Looking a little closer to home for holiday ideas

May 7 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

BARELY a few days of sunshine and the countdown to the great escape has begun.

More carefully planned than the Normandy landings, the national exodus to warmer climes begins with a rush on exfoliating scrubs and ends with a lobster-red workforce dreading the 50 weeks ahead.

Pasty skin is bravely bared as we finally bring our legs out of hibernation beneath a pair of thick black tights and the very boldest risk – leaving the house without a coat.

Our carbon emissions forgotten – the only footprints on our minds are those of our flip-flops in the sand – we thank the organisational skills that led us to book a fortnight in paradise before the Christmas tree had shed all its pine needles, when spring seemed a lifetime away.

Those of us not blessed with minds like Oliver Cromwell focus on the Last Minute Bargain – an often elusive prize that rewards the patient, brave or downright lazy.

This is a gamble that either pays off with two weeks in an over-water villa in the Maldives, or sees you landing in a two-star flea-pit next to a building site in Lanzagrotty.

As with major events, the Great British Getaway has its rules.

1. You cannot go anywhere until you have prepared yourself for the climate with at least three barbecues in the garden, even if the sun is only half peeking from behind a cloud, you have to cook the chicken pieces in the oven to prevent a repeat of last year’s salmonella outbreak, and you can no longer feel your fingers and toes;

2. You must buy as many bottles of sunscreen as you can fit into your supermarket trolley, but only if it is on a BOGOF offer, then forget to take them with you and end up spending a small fortune on a 25ml tube of Factor 6 in the airport;

3. You must either embrace the local culture with full vigour – pronouncing the place names with an appropriately exaggerated foreign accent, even when speaking English, and eating only local food (if you don’t know what you are ordering, then so much the better).

Or you must behave as a modern-day Imperialist, creating a miniature homeland thousands of miles from the shores of Blighty, shouting loudly at those infuriating natives who are pretending not to understand your mother tongue and wondering why the chips are cut so thinly.

Were it not for the weather, those in the latter group probably wouldn’t go abroad at all, which would be a victory for the environmentalists, who would rather we cut back on the carbon footprint and stayed at home instead.

The irony is that, while the carbon dioxide belched out by gas-guzzling aeroplanes has caused the melting of the polar ice-caps, global warming has, in turn, caused our plants to flower early and our lawns to keep growing for longer.

But there are also other reasons to spend the summer in this country – the major one being that a lot of people seem to think we are already abroad.

When Travelodge recently showed 3,000 people a photograph of St Paul’s Cathedral, a quarter of them thought it was in Vatican City.

Nearly a third mistook Hadrian’s Wall, started in AD 122 in North East of England, for the Great Wall of China, and more than 2,000 people thought Brighton’s Royal Pavilion was India’s Taj Mahal.

So perhaps there’s no need to travel half-way round the world when you can take your Princess Diana-style holiday snaps outside a building on the south coast or drive the leisurely 170 miles to Northumbria, instead risking DVT on an 11-hour flight to Inner Mongolia.

Good news for Liverpool, though – more than half of those questioned managed to recognise the Liver Building, making it the fourth most well-known landmark in the country.

This does mean, however, that there will be no boom to the Merseyside economy from tourists looking for the Empire State Building or the Burj Dubai tower.

Although you could be forgiven for mistaking some of the deserted building sites for downtown Baghdad.

lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk