LBC Views: Very little has made sense this summer, Lisa Aziz writes
16 August 2021, 14:29
LBC News Presenter Lisa Aziz ponders the impact of Covid, and possibly Brexit, on her family holiday this year branding it "even worse" than last year.
Very little has made sense this summer…
I don’t even want to contemplate going through the hoops of foreign travel, and the inconsistently applied rules at home have made it hard to know what ‘holiday’ even means anymore.
Nonetheless, it was with a mix of eagerness and trepidation that as a family we came up with our list of ‘dream’ destinations. Cornwall, Devon, Bath and erm, Norfolk…(erm only because it takes an AGE to get to from SE London!!)
We set off for the first trip mid-July…buoyed slightly by the prospect of an ‘extreme’ heat warning that we would do our best to enjoy, safely of course.
Six hours later we were confronted not by the rolling hills of Tuscany or gently lapping azure waters of the Mediterranean, but the beauty of the Cornish countryside and Rock and Polzeath specifically….
But with it came pints in plastic cups, hour-long queues for the chippy (takeaway natch), no tables whatsoever for dining inside unless you’d booked in February 2021, and a distinctly noticeable shortage of hospitality staff.
In the B&B we booked I was left eating my breakfast, alone, in my room - effectively quarantined, as the dining room was off-limits. This happened after restrictions in England were lifted…thoroughly incomprehensible really…
We decamped to south Devon for the rest of our stay. The situation though was all-too-familiar. Queues upon queues and not a bookable table anywhere.
Also - some places were still demanding card payments only…while others were happy to handle cash…
Earlier in the summer, it was a week in Norfolk…in a holiday ‘lodge’…table service only…with restricted ‘activities’ for the little ones’…and yet the local pub was crammed…
Were we witnessing the full effects of Britain’s ‘pingdemic?’. Or had Brexit hit seasonal staff? Was it both?
The experience of holidaying in the UK felt, to us, even worse than last year when we didn’t have the same level of protection from vaccines, and we were actually able to travel abroad.
Despite all this, the beaches were crammed and the streets were packed.
After several weeks of doing our best to enjoy a UK break, one thing is abundantly clear to me.
Before we can truly enjoy holidays again, either at home or abroad, there’s still a vast amount of Covid-19 mess that needs to be cleaned up by the government.
People really do need to know they are free to go about their business as safely as possible…in a clear and unified UK government approach.
