I’ve been thinking about holidays lately. Who doesn’t enjoy a holiday? In my case, when I go on holiday, people are more likely to say, “On holiday from what?” given my status as an elderly non-employed person – and that’s fair. The Cambridge dictionary – I can’t afford the Oxford version – defines a holiday thus: “A time when someone does not go to work or school but is free to do what they want, such as travel or relax.” But I’ve been thinking more specifically about how the very idea of holidays has changed in my lifetime and the snobbery I have been guilty of regarding the holidays of others, specifically people from the working class where I came from.
In this modern age, many people enjoy a nice holiday. In days gone by, say back in the 1960s and 1970s, foreign holidays were the preserve of the better off. They might spend their summers in France, Portugal, Spain or Italy. The rest of us either went on our holidays to England or we didn’t go on holiday at all.
People went, in their million hordes, to Blackpool, Weston Super Mare, Skegness and countless other seaside towns for a week, or if they were particularly lucky, a fortnight of bliss, maybe at Butlins or perhaps in a caravan. The weather was inevitably dire but one had the consolation of the things we loved at home. Beer, bingo and fish and chips, home comforts for sure but in a place where you could get away from it all. The rich and famous would come back tanned while you would return pale but at least you had enjoyed a break.
Package holidays changed everything. The better off could still visit their gîtes in France and their mansions in the Tuscan hills, but the working classes could go abroad too. It was not high-living luxury, for sure, but it involved going somewhere warm and sunny, something that working class folk had never seen before, nor believed would ever happen to them. That was where the snobbery kicked in.
What summed it all up for me was the brilliant Monty Python travel agent sketch, which was one long piss take of package holidays enjoyed by the working classes and performed by a bunch of wealthy public schoolboys, talented, gifted and very funny though they were.
And where the working classes would go, snobbery would follow. Benidorm and Torremolinos of Spain, the Canary Islands off Africa, Sidari in Corfu and certain resorts in places like Portugal, Turkey and even Bulgaria. “Why do people go abroad in order to enjoy all the things they can enjoy at home?”
The simple reason is it’s warmer abroad in summer. And if someone comes along with the bright idea of creating home comforts abroad, then there is a substantial part of the population which enjoys just that, especially if beer costs €2.5 Euros a pint and you can enjoy a full English for not much more, before crashing by the pool all day. It’s something that I have completely changed my mind about.
I was that snob, too. When staying in Sidari in Corfu some 28 years ago, I absolutely hated it. Now that was in part because as resorts go, it’s a bit of a tip. It’s scruffy, with an uninviting beach and wall to wall British ‘treats’ like John Smith’s bitter, Karoake and the usual full English experience. I’ve since driven through the resort and it hasn’t changed, yet many Brits love Sidari. I have the feeling that this is little different from the holiday experiences of the past, with added sunstroke and holiday tummy.
I had never been to the Canary Islands until 1988 when I went to Tenerife with somebody I used to know. I was startled by it. Here we were in the depths of winter and it was hot and sunny. We walked from Los Christianos to Playa de las Americas and passed endless unspoilt British pubs and bars, all selling British booze and fish and chips. The snob in me was appalled but deep inside I didn’t mind that much. In future years, I preferred less touristy areas, even in touristy Corfu, but in more recent times I’ve returned a good few times to Lanzarote, in general as Anglicised a Spanish island as the other Canaries and I love it.
This is no scientific account but I am sure that in many instances this is the British working and middle classes at play. There are hideouts for the more affluent holidaymaker but in the main this can be a home from home if you want it to be. If you do fancy exploring the sites and the history – and it’s definitely there, even in the most touristy places available – then you can. But I can understand how people love a bit, or even a lot, of home experiences when they are away.
I love doing a lot of nothing, especially under a hot sun a thousand miles from home, and then enhance my nothing with a few beers, some decent food, even local food believe it or not, watching sport on the big screen and that age old pastime people-watching.
In pointing out a type of person who enjoys a British-type holiday abroad, I am trying to avoid being patronising or classist. I enjoy a British-type holiday abroad and a working class boy from Briz (Brislington) in Bristol has no business being classist to anyone.
What has changed since I were a lad is that these days ornery folk can actually holiday abroad and no longer is it the sole preserve of the rich and famous. As recently as the early 1980s, Bristol offered around five flights a day. Now it’s around 120 and many airports are much the same, although not, perhaps surprisingly, Cardiff which last summer offered around 15 flights a day.
My old mindset was to look down on people who preferred the British experience abroad than to embracing another culture. I don’t do that anymore because snobbery doesn’t suit me and anyway it’s wrong.
In historical terms, we are still in the relatively early days of overseas travel for the masses. At a guess, it only really took off in the 1980s, we are still evolving as travellers and perhaps those who now just fancy beer, burgers and bingo will evolve into what some might describe as more sophisticated travellers? I don’t think I will, mind you, having on two occasions he passed up the opportunity while in Split to visit the Diocletian’s Palace, preferring instead to enjoy ice cold beer in a roadside bar. But that’s me and I am not you. I am a self-confessed philistine who would always prefer to be at Kanoni in Corfu watching planes taking off than visiting, say, Mon Repos, birthplace of Prince Philip.
I see the wide extension of the overseas holiday for people who in the past would have never had the opportunity as overwhelmingly a good thing and part of our more egalitarian society.
Don’t knock the Brit who goes abroad, lies by a sun bed all day before eating steak (medium rare) and chips and ending up in a boozer with a British name to watch the darts on a big screen. Because tonight, Matthew (as contestants used to say on Stars In Their Eyes to Matthew Kelly), I am that Brit.
Cheers, as we say in Spain.
