Oh Christ, we're "saving summer" now are we?
Even the most cursory interaction with this morning's media would have left the casual observer with the general impression that summer is in imminent danger of being cancelled, after Grant Shapps suggested yesterday that maybe booking your summer holiday now might be jumping the gun a touch. No-one, sadly, had told Health Minister Matt Hancock, a man memorably described by Charlie Brooker as "your sister's first boyfriend with a car", who, giddy with the success of the vaccine roll-out (and, let's be fair, this part is going well) has rushed off and metaphorically stuck his towel on a Cornish beach,in anticipation of what he is hoping we'll all call "A Great British Summer."
We won't,by the by, because it sounds like a 3 for £10 barbecue meat promotion at Tesco.
This lack of clarity as to whether or not summer holidays are a thing this year has spooked the media classes, to the extent that vast acres of newsprint and countless hours of airtime have been given over to whether or not Alicante is a thing this year; which,to my mind, says a great deal about what is wrong with media discourse in this country. But I'll get to that in a minute.
Where media goes, social media follows, and lo there has been a wailing and a gnashing of teeth from people who "need" and "deserve" their holidays. Viewing this charitably it's understandable. We've all had a pretty rubbish time of it over the last year, even those who've got through in relative comfort will have found their lives curtailed to some extent, so it's nice to have something to look forward to.
Viewed less charitably: get over yourselves, you whining entitled pricks. Since when was a summer holiday a human right? Suck it up and get on with it.
But,here at Coastalblog, I've been accused of being a centrist so many times over the last few years (news to me)that I suppose it's incumbent upon me to try to find a third way. So here's my take, people are being whiny and entitled, but it's not entirely their fault.There. Now nobody's happy.
I'm only half joking. I don't have a huge amount of sympathy with people who assume that a holiday is their god-given right, but I don't think it's that many people. I think, as with so many other ills which afflict this nation, it's a shouty minority, amplified by a media which reflects much of what is worst in public life. A media largely staffed by middle class people, who are also the sort of people who are far more likely to book their holidays in advance,before all the charming cottages get snapped up.
You don't hear much from the people who can't afford to go on holiday, for whom this is an utter irrelevance. Much as, amid all the hoo-hah about "Boris saves Christmas" you didn't hear much from the people who didn't have anyone to spend Christmas with, or were working over Christmas, or didn't celebrate it. It was a very narrow discourse, viewed through a very narrow prism.
This has been true of many aspects of the pandemic. When is a lock-down not a lock-down? When, as with each one we've had so far, people have still had to go to work.The shelf-stackers and delivery drivers must be wondering what everyone's going on about. The rush to re-open was driven by much tabloid cheering about pubs re-opening, but millions still shielded, afraid to go outside. Remember before Christmas,when Gavin Williamson threatened to sue schools that wanted to close early, only for them to shut one day after the holidays? No one asked the teachers,but the Mail poured buckets of bile over "lefty teacher's unions" At every turn, our response has been to rush back to "normal" without ever acknowledging that this is only "normal" for one small section of society. And that is why we're in the mess we're in.
And it's this section of society which starts thinking about its holidays at this time of year. Not for them the cheap last minute package, if you don't get booked into Rock right now then you'll have to rent a cottage without a sea view. While it's undoubtedly silly, it's also quite revealing.You never hear from the people for whom this question means nothing; if a sink estate appears on television it's only as the backdrop to a murder, never as a source of vox-pops. But this disease affects them more than anyone else. The lower your socio-economic status, the higher a chance you have of dying. This is not a matter of opinion,it is a matter of fact.
While the British media speaks to people of all types it tends,sometimes by design, sometimes without realising, to only speak for itself. Whether it be property prices, holidays in the time of corona,or how much cleavage Susannah Reid is showing it gets itself into a froth about things which affect far fewer people than it imagines. And so stupid arguments like this become news.
I'm not going on holiday this year, most likely. If by some chance my business can trade, I'll be working all the hours I can to make up for the effects of being shut nine months of the last twelve, but that's okay,sometimes you've just got to get on with it. And if the price of getting covid under control is I don't get to go anywhere for a little while yet, so be it. I might get the chance to grab a last-minute break somewhere, I might not. It's not news. Not going on holiday won't kill you. Going, though, might kill somebody else.
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