For more than 60 years it has been an annual fixture for thousands of us, a birthright enjoyed and embraced by the children of modern, pleasure-seeking, throw-away Britain. Precisely when it happened, I couldn’t say, but at some point in the 1950s or 1960s, the trains radiating from the metropolis to the coastal resorts of Clacton-on-Sea, Southend-on-Sea, Bournemouth, Frinton, Brighton and beyond stopped heaving with Londoners.
In their place a whole series of new, hitherto unfamiliar resorts zoomed into the national consciousness, heralded by the tang of aviation fuel and the promise of neverending heat and chilled cerveza. Benidorm, Alicante, Tenerife, Torremolinos and Lanzarote were the new Clactons, Margates and Blackpools; the only difference was, these were drenched in glorious Mediterranean sunshine and light. And boy, couldn’t you tell the difference of being 800 miles closer to the equator?
Well, you could then, and you really can now. Because you don’t need to be Greta Thunberg to realise that something is happening to summer weather in the Mediterranean. People can disagree on the cause, but the fact is that temperatures of 40°-45°C are now not uncommon in the Med’s favourite hotspots. And it’s no joke.
Having just returned from Turkey I can tell you that if you stand out for too long in the full glare of the early afternoon sun, your flesh begins to do a startlingly close impersonation of the melting wax Nazis in the closing sequence of Raiders of The Lost Ark. (You know, the part where the bad ’uns look at the spirits that emerge from the box.)
In the week we went, when the temperature dipped to the low-to-medium 30s, the British tourists positively did a rain dance. And it doesn’t make sense, really. What is the pleasure of spending your time cowering from a ferocious sun belting out near-40°C heat? I suppose it’s a question of how much you like air-conditioned dark rooms and the reek of suncream (not to mention the sound of bickering children). What is relaxing about enduring a UV ranking off the chart at 11 or 12 – compared with perhaps three or four for a very hot British summer’s day? What is the point? Is it simply to subsidise Britain’s manufacturers of sunscreen, what some of us still refer to as ‘suntan lotion’?
And yet many of us still book these holidays because it’s become culturally ingrained. You go, you cover yourself and the children up in hats and enormous quantities of clothing in order to prevent your skin from falling off so that – in effect – you are dressed for an English summer’s day, and you cling to the shade with vampiric necessity, only re-emerging and disrobing without fear at about 6 p.m.
You go, you cover yourself and the children up in hats and enormous quantities of clothing and you cling to the shade with vampiric necessity, only re-emerging and disrobing without fear at about 6 p.m.
So what’s the point of spending all this money and effort getting there in the first place – unless you have a deep-seated desire to ape the sort of aggressively ascetic heat-exposure experienced by Lawrence of Arabia? Why would you put yourself and your children through it? After all, as any parent knows, small children love to have sun cream put on, don’t they?
A beach holiday when you can’t use the beach is nonsensical, and yet the Mediterranean in high summer is now too hot to enjoy. It’s only marginally more habitable than the moon. Imagine if the air-conditioning failed: it would be like finding yourself dropped on Mars with the wrong snorkel. Not even Matt Damon could survive that.
And it’s dangerous, too. Where we were in Turkey there were scores of Brits whose flesh was going through various states of Ark-inspired immolation and who will doubtlessly be filling the waiting rooms of our skin-cancer units in the years and decades to come. It’s not so much a beach holiday as a walking mole clinic.
Which leads to another question: ought Mediterranean summer holidays come with a health warning and be taxed like booze and cigarettes – because the bill for the NHS is coming? As sure as eggs and eggs we have a time-bomb on our hands, and you can’t help wondering if a sneaky carton of 200 Lambert and Butler Bright Golds might be somewhat less harmful than a fortnight of August in Corfu at full gas mark seven.
The question is, then, where to go next year? Is it time to return to Clacton (great pier, after all, and a rather colourful MP if you see him there) or Frinton, where it’s been balmy this summer – or should we head to Normandy, Holland or even venture to the Nordics where the sun is less ferocious still? These are all more sensible options.
So is it time to declare the Med summer holiday broken? I think so. There is already evidence that some of us are choosing to go in the spring instead – bookings are increasing – and that is a far more sensible idea, if you can get away then. Because the Med in high summer just doesn’t make sense any more. It’s not enjoyable and it’s verging on dangerous. Thank goodness September is here.
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