Loving the trend
Fraser Nelson 10:16am
I’m in Austria for a wedding this weekend, as yet another one of my friends has got hitched to a European. It’s becoming a trend. Of the five closest friends I had when I was 21, four of us – including yours truly – started a cross-border relationship which ended in marriage. This has to do, of course, with love – but also, if I may be so nerdy, with technology and economic trends. My generation, born in the mid-70s, was perhaps the first to be able to enter long-distance relationships armed with the new tools of communication and transport. The old narrative of a long-distance relationship was meeting up every couple of months, slowly finding you had drifted apart and cursing the time you had wasted. Now, technology has closed the gap. Here’s how.
Cheap overseas calls: Now BT’s monopoly has been shattered, people pay what international calls actually cost – next to nothing. First there were prepaid cards, where you bought £5 of credit, dialed some 0800 number and called pretty much anywhere in the world for 2p a minute. Then came companies like Just Dial, where you rang a 3p-a-minute line and it put you through anywhere. Once overseas calls were a rare luxury (especially for those on a budget) now they are routine.The internet: Skype, of course, makes calls free. There is also instant and free email and scores of other innovations. Twitter lets you find out what anyone’s up to without having even to ask them; if the musical Greece was written in 2008, the line “wonder what she’s doing now” would not be in Summer Lovin’. Technology has removed the uncertainty which used to scupper long-distance relationships.
Easyjet: The cheap airline revolution made weekend commuting affordable for those who had just started working. The best man in his speech last night suggested 1p flights would be intrinsically attractive to Scots, but the trend is UK wide. One of my friends (from Essex) was dating a girl in Montpellier and booked a Ryanair flight for every Friday, returning on Sunday, and if he didn’t use them just cancelled. They’re non-refundable but you get the tax back, which is most of the cost. Such competition forces regular airlines to lower fares. I shuttled to Stockholm with SAS for four years for about £120 return. It was below cost for SAS but with Ryanair running two Stockholm-London services, they couldn’t afford to make it more expensive.
When I was at The Scotsman I once tried (without success) to see if we could redraw a map of the world by time of travel, not by distance, to show graphically how the world had changed. It takes three hours to get from Edinburgh to my hometown of Nairn, for example, by which time you could be in the south of France for less money. This changes not just holiday options but relationship patterns. And perhaps helps fuels Britain’s 1,000-a-day emigration rates (of those five friends, I’m the only one who has stayed in Britain).
That’s why I think Stelios, Michael O’Leary and the internet have done more for European integration than anyone in Brussels. Revolutions in technology and transport have shrunk the continent and the world – and the long-distance relationship has been amongst the chief beneficiaries.
Previous
Comments
Neil
July 13th, 2008 10:30amFraser,
This is a point that can be extended: technological innovation has done more for the world than any political action ever has.
If we seriously want to reduce carbon emissions then stimulating technological innovation is a better way than individual economic penalties. Emissions will be reduced by developing affordable low emission cars rather than taxing everyone off the road.
Marcus Cotswell
July 13th, 2008 11:31amI'm unfamilar with the musical 'Greece' to which you refer, Fraser.
Too much retsina at the wedding? :-)
Paul L
July 13th, 2008 11:43amIs this an article or an Easyjet advert?
Kevyn Bodman
July 13th, 2008 12:47pmThe musical 'Greece' wasn't much good; in fact it was a bit of a turkey.
C Powell
July 13th, 2008 1:01pmI think you're making the mistake of assuming that because your generation has done your generation was the first to do it, Fraser. My parents were Italian and Irish and conducted their courtship by letter and they weren't the only ones in the 50's to do the same thing.
Fergus Pickering
July 13th, 2008 2:01pmt my Edinburgh school there were legions of half Poles (Polish dad came over to fight for us, married Scottish mum). Then there were all the girls who married G.I.s, though most of them went off to the States. My old boss was married to a Greek Cypriot. My wife's mother was an Irish immigrant. Congratulations on your big fat weddings, Fergus et al, but it isn't NEW, you know. Come to that, Churchill's mum was an American immigrant.
