By Mick Haining
Everybody Has a, Summer Holiday?
“Everybody has a, summer holiday,” sang Cliff Richard in 1963. This was in the third verse of the song, ‘Summer Holiday’ that topped the UK charts for a fortnight that year. However, his assertion wasn’t entirely correct – I know that “everybody” then did not have a summer holiday because I had never had one and I was 16 at the time. In our little Donegal seaside town, going away for a holiday was relatively rare – though my cousins would come over from England for a week or two in summer, my chums and I seemed to be around together in our town for the whole school break.
‘Summer Holiday’ is a jaunty song, though not really my style – I’d already heard people like Bill Haley and the Comets, Ben E King and Little Eva. It was also a trifle unrealistic. “No more worries for me or you” went one of the lines in the song. Really? As a student on holiday, in a park in Seville one summer night, I had my camera stolen from inside my sleeping bag… while I was asleep in it!
Still, just like the song, the travel ads in the newspapers – oh, so, so many! – don’t mention the potentially negative sides of a holiday.
“Winter sun in the Canaries Luxury Cruise Sale – Save up to 35%!!”
“Norwegian Fjords – 7 Nights – Save up to £200 per room – £964!!”
“Save 15% on a historic New Forest break!!”
“Escape to the Swan Hotel, Southwold!!”
“Visit the Land of the Giants – a world away from ordinary. [from only £4,683pp]!!”
The one thing that is not being saved by these holidays is, of course, the planet. And they are helping to create a world from which we will not be able to “escape” and which will be so far away from what most of us today in the ‘developed’ world would describe as “ordinary”.
Given the multitude of ads and holiday articles you can find in the media, the related statistics are almost unsurprising. According to Statista, “in 2022, the number of outbound holidays from the UK reached nearly 46 million, growing sharply compared to the previous year but remaining below the volume of trips reported prior to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.”
Those would not all have been via an aeroplane but, in a population of around 76 million, it still suggests that maybe half the UK population left home to go on holiday that year.Statista went on to identify Spain as the UK’s most popular holiday destination with 13.6 million visits that year. And they wouldn’t all have been travelling on an electric bus.
The BBC reported in 2019 that the “the number of flights using British skies on one day is set to reach an all-time high of 9,000 on Friday. More than six per minute are expected, exceeding the previous record of 8,854 set on 25May 2018.”
And, quoting the German nonprofit company, ‘Atmosfair’, the Guardian wrote in 2019 that “even a relatively short return trip from London to Rome carries a carbon footprint of 234kg of CO2 per passenger – more than the average produced by citizens of 17 countries annually”. And that’s just UK figures…
It’s also worth noting that, extravagant as those statistics may appear, flying itself produces only a tiny fraction of emissions compared to, for example, electricity, construction, heating or transport in general.
Keeping Up With the Joneses
What it all implies, however, I feel is the real problem. There are so many examples of features we humans have invented because of our extraordinary imaginations and dexterity that, once established, become ‘necessities’ rather than merely improvements. I can imagine that the first people ever using wheels must have excited the envy of those who dragged large lumps of stone around even though the lack of wheels had not prevented the building of Stonehenge or the Pyramids. Similarly, the first human to domesticate and ride a horse would have inspired plenty of others to follow suit. Robert Browning used around sixty-odd lines in his 1845 poem to describe ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ – on horseback – were he to be writing it today, he’d need only to reveal a WhatsApp message…
We invent, we restructure our behaviour around the novelty and before you know it, the efficiency of our interactions comes to depend on what was a novelty but becomes a normality which is further redefined as a necessity. We have come to believe that we ‘need’ our cars, that we ‘need’ our mobile phones, that we ‘need’ our credit cards whereas, like any other species, what we need is breathable air, water, nutrition, rest opportunities and a working immune system.
