Poolside With Brits

Prince Andrew wasn't picked for England World Cup squad, and thank God for that!

But back to our holiday. I am mindful that it would be impossible to concentrate on anything much more demanding than Jackie Collins out by a typical swimming pool, as there isn’t a pool area anywhere Brits holiday en masse that doesn’t play the world’s worst music — EDM (electronic dance music) relentlessly, apparently because the Brits so enjoy it. Thud! it goes, and goes and goes. Thud! Thud! Thud! It’s soulless, formulaic, wholly artificial, created, like Jackie Collins fiction, for the sole purpose of diverting the not-very-discriminating. I have asked at a variety of hotels if it could be turned off or just down, and been told every time that it could not. The Brits find it wonderful accompaniment for over-exposure to the sun.

Watching them eat is heartbreaking. Our last holiday was on the Ionian island of Zakynthos. The food at the hotel was, well, gorgeous almost beyond description. I’d have been ecstatic with only the nightly array of unusual, imaginative salads. And do you know what the sunburn-tattoo-and-Jackie Collins crowd loaded their plates with at every meal?

Hint: It’s what they’ve loaded their plates with in every hotel dining room I’ve been in with them, be in Croatia or Cyprus, Bodrum or Sharm el-Sheikh.

Chips, better known to Americans as french fries.

And then, on the bus back to the airport, can you guess what a third of them are invariably talking about? How disappointed they were in the food. On the basis of its not tasting exactly as in Stevanage or Bolton or Yeovil.

As unpleasant as it is being poolside with this sort of Brit, or in the dining room with him or her, it’s even worse being around those from the North. A couple of years ago we spent Xmas in Lake Como, Italy, to which we’d traveled from Calais in a coach otherwise full of Yorkshirepersons, who howled with delight when our guide, a right boor, made jokes about ‘poofs’ and Asians, as though it were still 1973. In my limited experience, I have found the typical Yorkshireperson to be brusque, but to want you to mistake the brusqueness for candour. I like to imagine I can discern the difference, though.

Be forewarned that the Brits don’t seem to want anyone from out of town to be able to find his way round. In American cities, a street that’s called such-and-such on this block is likely to be called the same thing five miles away. Indeed, Los Angeles’s Vermont Avenue begins just south of the Santa Monica Mountains, and extends all the way down to Peru, where it’s also known as Vermont Avenue (or at least Avenida Vermont). Not so in the UK, where a road will be called one thing between Church Road and Vicarage Way, and something else between Vicarage Way and Kings Road, and something else entirely between Kings Road and Station Road, the distance between Church Road and Station Road being around 62 centimetres. The good news is that the oft-renamed thoroughfare is also known as, say, the A2043, across its length, not that anyone will have the faintest idea what you mean if you ask for the A2043.

Only around five percent of the roads in London are marked. Some anglophiles have speculated that the street signs have been pilfered over the years by frustrated American tourists who wanted one that said Abbey Road, but settled on Vicarage Way NW 1, for instance.