Still in the UK!!!
July 13th, 2008 2:16pmThe trend doesn't do much for the UK's carbon footprint.
(Just being provocative, I'm a denier)
Latter this year my son is marrying a Japanese girl in Vancouver.
Greece Lightning
July 13th, 2008 2:37pmMahlzeit!
Dug Skullery
July 13th, 2008 4:46pmThere's nothing nerdy about your paying attention to technology and economic trends.
The ease with which you are able to pluck lines verbatim from musicals though: now that might be an area of concern.
Verity
July 13th, 2008 5:09pmI don't agree, Kevin Bodman, re the musical 'Greece'. I loved it and left hungary for more.
Verity
July 13th, 2008 5:15pmBut would I have gone to see anything else with the squeaky-voiced Olivia Newton-John in it? Nor-way!
But s'all a bit of a larf, Innuit!
Verity
July 13th, 2008 5:40pm"I went to see 'Greece' in the West Indies with a girlfriend."
"Jamaica?"
"No. She went of her own free will."
Fraser Nelson
July 13th, 2008 8:40pmre Greece - I plead guilty of blogging while very very hung over. I don't say mine generation is the first, just that it's far, far easier to stay closer nowadays. Paul L, much as I salute Stelios my personal debt is to SAS. Or to Sir Freddie Laker, who pioneered it all. As to whether its more prevalent now - well, I will go find some data on this and report back to CoffeeHousers at a later date.
Paul L
July 13th, 2008 9:06pmRe Easyjet - fair enough
By the way, 3 hours to Nairn is well worth it - didn't Charlie Chaplin and his wife Oona used to holiday there?
Fraser Nelson
July 13th, 2008 9:49pmPaul L - The Chaplins did indeed holiday there. It was, and perhaps still is, Nairn's greatest claim to fame - apart from being voted Britain's top spot for outdoor sex (something which I suspect the tourist board just made up).
Verity
July 13th, 2008 11:16pmFraser, don't you think the current burst of cheap travel, easy and cheap long distance calling and, of course, the internet is rather similar to the spread of the railways in Victorian Brirain?
Suddenly, people whose parents had never been away from their rural areas, or perhaps just to the closest town as a big thrill, were able to go to the seaside. It was a great wonder, and they saw people they'd never seen in their lives before. After living all their lives among people and families they knew.
Then it became possible for young men (and later young women) to move to larger towns and cities and look for work; and they would inevitably meet a stranger - who probably seemed very exotic to them - and marry them. It produced a great social upheaval - mostly for the good.
Now, with the easy availability of the conveniences you refer to above, I think we are seeing a kind of mirror image of the expansive Victorian experience.
Verity
July 14th, 2008 3:01amNeil - I don't want to "seriously reduce carbon emissions". Nor do I want to reduce them "comically", even with Stephen Fry in the lead role.
But it doesn't make any difference in the universe what I want, or what you want. The Sun's surface will continue to control our entire solar system. The key is in the word "solar".
Diversity
July 14th, 2008 6:27pmVerity
It was railways, and steamships. Victorian Brirain was a world-wide sort of island.
Fraser
At last I see how Europe is evolving. The British are quietly absorbing the continent. I wondered when the rest of Europe switched from American to British English in the 1980s and 90s. (It was when the Berlin Wall fell that this English became the working language of Brussels.)I was surprised at the automatic way in which young Eurpeans came to treat London as the commercial and cultural centre of Europe. The depth of the change in the cultural tide came evident with the French of all peoples rejecting a written Constitution for Europe. No doubt we and our language will be changed in the process, but your great-grandchildren will take for granted that European is the new British.
Derah Yasque
July 14th, 2008 6:56pmDiversity.
All we have to do now is to get them used to feet and inches.
Craig Strachan
July 15th, 2008 12:38am"Nairn's greatest claim to fame - apart from being voted Britain's top spot for outdoor sex (something which I suspect the tourist board just made up)."
That doesn't exactly entice me to visit - Nairn's full of grannies.