Yahoo News If you were the Prime Minister's dad, where would you go on holiday?
With schools broken up for summer, it should have been the week of the great getaway: families taking flight for a much-needed break after the pandemic left Easter and half-term trips abroad on hold.
Instead, the travel chaos – whether you’re double-jabbed or otherwise – has rumbled on. Spain, France and Italy were, this week, threatened with a move to an ‘amber watchlist’ meaning they could turn red at ultra-short notice. And although that entire concept has now been scrapped, it seems the uncertainty is set to continue. Little wonder, many remain too scared to secure anything at all, anxiously awaiting the next green list update on Thursday before embarking on the great booking gamble again.
Is it worth the risk for the thrill of flying away after so long? Or has the uncertainty and expense rendered foreign trips too much hassle? Here, our writers reveal their summer plans...
‘My stress levels spiked when the flight attendant peered at my vaccination certificate’
Poorna Bell
Previously, the most stressful thing I found about a holiday was packing or hoping the hotel room wasn’t riddled with bedbugs, which seems laughable now given the rigmarole involved in the actual travel itself. My mother’s 70th birthday was meant to be celebrated on a cruise ship with immediate family around her. When travel restrictions eased, given that we were all double-vaccinated, that evolved into a week-long stay at an Airbnb villa in Menorca.
Then the Balearics went off the green list the week before we were due to travel. Panic set in, but it was with relief we realised we could still go and return without the need to quarantine.
Still, my stress levels spiked when the BA attendant peered at my vaccination certificate, and then again in Spain where you have to fill out a passenger locator form. The initial elation of us all making it through and being in a stunning location was underpinned by worry at needing to book our antigen tests to return home. And what if we tested positive?
For the most part, we pushed aside our anxiety, and Mum had an incredibly special birthday that wouldn’t have been the same had it been hosted in her back garden.But still, I am not in a hurry to travel abroad anytime soon. The stress that accompanied it at times outweighed what a holiday is supposed to make you feel: relaxed.
‘My children are finally able to see their grandfather again’
Fraser Nelson
When ministers banned foreign travel, they spoke about “holidays”. But for those of us with mixed-nationality families it's about much more than that. I met my wife at a time when cheap flights had just made cross-border relationships feasible in a way they just weren’t beforehand. When Linda moved from Stockholm to London she could tell her family it was like going to Gothenburg. Just three or four hours away – and she can come back at any point if needs be.
That all vanished during Covid; but finally, we are back, and my children are able to see their cousins and rekindle the family relationships much-missed during the pandemic. We’ve been reunited with their grandfather, who hasn’t been well recently: you can only guess, over Zoom, how people are really doing. I’ll have to pay for tests on return, but I’m one of the lucky ones who can afford to run this gauntlet. The pain caused by the various restrictions has broken families I know, separated single fathers from their children, forced dual-country families to leave Britain. If you can’t go see a relative in an emergency, the distance can be unworkable. A quarter of British kids have foreign-born mothers: we’re a global country for whom travel routes are often the lifeline of a family. For as long as the travel chaos, diktats and needless quarantines go on, the damage on millions of British families will continue.
‘Covid tests and airport queues are just too much’
Kathy Lette
One of the best things about moving from Australia to Britain, is London’s proximity to Europe. Every summer for 34 years I’ve popped over the Channel with pals for Continental fun in the sun. I’ve partyied in Mykonos and lazed around Tuscan pools. But without doubt, my favourite holiday highlights were hiking the Amalfi coast with Ronni Ancona; learning to pilot a Danish boat with Sandi Toksvig; and cycling the Loire with Ruby Wax.
But this year is all about staycations. I’ve just spent a week at Budget Ibiza, otherwise known as the Isle of Wight; and another week exploring castle-encrusted Cumbria and the golden surfing beaches of Pembrokeshire.
Yes, I miss Europe. But Britain haemorrhages history, with a host of ghosts in every nook and cranny. Covid tests and airport queues are just too much when you can go and explore your own big, beautiful backyard instead.
‘Foreign travel is often a litany of fresh, punishing anxieties’
Andrew O’Hagan
I never truly knew the real meaning of the word “nightmare” until very recently, when I tried to visit Iceland for the weekend. It was on the green list, but my wife and daughter are wise souls, and they said “no thanks”. So, I went alone. To say it was a conveyor belt of harassment from one end to the other would only half cover it. From the minute I left the house, I was subject to multiple testings, multiple taxi journeys in search of forms or proof, multiple amounts of jostling and waiting in hotel rooms for results, multiple numbers of invigorating lectures, and a generally diabolical experience that might have put me off holidays for life.
So we’re going to Largs this month instead, a beautiful, cosy seaside town on the west coast of Scotland, about 30 miles from Glasgow. I’ll be walking up the prom and pretending Covid never existed. To be honest with you, foreign travel is often, when you think about it, a litany of fresh, punishing anxieties, most of them happening in 45-degree heat.
Nah. I’m off to Largs. Okay, we’re not dining at the equivalent of El Bulli, but what’s the matter with Irn Bru ice-cream and a Tunnock’s teacake for dinner?
Andrew O’Hagan’s latest novel is Mayflies (Faber, £14.99)
‘I hope they make Greece an easy holiday destination again’
Stanley Johnson
Twenty years ago, my wife and I built a house in Greece, on the wonderful wooded peninsula of Pelion, bounded to the east by the Aegean Sea and to the west by the Pagasetic Gulf.
We will be going there at the beginning of September – though my trip last year, I admit, was a bit fraught. I needed to go out in July to get our house ready for letting in August. But there were two problems. First, there was government guidance to avoid “non-essential” travel. Second, there were no planes to Athens.
I rang a Greek journalist working in London. “It is quite true,” she said, “that the Greek Government has banned direct flights.”
When I put the phone down, I recalled that she had put special emphasis on the word “direct”.
Two days later, Wizz Air whizzed me off to Sofia with a more-or-less connecting flight to Athens, which the Greek Minister of Tourism went on TV to explain was totally legal.
Well, all that by now is water under the bridge. Ironically, parliament in March this year Parliament approved the “Stanley Johnson loophole” by deciding that, even if government policy is to “avoid non-essential travel”, travelling abroad for the purpose of managing a holiday home is now legally acceptable.
Perhaps the government will make Greece an easy holiday destination again. I certainly hope that they do.
