“See the world!” instructed the Guardian’s Suzanne Moore last week in a list of Twenty Things To Do In Your 20s . We should spread our wings, take ourselves off to faraway places and do “hard and lonely and dangerous” jobs to pay for it.Those words still came like a hard prod in the gut. They always do. It’s a harder gut-prod every year, as my 30th creeps closer and the to-do lists get longer, loftier and less helpful, but continue telling me to see the world.Because I have failed on that point. I have never been travelling.Actually, I’ve never been on holiday for longer than a week and a half in my life. It’s a fact I never thought was all that remarkable, except that often when I tell people they gasp in horror like I’ve just said I’ve never had a birthday present.“But HOW?” they ask, their eyes filling with tears. “I don’t know,” I shrug. “Money, I suppose? Two week holidays are expensive. Also, two weeks is a long time to take off work. It’s a long time to squeeze in between other stuff, like the million weddings I must attend every summer. And let’s be honest, it’s a long time to spend with a very small group of other people in a place that may or may not have functioning wi-fi. Truth be told I worry I’d get bored. I’m used to the kind of holidays where it’s all anticipation, planning, settling in, working out how to use the shower controls, then suddenly ‘one last swim’, using up your Euros and coming home again with maybe two days in the middle of actually being on holiday. You really appreciate those two days, though! Boy, those two days are bliss!”Then they nod and smile, nervously, and you can feel them making mental notes to send me for a fortnight in the Seychelles if they ever win the Euromillions.But while long holidays are one thing, ‘travelling’ is a whole other kettle of fish. Travelling is the real badge of honour; the rite of passage that shapes you, breaks you and rebuilds you as someone wiser, better, with a stronger sense of self, a crochet bag full of memories and a fairly shit ankle tattoo. Everyone knows this. And nobody knows it more than us, the ones who never went.When you’ve never been travelling, you find yourself turning mute in a lot of conversations. It’s worse at uni, of course, when all roomfuls of people can generally be divided into those who want to sit on their Thai triangle floor pillows and tell you all about their life-changing experience on the Inca Trail, and those who consider being out of their parents’ loft conversion with a caseful of weak lager and a Durex variety pack enough of a life-changing experience for now, ta, but even at the ripe age of 28 I can still be marked out quickly as One Who Has Not Travelled. A sheltered tourist. It’s like walking around with a tell-tale hotel pillow mint stuck to your forehead.When you’ve never been travelling, you have no good anecdotes about near-death on a fishing boat or sex in the back of a tuc-tuc. You didn’t learn to play guitar round a campfire with a man named Dr Jesús. You don't have any photos of yourself silhouetted in a bikini on top of a mountain, and you worry it might be holding you back on Tinder.