BLOG 103: CLIMATE CHANGE

“Travelling is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” John Steinbeck -Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist

This week the main chatter has been about how our right to jump on planes to far flung places has been interfered with by the powers that be who stopped all flights from and through Northern European airspace due to volcanic activity in Iceland.

One of my dear friends has aptly pointed out that it really was not that long ago that air travel was the remit of a select few and that she was unaware that air travel had been upgraded from a luxury to a right!

Of course this a very important point. But judging by the way that we Brit’s have whinged this week, the most important thing to us is certainly not climate change effecting volcanic action, but our right to change climate at whim. (And damn the co2 we pour into the atmosphere from the planes that make this all possible).

Of course climate change is nothing new.

When I was a child, our vacations were built around climate change.

We would decamp from London to a cottage in the Lake or Peak District (or God help us all the West Country) and conduct the most extreme climate changes known to man kind:

We would get up in a ill heated/ventilated rented holiday home, go out for a walk through the countryside, get extremely cold, come back in again, chuck wood on the fire, drink beefy bovil, get extremely hot and then go out for another walk. Our holidays were devised to give us nothing more than dramatic changes in body temperature! That was climate change in the 70’s!

We used to do a lot of walking. Being city kids, I suppose my parents thought the country air would be good for us. Stopping off for a well earned break in gingham table clothed tea shops punctuated the week. There was also a lot of sightseeing, which usually involved places where dead monarchs or artistes used to live. Towards the end of the holiday, we kids were allowed the one thing we’d nagged all week for…. To go to the arcade. I think after a week of dragging three decidedly under impressed kids around castles, monasteries and national parks – they needed the break as much as we did.

In this pleasure palace we were dazzled with not much more than rows of slot machines, shooting galleries and in its own special room… BINGO! Rows and rows of seats with a brightly coloured board before each one. You had to slide the little doors on the board closed as the bingo caller yelped out the numbers. The prizes were always crap and yet I recall being very jealous indeed when my sister won a plastic cow (coated in genuine felt as fur). Las Vegas it was not.

We didn’t really eat out. Holiday meals were served much as they were at home – rustled up in the kitchen and served at the table. The only eating out we ever really did on holiday was to have a picnic.

Picnics on seaside breaks were my favourite. We’d awake in afore mentioned ill heated/ventilated rented holiday home, peer through the net curtains at the sky (always blue before 10am), and waste the two hours of guaranteed sunshine (always clouds after 12pm) packing a picnic and flasks of beefy Bovril (just in case). We’d then get in the car, drive down to the beach, watch Dad try to erect windbreaks in a force 10 gale, then hunker down behind it and eat sandwiches which always seemed to acquire a light dusting of sand. When the monsoon started we’d retire to the car and sit drinking beefy Bovril while Mum or Dad would look optimistically out the window. They’d take it in turns to say “Oooh I think it’s brightening up”… Lord alone knows what sky they were looking at.

There must have been sunny days during our many years of holidays to Wales, Northern, Western and Eastern England. The met office figures for those years show summers with temperatures we seldom see today… proper “PHEW! What a Scorcher” weather. But funny enough in total contradiction of the cliché that childhood memories are always bathed in golden sunshine – mine (though affectionately remembered) are of cardigans being pulled tight against the cold and of rainy seascapes through steamy car windows.

It was no surprise that we Brits embraced the advent of cheap air travel with such gusto. It was just too dazzling a thought to be able to be somewhere with consistent sunshine within 2hrs. (Especially when it used to take us practically all day to drive up to the rainy lakes).

My first proper European holiday (we still said ‘on the contentment’ then) was to Majorca. Playa de Palma.

I don’t recall being over awed with the air travel, but I must have been as I still have the in flight magazine all these decades later! The airline was Dan Air. The plane was very old, very cramped and very noisy. You kind of knew it was 2^nd or 3^rd hand. Everyone chain smoked for the whole flight and the cabin staff were probably the most friendly I’ve ever encountered. But back then being an air hostess was perceived to be a very glamorous job so they had every reason to be happy with their lot.

Mass Tourism was just beginning, so Spain had not yet totally given over to duplicating English life in the sun. The Spanish habit of the paseo was much copied by us Brits … The Spanish Early Evening Stroll. So this was kind of what we did every evening. All that walking reminded me of my English holidays! In fact there was much to remind me of the UK. I remember my first impression of our hotel complex was that it looked like one of our local sink estates – but with towels hanging out instead of laundry!

But there was something that didn’t remind me of the UK at all. It was winter and it was warm. It was warm every day. It was warm every evening. There was no need for beefy Bovril to warm me up.

It was clear though… even back then… that I would not choose to rent a cottage in the countryside or the seaside in the UK over the choice of feeling warm…every day, every night…guaranteed.

My tastes have developed and the distances I have travelled to vacation have developed too. I am responsible as any of us (probably more than most) for that great big carbon footprint that is bothering mother nature at the moment. I understand that mother nature is mighty angry right now and setting off volcanoes in Northern Europe is just a little of her rage at the problems I have helped cause with my pursuit of what is not mine by geography.

My dear friend is right…it’s not our right to jet off to sunny climes. What we should all be noting is that the lack of flights in Europe saved 206,465 tons of co2 from pumping into the atmosphere daily. We should be hearing what mother nature’s message says.

Climate change is serious. But damn it… I was as happy as anyone that the big birds are back in the sky mainly and selfishly I guess cause I just can’t see myself doing climate change 1970’s style!

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