Instabanned! Grace Dent's top 10 Instagram holiday don'ts

I’M ON THE BEACH, LEAPING!

Are you ever so happy in London that you literally leap with joy? I’m not. Not even when the Central Line is running a ‘good service’, or the queue’s low at Burger and Lobster, or when I get through Dean Street Tesco self-service with no unexpected items in the bagging area. So why are you leaping on the beach in a bikini? Is it because you need us to know you have tight abs, toned upper arms and a lovely décolletage via months of pre-holiday planks, lunges and burpees? Well, now we do and now we hate you and your hot body and we’re eating a Dunkin’ Donuts party box at our desk to medicate the pain.

LOOK, I’M PACKING AND I CAN’T DECIDE WHAT TO TAKE!!!

A terrible portent on any timeline. A warning of grave Instagrams to come. Are you packing your case? Is your case jolly full? What, you had to sit on it to zip it up? Hint: this isn’t a photo moment. Sure, you do seem likely to be that person on an ITV reality documentary who ends up frantically attempting to wear underwear as a headband to avoid excess baggage costs, but, nevertheless, ‘packing’ is NOT an Instagram moment. And the worst thing about packing on Instagram is that it leaves comment box bait for tragically glib sorts to write, ‘Aw, hun, any room for me in there?? So jel!!!’ No one knows why the British say that, we just do, and now we do on Instagram.

THE SMILES ON LITTLE FACES

Aw, look at your kids in their perfectly staged, post-pool wrapped-in-towels mega-adorbs shot. You are so #familyfirst. It’s so important to have #mamatime. Got to have #worklifebalance. I don’t mind the first dozen, or so, photos of your children, but I’d like them more if they were of your children dressed in glossy brown fur coats looking more like brilliant Labradors. Actually, do you have any pics of Labradors? I’ll look at them, thanks. Travelling with children is a real challenge and so rewarding, but let’s not pretend it’s a holiday. It’s like vacationing with mini-dictators who only stop whining if you’re gazing directly at them, dishing out money or agreeing to enter a kids’ club disco dance competition to win a gonk.

THE AMATEUR FOODIE

In decades to come, we’ll look back at this era when all our meals were photographed, captioned, hashtagged and broadcast for comment and approval by strangers and we’ll laugh at our silly, pompous selves. Until then, you just keep on taking multiple photos of slices of tomato, on lo-fi filter, with a border, and putting them on to a multimedia platform. We’ll keep on commenting with #perfection and #asgoodasitgets, using a tomato emoji and being generally overexcited, as if they don’t sell tomatoes in every cornershop in London.

YOUR PROFOUND TRAVEL LESSON

Look at this poignant Instagram of a tiny Tunisian child begging. Look at this row of shacks in South Africa. Look at this humble bowl of rice you ate in Goa after visiting a temple. You are so #blessed. What this holiday has done for you — according to your Instagram — is put things in perspective so you can see #whatreallymatters. Well, until about a fortnight’s time when you’ll be back in Whole Foods paying £7 for a blob of macaroni cheese and cruising Net-a-porter for £400 Tory Burch flats.

#BLISS #SOHAPPYRIGHTNOW

It’s day one of your break. Time to relax and leave the real world behind, right? No! Time to fire out a mini press release for your personal brand on how totally #bliss your holiday is. Obviously, this is going to take some staging. Spend at least 30 minutes perfecting a shot of a spa treatment brochure, resting idly on your sleeping boyfriend’s naked torso, with a wide-angled lens so people can see you got a room upgrade, a copy of an Anaïs Nin novel — so viewers know you’re a great thinker — and an empty champagne bottle in shot. Life is such #bliss right now. You’re in your happy holiday place... running your brand with the breeziness of Beyoncé.

YOU HAD TO BE THERE, SERIOUSLY. NO, SERIOUSLY

Most Instagram holiday shots mean very little to your audience, because, as the saying goes, ‘You had to be there.’ That beautiful tree, that crisp, clear morning, that perfect moment of calm in your villa while everyone slept. The pleasure was there to be felt by you, personally. Being present in that moment and experiencing it fully would probably have heightened your pleasure. Instead, you are trapped on an emotional treadmill, seeking one-upmanship, craving LIKES on a new photo to make up for the previous one that didn’t get much attention, perusing other people’s Instagrams with toxic envy. This sounds exhausting. Why don’t you try turning your phone off and having a holiday?

DON’T MIND IF I DO! IT WOULD BE RUDE NOT TO!

Due to our subliminal food anxieties, Instagram turns the small act of a person eating an ice cream, or choosing extra cheese on a burger, or any other minor calorie splurge as the epitome of coy decadence. But taking a photo of the double fudge sundae with the Carry On movie-style hashtags #dontmindifido #naughtybutnice #sobadbutsogood isn’t going to make your arse cellulite look less like a shoal of whitebait in three weeks’ time.

BOLD AS BRASS DOUBLE LIFE

He might have been verbally warned at work to stop flirting with the interns; he may spend his evenings in The Groucho Club drunk as a skunk; and he may keep his industry’s rumour-mill abuzz with his trouser-snake antics, but, hey, it’s vacation time and he’s a FAMILY MAN and here’s a lot of Instagram pics of his delightful, fragrant wife and his perfect kids at Disney World or in Tuscany, with the caption: ‘Ten years together, darling, still going strong, love you and all the babies you gave me #luckiestmanever.’ Instagram: letting love rats hide in plain sight, like Mafia bosses, since 2010.

YOUR NEW HOLIDAY BFFs

Remember how, by day nine, you’d decided that if you ever heard Gary’s stupid honking laugh or saw Babs try to snort tequila again, you’d kill both of them, then yourself, so you deleted their number? Oh, but you’d tagged Gary in a photo on Instagram on day two. And now he’s at home commenting on not just your holiday photos, but all of your photos ever, and he’s pressing the LIKE button and they’re both tagging you in photos where you look fat and ‘bantering’ with all your mates and your mum. He’s your BFF now, forever. ES