Mascara can be infuriating – but the right one for you is out there somewhere
Sali Hughes. Guardian [23/9/23]
Asleep Off the Job
Yes, like any other animal, we do need a break from activity that taxes our strength, both physical and mental – if we didn’t, we wouldn’t need to sleep, for example. Dolphins shut down one part of their brain for ‘sleep’ but need to keep the rest of it going so that they can surface to breathe since they don’t have gills. Giraffes sleep standing up and occasionally lie down for a deep sleep which lasts only a minute or two – you can’t really afford to be unconscious on the ground for several hours in a landscape that has lions. Frigate birds take short naps even when they’re airborne, usually on rising air currents. Nature has clearly evolved a variety of solutions to suit the needs of specific creatures for sleep which, in turn, is only one [dimension] of rest. While the brain is not an actual muscle but an organ, it does need fuel and energy to function andintense concentration over time depletes both to the point where normal mental functioning is impaired. Actual muscles cannot keep going forever, though, a fact that made early humans a top predator who could, like wolves, run larger prey to exhaustion.
Even trees ‘sleep’, according to the website of OneTreePlanted. In their article called “Do Trees Sleep At Night”, they describe how a group of European scientists studied birch trees and found that “not only do birch trees droop their branches an average of 10 centimetres during the night, but that they also have a daily cycle with several different phases” and that “the branches usually returned to their original position within a few hours after the first light”.
While rest thus seems absolutely essential for so many if not all forms of life, holidays are a luxury. If they were not, every single person in the world could not survive without one. And we are the only species to take a holiday. The two million wildebeest who travel every year from Tanzania’s Serengeti to Kenya’s Masai Mara aren’t going to look at the scenery. Our own species was and still is extraordinarily adept at migration, too, but not because of a desire for souvenirs to put on the mantlepiece when we get back home.
The Birth of the Holiday
In the history of humanity, a holiday is a fairly recent development, at least as far as the vast majority is concerned. Maybe a Pharaoh took a holiday but the people who pushed a two-and-a-half ton block of stone up sand ramps to create the Pyramids weren’t looking forward to their fortnight in Sharm El Sheikh. Yes, many religions set aside one day a week as a ‘holy day’, a day of ‘rest’ which would have been advantageous to both adherent and the religious institution but such days were not seen so much as opportunities to rest, more as occasions to maintain the believer’s links to the religion that had ordained them in the first place. As a Catholic child, I truly believed that if I missed Sunday Mass, I would go to Hell if I died before I’d had the chance to repent. And I was always given a coin to put in the collection baskets that were passed from hand to faithful hand.
The precedent of ‘holy-days’ may have added weight to the reasoning behind the 1938 ‘Holidays with Pay’ Act in the UK which was passed after over 25 years of agitation for workers’ rights. My cousins coming over from Greenock during my childhood usually coincided with the Greenock ‘Fair’, a fortnight in which many local businesses and factories in the Scottish town shut for maintenance. This was the equivalent of a similar practice, in northern England particularly, called Wakes Week, a handy break for both workforce and management.
The legislation certainly gave UK tourism a hefty boost. An ex-fairground stall operator, Billy Butlin, had possibly predicted that outcome by opening his first holiday camp in Skegness, two years earlier.
Successful as it was at its opening, “in their first few years after the advent of paid holidays,” says the article Holidays with Pay- the 1930s revolution that changed the UK, “holiday camps were massively oversubscribed – at one point, it is reported that Butlin’s itself had to turn away 3 out of 4 applicants!”
The Holidays with Pay article also reveals that the Skegness site had been “mostly built on land which had previously been turnip fields” … so land previously used for growing a vegetable was now covered in concrete, chalets, cafés and amusements.
By 1939, “there were an estimated three to four hundred holiday camps established across the United Kingdom”, according to The British Newspaper Archive blog. But WW2 paused such expansion although the popularity of holiday camps surged back in the 1950s and 60s after which it faded. English summers could not compete against the cheapening costs of flights to guaranteed sunshine.
Where Do We Go From Here?
I was in Paris a couple of months back helping a friend. [Yes, it was obviously a bit of a holiday, too.] I watched a TV discussion there where the panel of experts were all in agreement that French tourists, following record-breaking forest fires, would soon be very unlikely to take summer holidays on their own south coast or in countries like Greece or Spain but choose instead destinations to the north like Scandinavia. Summers in Skegness might even be considered …
Winter holidays will also be affected – “Ski resorts across Europe have been forced to shut”, reported Euronews last January, on account of “some of the highest January temperatures on record”.
