The rage built up through the entire three-hour flight. Flying home from her Italian holiday to Manchester, Anna*, 34, tried to read a novel or listen to music, but couldn’t stop seething. She’d spent far more than she’d planned to, and after three days of dinners out, shopping, gelato and countless spritzes, had found out how much her friend, Rebecca*, earned.
“The whole holiday I was stressed about how much I was spending. I’d bought some really expensive rounds of drinks and split meals between the four of us, even when I’d ordered something much cheaper,” says Anna, who works in PR. “Then I found out that as a private dentist, she earns more than three times what I do.”
Wealth gaps between friends often come to a head on holidays – a dynamic that is encapsulated in the BBC’s new drama, Two Weeks in August. Most of us have experienced the messy resentment that quietly builds from being made to have the tiny bedroom by the toilet in a villa, or blowing your budget on a group meal at a restaurant nonchalantly chosen by the higher earners.
Shorts
For Anna, her friend’s large salary suddenly put their friendship – and the expensive Airbnb that she could barely afford – into context. “It’s not just the holiday, it’s all the times before then that I paid for train tickets down to see her, the drinks I covered on nights out, the gifts I’ve got her versus the ones she’s given me. But the holiday was my real breaking point”. There are no more holidays together in the calendar.
