So, Londoners have at last abandoned the notion that “hot” is one of the prerequisites for a nice holiday, as in “nice and hot”. A report from a travel insurance company, Insure and Go, found that 84 per cent of people thought that their favourite holiday destinations might be unbearable if temperatures continue to rise; Spain, Turkey and Greece were each named by about a third of respondents. A fifth of Londoners thought that even the UK might be too hot for a holiday at home, twice as many as the rest of the country.
It’s taken you a while, hasn’t it? The equation of a good holiday with a Place in the Sun has always been downright odd, given that the people who live in hot countries adopt elaborate methods of avoiding the heat, from actually taking to the hills for the season to staying indoors for most of the day. It really is only mad dogs and Englishmen who go out in the midday sun…and even the mad dogs opt for shade.
If you see people wilfully walking around between 10am and 5pm in Mediterranean countries, chances are, they’ll be the Brits (or the Irish), the people who think heat is good and don’t realise that you should rise at dawn and get indoors at 10am and stay there until it’s safe to venture outside. And if this was true before temperatures rose over the last decade, it’s even more true now.
This is now the time actually to abandon the fantasy that somewhere hot is a place to aim for rather than avoid; the very words Costa del Sol should be enough of a warning. We (or, I may say, you) should be returning to a more Victorian approach to holidays; goodbye Sicily…hello Skegness (“it’s so bracing!” as the railway posters used to say).
There are a couple of options. We may simply do the sensible thing and go to the Northern hemisphere rather than the Mediterranean and indeed a fifth of people are thinking longingly about Iceland, Canada or Sweden. That’s more like it. But the trouble about these places is that they’re usually far more expensive than Greece, Spain et al. But if you can afford midsummer in Norway, go for it. Or northern France is no hotter than here — and what can be nicer than Normandy?
But how about returning to the Victorian treat of awaydays to the seaside? Margate used to be nice and cheap but that was before it got colonised by Londoners bringing with them their orange wines and oat milk lattes; it’s still good for a day trip; ditto Brighton and all the other places within a couple of hours of a central London terminus. And there’s something very jolly about returning home all sandy and hot after a day at the sea along with enormous numbers of other people.
Give me a place where the idea of a fine day is that it’s not actually raining, and I’m happy
Or if it’s culture you’re after, Winchester is stuffed with it, and there are meadows outside town for a picnic. A day in Bath has the Roman remains without the Roman climate (ditto St Alban’s): the best of all worlds. If you can run to a bed and breakfast or hotel (NB, there are lots of actual hotels in these places so you don’t have to ruin the local economy by going Airbnb), I can’t think of anything nicer than Northumbria (think St Oswald and St Aidan and Lindisfarne) which is astonishingly beautiful.
British resorts do get very booked up – I seem to recall that the last time I was in Cromer (good for crab!) there were waiting lists for caravans – but if you get a very early train and return by a late one, it’s doable. Anyone in possession of a camper van is laughing. May I say that now is the time to suck up to friends in picturesque parts of the country; one friend in Norfolk suggested a flat swap for a few days, an attractive idea.
The problem of course is that for people with families, the six week school break happens in July and August, precisely when the weather is most oppressive, whereas in the Balkans and the Mediterranean, the very nicest times of year are spring and autumn. If I may make a modest proposal, it would be to take a week off the summer holiday and add it to the Easter vacation, when you can actually enjoy Sicily, Crete and southern Spain.
For once, I was ahead of the herd on all this, way before global warming became a thing. I wilt in the heat; my flat is at the top of a mansion block where I only rise from a prone position to stuff myself with choc-ice. If I am to work at all, I need to get away from the heat. And that is why I find myself in the family home in Ireland after a couple of days in the West of Ireland with friends. I left London with my dress sticking to my flesh with perspiration; I got out of the plane at Shannon to find it was raining and remained lovely and overcast for a whole two days. I am now on the east coast which is less cloudy but nowhere near hot. Friends blame me for bringing the rain with me; I tell them they should be so lucky. It’s prohibitively expensive in Ireland, but what price not dying of the heat?
Give me a place where the idea of a fine day is that it’s not actually raining, and I’m happy. I’m all for the Balkans and the Mediterranean – between September and May. At this time of year, I say, stay at home and take your bucket and spade from a central London terminus to Eastbourne or Wells-by-the-sea. You know it makes sense.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