In order to survive, the tourist industry will, like any industry, fight a rearguard action for as long as it is financially viable. And, like any other industry in such a competitive market, it will seek new venues and new experiences in order to stay afloat. Orbital Assembly Corporation, for example, have plans to open Voyager Station in 2027, complete with cinema, spa and gym. It will spin around the Earth in low orbit and cost more than the average sales assistant will earn in a lifetime.
One section of the tourist industry that literally needs to stay afloat is cruises. Cruises are basically floating holiday camps with an engine. They don’t just cruise, though, they stop at attractive destinations and contribute not just to the local economy but also to the local pollution. Royal Caribbean’s ‘Wonder of the Seas’ can accommodate over 6,000 passengers. They won’t all disembark at every port – why would you when your ship has “a children’s water park, a children’s playground, a full-size basketball court, an ice-skating rink, a surf simulator, a zip line that is 10 decks high, a 1,400-seat theater, an outdoor aquatic theater with 30-foot (9.1 m) high platforms, and two 43-foot (13 m) rock-climbing walls”? [Wikipedia] Enough will step ashore, however, to have impacts which are not all positive. Venice, Barcelona, Marseilles, Dubrovnik and Amsterdam are among the European ports that have begun to place restrictions on cruise ship visits.
From Tourism to Overtourism
The World Economic Forum tells me that the term ‘overtourism’ was first used in 2001 by Freya Petersen complaining about the negative impacts on Pompei of too many visitors to one place at the same time. As in nature, any location has to have the resources necessary to sustain the life forms it accommodates. There’s a reason why locusts don’t stay in one place for long… There are also the changes so many extra tyres or feet will make to the local environment. A couple of hundred yards from where I type, the verges are being rutted by vehicles whose drivers don’t want to pay for the carpark just next to the verges.
Vehicles park next to a sign put up by locals which says “Wildflowers seeded here.”
It’s like so many human developments that have gone just too far. We refined sugar – now we have an obesity crisis and an epidemic of Type 2 Diabetes. We invented a combustion engine – now it is estimated that a horse-drawn carriage could cross London more rapidly in the 19th century than a car can today. Besides:
almost every London school is in an area where air pollution levels exceed World Health Organization limits
Nearly every London school in high air pollution area, report says – BBC News, August 2021
Like cars and flushing lavatories, however, holidays are now so deeply embedded in our societies that calling them luxuries would seem, at the very least, eccentric. We convince ourselves that we ‘deserve’ holidays, ignoring the fact that ‘deserving’ is a concept invented by ourselves to justify behaving in a way that brings us personal benefit, sometimes at the expense of others. While some local businesses may flourish because of tourism, other locals find, for example, that they can no longer afford rent locally because it’s so much more profitable to rent to tourists.
If, however, we continue to stuff CO2 and methane into the atmosphere at our current rates, it looks increasingly likely that, within a couple of generations, no-one will be going on holidays. Everybody will be too busy trying to survive thirst, hunger and the desperate attempts of other humans to survive, too. There was no tourist industry in the Stone Age. Yes, we’ll still sleep and rest when we can because we must … but “no more worries … for me or you”? An old ad for Cyril Lord carpets used to have the tag line “this is luxury you can afford” – for how long can we continue to afford the luxury of a holiday?
Upstairs in Whitby’s lovely little bookshop, the travel section is next to that on the environment. I’m unsure if that placement is deliberate or if the owners are aware of the irony. The latter was summed up for me by seeing a stack of ‘Best in Travel 2024’ on the floor next to copies of ‘The Future We Choose’ and Philip Lymbury’s ‘Dead Zone – Where the Wild Things Were’.
“So we’re going on a, summer holiday, to make our dreams come true,” sang Cliff in 1963. Holidays, however, will be just one of the elements that climate change will subtract from the life that we are used to living today and that we would like for our children to enjoy as adults, too. Unless we tie them and everything other human activity into an understanding and a behaviour that supports the planet that supports us, what will come true will instead be our nightmares. Planet Earth never takes a holiday.
Main Picture by Niels And Marco on Unsplash
Wordsmiths for XR 