Wish you were here!
IT’S the time of the Big Getaway and millions of Britons will be heading to airports to fly off on their summer holidays. Most will have booked online and will have checked sites such as Trip Advisor before they go and nearly everyone will take with them items such as smartphones and tablets.
Going away in 2017 is a very hi-tech affair but it’s not too long ago that things were very different. When did the “old era” holidays end and the “new era” ones begin? I’d say the watershed was 2001.
My wife and I were talking recently about a holiday we had in August 2001, a last-minute, 14-day Mediterranean cruise. The changes we’ve seen since then have been remarkable. For a start we found our holiday not on a website but through our television: on Teletext.
We had no mobile phones so when we were on shore we had to look for phone boxes (remember them?) to call home with coins and locally bought phone cards, which were always a challenge to work out how to use.
We could only keep up with the news by buying a newspaper, usually one or two days old. We had no digital camera – like most people then we still used film. That meant being much more choosy about what we photographed, unlike now when we’re able to take hundreds of pictures and just press “delete” if they’re no good.
Because we couldn’t text friends and family with “we’re having a great time in Spain” style messages, we had to sit down and write postcards.
For music we didn’t have downloads but Walkmans and a selection of home-recorded cassettes, some from the 1970s. As for money, 2001 was the last year historic European currencies were still in use: pesetas in Spain, escudos in Portugal, francs in France. Europe felt more like Europe before the euro was introduced.
SADLY 2001 was also a significant date because it was the last year before airport security tightened up after the Twin Towers attacks in September. It seems incredible today but before 9/11 going to airports was still something you could enjoy.
There was no need to guzzle all your water before going through security and no endless and highly annoying tannoy announcements about not leaving your baggage unattended. (Which idiot would want to leave their baggage unattended?)
There were also fewer rules about what you could and couldn’t do when you were abroad. In the section marked Ship’s Etiquette in our Cruise News dated August 2, 2001, we were informed: “There are no-smoking tables in all public lounges.” In other words you could smoke on any table unless it was marked to the contrary. Today you’d probably be thrown overboard and landed with a lawsuit if you lit up in a public lounge.
Looking back a holiday in 2001 seems very quaint. It was only 16 years ago but might as well have been 30 or 40 years in the past. In fact the basics of going on holiday didn’t change all that much from the late 1970s until the early part of this century.
New technology has revolutionised our lives since then but weren’t holidays before?
Pre smartphones and wi-fi everywhere, we really could switch off when we were away. It was impossible for our employers to contact us. We didn’t have to worry that we hadn’t posted any updates on Facebook or hadn’t replied to our emails for five days. Holiday photographs also meant a lot more when every snap counted.
Today taking a picture is the easiest thing in the world but back in the day it meant buying a film, loading it correctly, taking it out carefully and getting it developed. And not putting your camera in your suitcase with a leaky bottle of shampoo as I did once in Spain.
Who can forget the wait for your holiday snaps to be developed when you got home?
The day when the 24 (or 36) photos finally arrived was one you always looked forward to.
Another difference is that in 2017 we have an abundance of online more of an adventure information at our disposal about our holiday destinations. That means we can avoid Carry On Abroad-style hotels where the building work is only half-finished and the cockroaches run riot. But is it always a good thing to know absolutely everything about where you’re going?
It’s not so long since postcards and payphones were the only way to keep in touch with family and friends while on holiday. NEIL CLARK is nostalgic for the predigital age
THE element of surprise is gone when you can view every nook and cranny in the hotel before you book up. Some of the best holidays I’ve ever had were in the pre-internet age when going to “the Continent” was literally a step into the unknown.
I remember driving through a seemingly never-ending forest in the Alsace region in France with my parents in the early 1980s. Would we find a place to stay for the night before we ran out of petrol? Or would we be forced to park up overnight on the edge of the forest?
Today we’d simply click on our smartphones and see that the next petrol station and hotel were only two miles away and the suspense would be over. And of course we’d have a satnav. If Bonnie Tyler had had one in 1976, she would probably never have been Lost In France.
Finding out the sports results was always one of a holiday abroad’s biggest challenges. Just think of the lengths to which those diehard cricket enthusiasts Charters and Caldicott went to find out the Test score in the film The Lady Vanishes. If you couldn’t find the World Service on your short-wave radio, you could be on a real sticky wicket.
In 1989 I was on a walking holiday in East Germany and keen to know the football results. I tried calling home from a phone box in the street without success. Then a helpful lady told me that you could only make international calls from a general post office and escorted me there. After filling in a form I got connected by the operator and found that my team Sheffield Wednesday had beaten Aston Villa 1-0. Today I’d have the result flashing on my phone within seconds of the final whistle. But again, where’s the excitement in that? The thrill is always in the chase.
In 1984 while in Austria my father and I spent a rainy Saturday afternoon trying to pick up Sports World in a remote Alpine village. We had to wait until we got back to Britain and saw the league tables on Ceefax to work out who had beaten whom. Not knowing what had been going on meant your homecoming was more fun too.
There was so much to catch up with. It was wonderful to see people again, with whom you’d been out of contact for two weeks, to hear their news and to tell them yours.
Modern holidays are great in their own way but am I the only one just a little bit nostalgic for the old days?