Convenience Big Store: Holiday rules make us see red ⛱🚦😡

6 August, 2021

Hello,

Hotels are fun. The novelist AN Wilson says that he spent some of his "most fascinated" hours as a child in small, eccentric ones where "the brown Windsor soup for the first course was identical to the brown sauce splashed over the overcooked vegetables in the second". I have similar memories, which is partly why I love Fawlty Towers and plays like Terence Rattigan's Separate Tables. Now most British holidays are spent in Airbnbs or other forms of self-catering, where you spend your time wrestling in the kitchen "with blunt knives and sticky pans". Much better to have everything done for you in a hotel and enjoy the "free theatre" laid on by the other guests. See below.

All good wishes,

Jon Connell

Editor-in-chief

Travel

Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Holiday rules make us see red

"Give us a break," says Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph, away from "this damp, sullen English August". Alas, the government is doing its best to make foreign holidays "as difficult and expensive as possible". The costs are shocking. Even for the double-jabbed, the multiple tests needed for the ever-changing amber list can end up costing a "debilitating" £500 for a family of four. "Why on earth can't we use the free NHS tests for which we have already paid out of our taxes?" This "stealth tax on travel" is fine for the rich – I hear of one private jet pilot who has "never been busier" – but it blatantly discriminates against millions of hard-working families.

So does Britain's red list. Some of the countries on it, like Kenya, have low Covid case numbers and deaths, says Dr Peninah Murage in a letter to The Guardian. It seems the government is using the list to prove to the public that it is doing something, safe in the knowledge that the backlash from poor countries will be minimal. What about Britons with family and friends in these places?

We need an alternative to this "opaque" traffic-light system, says The Times. Rather than trying to distinguish between destinations, the rules should focus on a traveller's vaccination status – the Covid risk from someone fully jabbed is low, particularly in a country such as ours, where the virus is circulating anyway. 'It is common sense."

Home or abroad, we all deserve a holiday after the past 16 months, says Camilla Cavendish in the FT. "Enforced singledom" and home schooling have been a slog for many. "If we don't recharge this August, September will hit us like a sledgehammer." Maybe we puritanical Anglo-Saxons could take a tip from the Parisians and the Milanese, and clock off for the entire month. One high-powered friend spent his seven days in Malta idly watching boats unload in the harbour. That sounds much more appealing than a suitcase of "serious books" or daily yoga. "The soul needs something other than our constant drive for improvement. When I hear friends trading bucket lists, I can't help remembering how much our family has always enjoyed a simple bucket and spade."

Life

Coco Chanel lived at the Ritz in Paris. Granger/Shutterstock

Hotels are the only way to go

Staying in an Airbnb isn't the same as a hotel holiday, says AN Wilson in The Times. The former is full of "tedium and chores" – not only must you cook yourself, you have to use the blunt knives and sticky pans in the rental cottage. And hotels don't just provide meals, but "free theatre": watching and overhearing the building's motley cast of residents opens up a "world beyond your own". No surprise, then, that inns and hotels have been a favoured setting for authors from Chaucer to Agatha Christie. Even the hopeless dysfunction of Fawlty Towers has a strangely "comforting" appeal.

Hotels are also a refuge for those unsuited to domesticity. Oscar Wilde and Margaret Thatcher, both perpetual outsiders, spent the last years of their life in hotels. Wilde died at the Hôtel d'Alsace in Paris, at one point observing: "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has to go." Thatcher died at the Ritz in London. Coco Chanel, "whose hard outlines made her unsuited to the domestic hearth", made her home at the Ritz in Paris. But we can all shed our "unsatisfactory selves" when we check in, at least for a week or two. All the self-caterers get is a yearning for "a knife that actually slices through an onion".

Property

THE TOWNHOUSE This Grade II listed Victorian townhouse is one of the finest in Banbury, Oxfordshire. It has five bedrooms, four receptions, a conservatory, a cinema room, an office/gym and a games room above the garage. There's decking with a hot tub in the garden. £900,000.

Inside politics

We don't yet know what the "shadowy" group of anonymous Tory donors known as the Advisory Board have been discussing in their off-the-record meetings with Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, says the FT. But we do know that since Johnson became PM, the proportion of donations to the Conservative party from the property sector has risen from 12% to 25%, totalling close to £18m. It's these donors who are the likely beneficiaries of the PM's plans to push through changes in the planning legislation to allow the building of 300,000 houses a year.

What makes the "whiff of chumocracy" worse is that the man responsible for these new donations, party co-chairman Ben Elliot, made his name creating Quintessentially, a concierge service that caters to "the rich's whims". That's fine for a business, but allowing wealth to facilitate access "sits less comfortably at the heart of government".

Zeitgeist

Exterminate this woke Doctor

The first woman to play the Doctor, Jodie Whittaker, will quit after her third season. No wonder, says Amanda Platell in the Daily Mail. Whittaker is a fine actress, but the writers have turned Doctor Who woke. Instead of exploring the universe, Whittaker has been "investigating injustices surrounding the partition of India, meeting civil-rights icon Rosa Parks and even witnessing apparent digs at Brexit".

The madness doesn't stop there, says Charles Moore in the Telegraph. These days the Doctor doesn't have "assistants" but "companions" – a less demeaning term. The assistants challenged the Doctor and asked sparky questions, but the companions just listen politely as she witters on about war, climate change, poverty and racial injustice. And witter on she does. Although the Doctor is armed with a sonic screwdriver, "she actually spends most of her time staying still and talking". Maybe it's because there aren't any proper baddies for her to fight. "It is a long time since a really good, frightening alien popped up."

It's a shame. For the true Whovian, "the interest of the Doctor lies in his weirdness", not his worthiness. After all, he/she is a Time Lord who craves action, makes mistakes and isn't very nice. "The title name "Who" implies a question: the best Doctor is one who remains an unanswerable riddle."

Life

I owe it all to Anna Karenina

In Our Time was never meant to be a success, says its host, Melvyn Bragg, in The New Yorker. The Radio 4 show began in 1998, when he was almost 60. The premise is hardly glamorous. Meandering academics discuss one subject for 50 minutes, while Bragg chivvies them along. Worse still, he was offered a slot on Thursdays, "traditionally known in the BBC as the death slot". But somehow it worked.

Bragg is now 81, and the show has two million weekly listeners and more than 900 episodes under its belt, covering everything from Shakespeare's sonnets to astrophysics. "I wanted to do things that I knew nothing about, because I could get an education on the sly."

His entire life has revolved around education. He grew up in Wigton, Cumbria – "a town of five thousand people, with 12 churches". His mother cleaned houses and his father did odd jobs: he was a miner, a factory worker, a bookie and eventually landlord of "the worst pub in Wigton". Bragg, meanwhile, escaped through books. He had a "colossal breakdown" as a teenager and found solace in fiction. When I was reading, I forgot myself, he recalls. "I wasn't worrying about whether I was going to be worried. I was worried about whether Anna Karenina was going to do this or the other. And I think that changed me."

A scholarship at Oxford followed, then "another sort of scholarship" into the BBC. "As soon as I got there, I thought, I'm never going. This is all I want to do – make programmes. And I've just made programmes ever since. I mean, what a life. What a life!"