Brexit has turned my Grexit into a summer helliday!
Flackers has one VAST advantage over all those doe-eyed girlies...
WE’RE all going on a summer holiday – no more worries for a week or two… Eh? Now August and the busiest travel weekend of the year is upon us as, Queuemageddon conveniently cripples European airports, I admit: I’ve been worrying about the annual weeklong fam hol in Greece all year.
My main suite of anxieties was actually not about queues, or the hardening border, but the fact that our charter flight from Gatwick to Greece this w/e as usual left at 5.30am. I’m not a morning person (not an evening person either, for that matter) but I’ve been lying awake, dreading the reveille of bleary kidults at 2.30am, the harrying and rushing, to make the flight.
One year I insisted we sleep the night before in the Premier Inn at the airport but we almost missed the flight then too. We got through security OK but the boys disappeared to McDonald’s without telling us. After frantic searching in the ‘food village’, we located them waiting at the counter. It was final boarding. ‘But we’ve already paid for our Egg McMuffins!’ they protested, remaining rooted to the spot. I’ll never forget my husband’s exasperated cry of ‘It’s either Egg McMuffins or a holiday in Greece’ as he pelted off solo to the gate. ‘You choose!’
But after developments last week – in fact, over the past 14 months – I predict we will look back to such traditionally panicked transits with something akin to nostalgia. For a start, the exchange rate (now down 12 to 14 per cent since the EU referendum in June 2016).
I’ve just been in France on a short trip which was hot and sunny – but with the pound now almost level-pegging the euro, pricey. It even felt steep at the Pret at the Gare de Lyon, where my ‘light lunch’ came to €25. This seemed a lot for a couple of sandwiches, drinks, and coffees. It was. Thanks to the weak pound, the modest picnic cost me the equivalent of £22, while if I’d bought it all at my local branch, I worked out it would have set me back 15 quid. So the pound in your pocket doesn’t go as far as it did. Nor, it appears, shall we, if the new long queues at European airports are anything to go by, as antiterror checks on passengers from outside the border-free Schengen Zone (ie us) are being applied. At least – for now – we Britons waiting patiently in line in our hundreds for processing can use our mobiles freely to pass the time, to inform loved ones of delays, missed flights, and yak to our girlfriends without worrying about being gouged by service providers for using our devices abroad (we are currently benefiting from the helpful recent ‘roam like home’ laws which stop us being stuck with huge bills after downloading films and other data while travelling in Europe). That may well change after we leave the EU, as might our rights to flash our blue NHS cards to receive medical treatment, maybe even drive around, as we do now.
LOOK, I don’t want to cast too much shade: after all, according to a poll published last week, six out of ten of those who want out of the EU think ‘significant damage to the British economy is a price worth paying’ for gaining what they regard as independence, while four out of ten wouldn’t even care if their own kith and kin got sacked as a result of our departure from the union. Which tells us Brexit has become a belief system, with true believers prepared to sacrifice almost anything to achieve the desired rapture from Europe. No doubt many would claim they’d die in a ditch in some corner of a foreign field rather than have it dragging on. I get this. But holidays? Really, everyone? If deciding to ‘take back control’ messes with our sacred annual leave, and turns holidays even more into hellidays than they are already, then I’m not so sure this is going to fly at all.
If it’s going to take hours to enter the EU… no cheap sun and sangria… and we have eye-watering phone bills again, then Brexit may still mean Brexit, but ‘Leave’ will actually mean ‘Stay’.
There won’t be any point in trying to go anywhere.
Hey ho. I’m off next week – in Greece, hopefully.
Bonnes vacances, everyone.