When it comes to holidays, Denise Welch is a woman who knows what she wants.
“I do like to go on holiday and completely crash,” says the soap star and Loose Women regular, 66.
“I’m not a good tourist and neither is my husband. Every holiday we go on, we plan to be a bit more adventurers, and we end up doing yet another ‘fly and flop’ holiday.
“You know how some people want to go and do all that [adventurous stuff] – I just don’t. I’m not bothered. I’d rather just go to a beautiful hotel and lie and sunbathe and eat nice food. And I’m sick of pretending that I’m not that person, because I am that person!”
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For Welch, who was born and raised in Tyneside in England’s northeast, holidays are a cherished chance to switch off, especially as she’s “incredibly busy” with work.
“I’m incredibly busy and feeling a bit overwhelmed,” says Welch, who recently announced she’s signed up for a guest role on ITV’s Emmerdale, alongside her return to Waterloo Road and continuing slot on Loose Women.
“So, I’m just trying to take everything a day to time. It’s all very enjoyable, it’s just it’s quite a lot, but I’ve learned over the years how to sort of calm my head a bit.
“I am honoured to be busy at 66, so it’s not like I’m moaning about it. It’s just that I know the things that tend to cause me anxiety, and I now know much more about how to deal with them.”
This is something that’s become a priority for Welch, who’s previously had roles in EastEnders, Coronation Street and Hollyoaks, making her a true British soap stalwart.
She has spoken out in the past about her experiences with depression, which started after the birth of her son, singer Matty Healy, 35 (she also has son Louis Healy, 23, an actor, both from her previous marriage to Benidorm star Tim Healy), as well as alcoholism and addiction (she has been sober for 12 years now).
And in January last year, Welch revealed she had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which she’d likely had since childhood but can easily go undiagnosed in females, as the signs can present differently. The condition often causes difficulties with attention span and focus, time management and day-to-day organisation, and as Welch said last year, living with undiagnosed ADHD had left her “exhausted”.
Welch, who married her husband, painter Lincoln Townley, 51, in 2013, explains today: “It’s the little things in life that can cause me anxiety. I can deal with big things, but it’s the minutiae of life, like a bedroom that’s untidy and you can’t seem to [sort it out] – where do I put everything? How does nobody else have clutter? I seem to attract clutter, and then I get overwhelmed by it.”
Her last serious bout of depression was in 2019 (after recovering she documented her experiences in her 2020 book, The Unwelcome Visitor) but things have been steady since.
“I never say to myself ‘it’s gone’ – I would say that the unwelcome visitor has just moved further and further away from me, but he’s probably still standing somewhere in the distance. But I no longer live in fear of it [the depression] coming, which I had for many, many years,” she says now.
“So, every day I wake up feeling normal is a win for me. I don’t need to feel happy, I don’t need to feel excited or buzzing about something, I just need to feel normal.”
These days, Welch – who describes herself as a bit “chaotic” – is embracing ways to make daily life that bit easier. For example, deciding to get lens replacement surgery with Optegra earlier this year proved to be “life-changing” for the actress and TV personality.
As for many people, her vision had started to worsen in recent years and she was prescribed varifocal glasses. However, she found taking them on and off sometimes triggered her vertigo symptoms (Welch has lived with the condition, which can cause awful dizziness, for 15 years), plus she was often losing them, and she didn’t get on with contact lenses.
She admits the idea of eye surgery did “freak me out” initially.
“But it was the most painless, stress-free procedure in the entire world, and the results have been so life-changing,” she adds. “It was probably about 10 minutes per eye, and now I have 20/20 vision, it’s unbelievable.”
It made her think about attitudes around ageing, and how she wants to approach the next chapter of life.
“We always think that everything’s failing. But now I’m 66 and I’ve got 20/20 vision, I went to see an audiologist about my vertigo – and yes, I’ve got vertigo, but actually my hearing is incredible. So not everything’s failing, you know?
“My godfather is 87 and his wife is 82 and they run around the world like they were in their 50s. He says to me: ‘We are not letting the old on in’ – and I know what he means. So, that’s my philosophy.
“Obviously, I’m not taking away from people who are physically disabled, of course not. I’m talking about people who just decide that they’re old and allow ‘old things’ to happen to them.”
She isn’t one for punishing self-care regimes, however.
“Self-care has always been much more about my head than my body, as it were. I do the minimum of exercise to keep everything moving, but exercise and I are not natural bedfellows. I’ve been addicted to most things in my life, but I will never be addicted to the gym! I’ve just got into padel tennis though. I’m hopeless at it – I actually like just like playing bat and ball and hitting it back and forth!
“Self-care is also spending as much time as I can with my husband. I’m very fortunate that I have a wonderful marriage and we both like the same things. We love just watching television and simply being together with dinners on our knees.
“He says that joke of: ‘When I married you, you said you were interesting’… ‘No, I said I was into resting!’”
