Staycation Britain has changed a bit since the Seventies
The PM looked windblown, but why do everyone else’s home-turf holidays seem so idyllic, asks Fiona Gibson
It’s been a staycation summer. Instead of heading for the Caribbean island of Mustique, as he favoured in January, Boris Johnson and family rented a cottage in Scotland with bracing sea views and a curious bell tent pitched a few metres from the house. Judging by their Instagram posts, all of my friends have also stuck to home turf. And why not? There are no fears about quarantine – and you can take the dog. In fact it’s all looked so lovely, I suspect we’ll be doing this for years to come. Cornish surf beaches, thatched Hebridean cottages, deluxe treehouses in Shropshire… when did holiday Britain get this glam?
The UK I remember from childhood summers certainly wasn’t. Our staycations – the only holidays we ever had – involved pitching a tent in a field in Wales (my dad wouldn’t do campsites) where we would all have to “go to the bathroom” behind a tree. Or the Galloway coast in Scotland, where a family friend burnt his leg on the gas stove. Back then, , it seemed normal for holidays to feature ature a trip to the minor burns unit. t.
Thankfully, my y friends seem to have avoided such incidents this summer. Instead, tead, they are feasting on takeaway away lobster and chilled Chablis blis overlooking the glittering sea a in St Ives. Or they are beaming g in front of charming beach ch huts in Frinton, or diving for crabs on Dorset’s Cogdon beach. Another friend is strolling through Perthshire woodland, so exotically verdant it could be Sri Lanka.
No one appears to be fighting off biting insects or standing glumly with wet hair plastered to their face. Where did all those Seventies midges go? And the cagoules, the leaking wellies, the treacherous cooking stoves? Why is no one miserably spooning in Heinz beans with pork sausages (“in a rich tomato sauce”) straight from the tin? Why aren’t couples screaming at each other, threatening divorce?
Although package holidays had been booming for a decade or so, in Seventies West Yorkshire – where I grew up – only one family from our village went to Spain.
It seemed incredibly glamorous. The rest of us holidayed closer to home, so unused to sunshine that even a mild spell in south-west Scotland triggered an allergic reaction that caused my mother’s entire face to swell up. My husband says the same thing happened to his mum, in Littlehampton. Our poor mothers, with their puffy faces – after having endured two breakdowns (one car, one nervous) on the interminable journey to get there.
Perhaps one of the factors that has made UK holidays so Instagram-pretty is that the roads are better and it no longer takes 17 hours to drive from Glasgow to Skegness. Even our service stations have upped their game. Some have farm shops and are so picturesque, you yo could have your holiday right th there with excellent coffee and artisan sourdough loaves (£85) available ava at any time.
In my youth, having a “brew” involved stopping at the roadside to get the camping camp stove out – a risky endeavour for my late father-in-law in who, on opening open the boot of his Morris Mor Traveller, was attacked att by a falling Calor C gas canister that th crushed his s slippered foot.
In modern day Britain no one insists that slippers are “more comfortable for driving.” And thankfully automotive technology has improved immeasurably since 1973. In every Facebook photo I’ve seen, everyone is either smiling or gazing serenely out to sea. This suggests that there have been no overheated radiators belching steam across badly pitted A-roads, or fan belts “going”, to be replaced by mum’s hastily requisitioned American tan tights. Poor mum with her swollen face, having had her hosiery ripped off her in order to hold the car together.
We encountered further travel-induced stress when my dad bought a sailing boat and, as a novice seaman, took us through the terrifying whirlpools of Corryvreckan – its Gaelic name literally meaning “cauldron of the speckled seas” – and among the most dangerous waters around mainland Britain. Is it any wonder that marital discord was as common as rain on those Seventies staycations?
I vividly remember my parents throwing fruit at each other in that field in Wales. Awkward, yes, but at least it was fresh produce and not canned. Tinned fruit cocktail – that
mainstay of guesthouse catering – has been glaringly absent from my friends’ 2020 staycation photos from the interiors of their surf shack Airbnbs or charming yurts.
No wonder romance was lacking when our accommodation amounted to a leaking tent or a B&B presided over by a terrifying chain-smoking woman and her malevolent Alsatian. “None of us liked the cooked breakfasts at our guesthouse,” remembers Lisa, a business coach from Derby whose family always holidayed in Bridlington. “But we were too afraid to say anything. So, the minute the landlady had slammed our plates down and left the room, we’d all say, ‘Dad, you have my egg’. We’d all scrape them on to his plate so when she came back in, he would be sitting there with six fried eggs.”
As for these languid morning vistas I keep seeing – “Just enjoying papaya and coffee on the veranda!” – forget that, in old-style Britain. As one friend puts it, “You’d be shooed out of your guesthouse straight after breakfast and wouldn’t be allowed back until five o’clock. If it was raining – which it always was – there would be nothing to do but post all your money into slot machines and never win.”
Or go shopping. My husband remembers a wet childhood holiday to Aberdeen in 1972, during which he and his parents had spent so much time shuffling around the city’s branch of C&A that a security guard came over and politely asked them to leave.
This never seems to happen on Instagram. Perhaps we’ve just got better at going on holiday – or Britain has modernised to the point where it really is as photogenic as anywhere else in the world. Or maybe it’s not as good as it appears on social media, but with all the curating and filtering that goes on, it’s showing its best self.
We take hundreds of pictures now – whereas the only evidence of those childhood holidays was a slim wallet of photographs developed at Boots. There was no glamorous glow. It all looked precisely as it was: damp and windswept, condensation and hazed with cigarette smoke.
Or perhaps things are just as bad really, and we’re all just putting on a brave face. After all, we have staggered through lockdown and it would seem churlish to moan about cold, bendy hotel toast when we should be grateful for being alive, let alone having any kind of holiday at all.
In typically stiff-upper-lip fashion we are presenting a vision of glorious Britain, resplendent with surfers, sunsets and sufficiently chilled white wine. No one is documenting their midge bites in Fort William or parking tickets in Walton-on-the-Naze. No one is posting pictures of the blocked loo on a campsite in Rhyl. We have avocado on toast now and sleeping bags. No one takes “bedding” on a camping trip.
As for us, we are renting a camper van next week. I simply can’t wait.
When Life Gives You Lemons by Fiona Gibson. Buy now for £7.99 at books. telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514
No one appears to be fighting off biting insects or standing glumly with wet hair plastered to their face