, make the act of being gypped out of a holiday because you're flat, stony broke, sound like some manner of intentional, principled decision - which is borderline Marxist, if you think about it.

Because, at the end of the day, this is what the staycation is really all about: money. It's about being too poor to go away. It's one of the many symptoms of the credit crunch. You can tell that it's a “being broke” issue rather than a “fashionable new invention” issue simply because not one celebrity - not even, say, Jon Tickle, a former Big Brother contestant - is reported to be having a staycation. Journalists covering the staycation phenomenon cannot find a single illustrative celebrity whose picture they can run alongside the feature. Given that there are celebrities you can use to illustrate colon cancer (Sharon Osbourne), urinary-tract infections (Billie Piper) and shooting your wife (William Burroughs), this is quite incredible. Really, a staycation is only as fashionable as wearing the same, holed pair of trainers for three years is; or sleeping in a bin. It is a matter of necessity, not of free choice.

Still. Being realistic about your situation is a frankly suicidal life-choice - and one, therefore, I thoroughly eschew. Reality will have no place in my holiday plans! If the recession is to shoe-horn us all into staycations, we must begin to cultivate a stoic cheeriness about it - one that borders on the demented. The kind of attitude we had during the war. Because there are positive points to the staycation - other than not having your bank manager knocking on your front door, holding a cool box and demanding a kidney. Indeed, two gins into my staycation, I am pitying the poor fools picnicking in the hot lavender valleys of Puglia. They might be having a wonderful time; indeed, they almost certainly are. But when they return home, it will be to overgrown gardens, piles of bills and the same, nagging, existential panic they left two weeks ago. They have spent hundreds of pounds, merely to run away from their problems for two weeks. And get brown. And maybe have restorative, prosecco-fuelled sex in an orange grove.

No matter! NO MATTER! For while this base, Dionysian time-wasting is occurring, I shall be both saving money and confronting my problems head-on. For if I must have a staycation, I am going to work as some manner of Sir John Harvey-Jones on my own life, troubleshooting every vexatious element until I wake, every morning, into the kind of calm, ordered, productive existence I imagine, I dunno, Sting, is probably having. Some manner of evolution will have occurred. Starting with, I think, my iPod.

For more than a year, I have had to acknowledge the troubling fact that engaging “Shuffle” mode on my iPod can bring all manner of distressing, unwanted detritus to the fore. Maxwell's Silver Hammer. Shiny Happy People. Random grammar lessons from Michel Thomas's German Foundation Course. During my staycation I am finally going to stop pretending that I'm going to get into the last Kate Bush album, or Charlie Mingus. I'm going to cleanse my Pod instead. Then I'm going to load it up with all the stuff I know will make me really happy: Roxette, Prince, the Doctor Who soundtrack, Guns N'Roses and Centrefold by the J. Geils Band.

Similarly, as I am 33, I need more hairstyles in my repertoire than “high pony-tail”, “low pony-tail” and “solid, back-combed mass, punched into a roughly circular shape”. I'm going to get a book illustrating the updos of the 1940s and practise until I have at least three new hair options - one of which, I hope, will be a small, jaunty top-hat, made entirely of hair. I'm going to go through that box of recipes torn out of newspapers and actually start making wild rice and sumac salads. I'll plant my window boxes, watch The Godfather box set, take up the hem on my red dress, finish The Wasteland, learn the lyrics to both Visions of Johanna and Hungry Like The Wolf, and spend a whole day wearing a beard and pretending to be a man (just to see if it's as bewildering and upsetting as it looks). Yes, when I come back in September, you'll barely recognise me. All thanks to the credit crunch. And the staycation.

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