On Saturday Holidays that change your view of home

WOW, holidays! What a wonderful invention. If you haven’t been on one for a while, the act of spending a few days tootling about in a place you’ve never visited before seems almost overwhelmingly joyous.

I write these words sitting in a departure lounge on my way back to Bristol Airport having spent half-aweek with friends sharing an apartment in the heart of Lisbon. And what fun it’s been! Nothing expensive. Indeed, the only other holiday we’ve had in two years – spent in Cornwall last autumn – was double the price.

Nevertheless, I realise the idea of a foreign city-break might sound a little decadent in these straitened times. I am old enough to remember the days when flying abroad for a short break would have been the preserve of royals or millionaires.

Added to that, the act of flying in a fuel-guzzling airliner is a thing many would scorn.

But when I weigh up the benefits, I am not sure flying is quite as terrible as some make out. Persuading our politicians to attack the problems of global warming on a large and universal scale is what’s really needed, rather than individuals refusing to travel. Reducing plastic usage and food waste would be a start – and we know our carbon problems could be massively downgraded if agricultural practices took more care of the world’s soils.

Travel in all its forms accounts for just 3% of carbon emissions – and this will be reduced as a profit-making industry spends vast sums on developing new greener forms of propulsion. Which it will do as long as there’s a market.

The benefits of foreign travel are too numerous to list here. But among the most important is the idea that visiting far-flung places helps to reduce those nationalistic delusions of assumed superiority from which many people suffer. It is difficult to fear and loathe “foreigners” when you’ve visited someone else’s country, enjoyed their hospitality and admired easy-going lifestyles.

Air travel changes the way people think about “us and them”. It builds millions of bridges at a grassroots level. We make friends in distant places, to which we return again and again. Hundreds of thousands of Brits love it so much they even buy properties abroad.

Yes, there are those who fail to enjoy much in the way of a foreign experience beyond a portion of paella and a conveyor-belt of beer. But even they have actually visited that mystical place called “abroad”, which my grandparents – like so many of their generation – never did get to experience. In their day, any cuisine beyond the English Channel was, for example, simply known as “foreign muck”. Now hardly anyone would dream of using such a phrase.

Thanks to foreign travel, we live in a more joined-up world, which can only be a good thing in the present circumstances. Feelings of crossborder hatred are surely more difficult to sustain once you’ve visited a place and got to know its customs, culture and people?

Moreover, I can’t see anyone putting the genie that is air travel back in its box. Millions will continue to fly even if some believe it’s burning the planet. Talking of which, I happened to bump into one of the UK’s most vociferous environmentalists at Bristol Airport when we left, and he seemed happy boarding an airliner which made me feel a little less guilty about my own trip.

Among the other benefits of foreign travel is the idea that it can help us see through some of the overbaked statements made by politicians. Take present concerns over the cost of living. Our cabinet ministers like to tell us we are hugely fortunate compared with our neighbours who are suffering much worse rates of inflation. But in Portugal the cost of food is far, far cheaper than it is in the UK. If I was able to shop at the small-town market we visited yesterday, my wife and I could eat and drink very well indeed for less than £50 a week. I’m talking about the highest-quality ingredients.

Beautiful hot tasty radishes as big as apples. Kilos of fresh tomatoes for a fraction of the cost here. Sack-fulls of globe artichokes costing less than one single choke at my Somerset supermarket. Vast arrays of fresh fish that dazzled. Good drinkable wine at less than three quid a bottle!

Don’t say: “If you like it so much, go and live there!” Which is what several readers did last time I praised life in Europe. I do not want to live in Portugal, Spain, Greece or anywhere else. I am British through and through. My family goes back 400 years in a graveyard five miles from my home and I’d miss the cool rainy hills of Exmoor far too much.

But let us not pretend. Let’s not lie to ourselves that we are better off than anywhere else, simply because someone in a suit tells us so. My grandparents who never went abroad would never have questioned the nationalistic hubris of politicians. They had no way of authenticating such promises. Today, foreign travel affords us a direct window into other people’s lives. It is an eyeopener, and happens to be a hugely enjoyable experience.

Feelings of cross-border hatred are surely more difficult when you have visited a place?