100 YEARS OLD AND STILL NOT THROWING IN THE TOWEL...

AS YOU may have heard, talks with the EU about Brexit are in a complete muddle, or possibly doing amazingly well, or going exactly according to plan, depending on who is doing the talking.

What is clear, however, is that there are three areas that urgently need sorting out before progress can race ahead. Two of these, the Irish border and a British leaving fee, have attracted a great deal of publicity, but the third may prove the greatest stumbling block of all. I refer, of course, to the traditional practice of using German towels for the purpose of reserving sun-loungers by swimming pools at beach resorts.

This dates back to the very earliest days of the Common Market in the late 1950s when holiday-making Germans secured the right to reserve sunloungers by the simple but effective process of getting up earlier than everyone else and slinging their towels over the sun-loungers in the most desired locations before they went to breakfast.

The German towel became the de facto standard reservation device, though no formal legislation became necessary until the UK joined the EEC in 1973. The resentment of British tourists to what they saw as unjustified Hunnish tactics by the Germans led to the Summers of Discontent in 1973 and 1974, which culminated in the Great Towel Riots of 1974.

These began when the holidaymaking British, in order to counter the towel-grab, got up late as usual, went to breakfast, smiled at the Germans, then sneaked out of the breakfast room and threw the German towels into the pool. Then they denied everything saying it was “probably a gust of wind”. The Germans then stationed guards around the pool, which was what led to the riots.

These were quelled with negotiations leading to the introduction of the Single European Beach Towel in 2002, which the British did not join, but by agreeing to adopt the metric system for sizing our beach towels, the British towel was granted parity with the German in matters regarding sunlounger reservation.

After Brexit, of course, all that will have to change. The EU negotiators are insisting that the British will have to pay for the use of Euro-sun-loungers, but the British have countered with a threat to ban holidaymakers from EU countries from occupying deckchairs on British beaches.

The present arrangement guaranteeing parity between the prices of British deckchairs and European sun loungers will, of course, lapse when Brexit happens, but the two sides are miles (1.609 kilometres) apart on the matter of what will replace it.

There are also the questions of what will be the position of German holidaymakers who sneak their own deckchairs into Britain, after travelling via the Republic Ireland and Northern Ireland, and what happens to British criminals in Spain who have been lying in the sun for so long that they have acquired squatters’ rights to their sun loungers. Will they have to pay an exit fee when they finally stop lounging?