Home and away
The collapsing pound is giving the British holiday new appeal
ROD LIDDLE
ern tourists the local men were,
in the main, utterly foul human
beings, greedy, groping, smirk-
ing sexist scumbags.
Epiphanies are always con-
tingent, mind. Just as travelling
abroad has become a hugely
unpleasant ordeal, so staying in
the UK has become much more
palatable and, thanks to the
collapsing pound, much more
affordable. Some 20 or 30 years
ago you would not have con-
sidered taking a holiday in an English sea-
side town. They were, in the main, decrepit,
hollowed-out hulks used as a depository by
local authorities for every low-life skank
and druggie they had on their books.
My own town, Saltburn, is a case in point.
Back in 1978 I worked for what was then
the DHSS in nearby Middlesbrough and
our most evil clients were domiciled in Salt-
burn — especially the street in which I now
live. Back then the town had faded almost
into invisibility. Poverty and despair hung
over it like a perpetual haar from the North
Sea. But now look at it, with its food festi-
val, its folk festival, its glorious, wildlife-rich
ten-mile beach packed with surfers and fam-
ilies, so much space for everyone and you’re
only a short cliff-lift ride from a multitude
of restaurants and cute poncey shops. Once
again, the place has found prosperity. Who
would not want to come here?
The previous decline of the likes of Salt-
burn — and its bigger cousins, Skegness,
Scarborough, Hastings, Ilfracombe, Black-
pool and so on — began, like most declines,
in the early 1960s, when those first jets were
taking off from London Airport. It was exac-
erbated by the sheer and unforgiveable van-
dalism of the Beeching cuts to our national
rail network, which suddenly cut off a whole
bunch of British holiday resorts and made
the rest much more difficult to get to. The
decline was immediate and startling. Soon
almost nobody holidayed at home, unless it
was the posh going for a weekend in Isling-T
he epiphany came when
I was standing in the oxy-
moron of a speedy board-
ing queue at Gatwick, waiting to
have my ticket checked by Eva
Braun, mewling middle-class
brats squabbling beneath my feet,
all of us en route to somewhere
in the EU which is both searing-
ly hot and supported by British
taxpayer subsidies (for a while).
I had been wondering where on
the plane we would be seated.
Almost certainly that very row in the middle
which is the last to be served by the drinks
trolley, and where the stale flatus tends to
congregate. And probably behind some
ignorant cow who will put her seat back so
that I can inhale her rancid scalp while I’m
trying to eat my sickly Thai chicken ‘wrap’.
The epiphany I was talking about came
as the queue to board the plane — from
which we could see our bags being hurled
into the bulging, fragile, stomach of the Air-
bus — dragged on and on. ‘Why am I here?’
I asked myself. Not in an existential sense
— just why am I not absolutely anywhere
else on earth? And what do I have to look
forward to, once the plane has landed and
taxied for roughly double the length of the
flight? Flies, skin cancer and foreigners.
And worse even than foreigners — the Brit-
ish abroad. The working classes shagging on
the beach, pissing in the street and fighting.
The middle classes getting arsey in restau-
rants and braying to each other over break-
fast. It’s not our fading colonial past the rest
of the world hates about the UK, it’s the
people we dispatch every July to all ports of
call from Le Touquet to Pattaya, Orlando to
Nusa Dua. People like me, for God’s sake.
Poor foreigners.
So I thought to myself: I’ve had enough
of this. No more dawn drives to the gates of
hell (specifically Gate To Hell Number 21,
a 15-minute trek from the departure lounge,
once you’ve had some tyrant insist you
remove your belt and put all your stuff in
trays and stand in some scanning machine to
make sure you haven’t got three pounds of
Semtex up your jacksie). Henceforth, we’re
staying at home, in the UK.
Travelling used to be fun. Since 9/11 it
has involved endless security rigmarole, and
queues everywhere for everything. And the
cabin crew now believe that they are much
more than mere peripatetic waiters: they are
the front line in the Defence Against Terror,
and they will not be gainsaid, questioned,
queried. The look of self-righteousness ontheir faces is the same look you see on the
faces of cyclists, vegans and Dominic Grieve.
Going business class is a mere palliative, and
a ruinous one when you have three kids. So
you spend your two weeks abroad dread-
ing the flight home and, if you’re well orf,
get to the airport early to take advantage of
the business lounge, which is crammed full
of plebs offering only stewed coffee and the
remains of a Danish pastry.
More to the point, the number of places
to which we can now travel in anything like
a sense of security diminishes by the year.
We used to go quite regularly to Malaysia
and Morocco — would you book a holi-
day in either now? Certainly not Morocco.
Even before they started decapitating west-What do I have to look forward
to once the plane has landed? Flies,
skin cancer – and the British abroad