Spain – a land of excellent food, rich cultural identity and a beautiful language. Of course, if you’re a British tourist there, odds are you won’t have noticed.
Following the news that UK culinary bastion Greggs is opening a branch at Tenerife South Airport, I find myself compelled to ask for the millionth time – why do the British insist on exporting their culture when they travel? Is there another nation on earth that flies for hours, only to retreat to a copy-paste, theme-park version of their local high street (sunnier but otherwise identical) when they get there. Or is that just us?
Worse still, the bits we insist on bringing with us, alongside our sunnies, are undeniably the nation’s most odious. Our binge drinking is a country-wide health emergency; our beige diets a national embarrassment; our refusal to learn more than two words of another language a point of global hilarity. Yet for millions touching down in Tenerife, Lanzarote, Ibiza (or Zante or Malia, Marseilles or Amsterdam – unfortunately, it’s not just Spain we inflict ourselves on), the prospect of a week in the sun speaking 100 per cent English, eating oven chips and necking pints of Guinness is, inexplicably, the apex of pleasure.
It’s nothing less than perverse, especially when you consider the joy to be had just metres away from a given expat enclave. The quality of basic ingredients in most of mainland Europe is so wildly superior that even a local supermarket can be mind-blowing for a British traveller. And don’t get me started on the restaurants. Anything is better than our unseasoned roasts, grey pies and weird crisps – but between Italy, Spain and France we’re talking about some of the best food in the world. Extraordinary, then, that in the lands of tapas and fresh seafood, we continue to order gammon and mash.
You’d think that people flying to another part of the planet might be interested in experiencing some of it, but you’d be wrong. That is, if the number of crazy golf courses and “Irish Pubs” on holiday strips frequented by my countrymen is anything to go by. We turn up and cause a drunken ruckus, all while behaving as though our crappy culture is so superior that we’d rather not integrate. Is it any wonder recent years have seen literal protests, urging British tourists to go home? Perhaps we should, if we like it so bloody much.
How to account for our appalling behaviour? Is it some kind of colonial hangover, the impulse to impose bargain-basement Britishness everywhere we go? Or are we just such (pathetic) creatures of habit that we can’t bear to branch out, even after travelling hundreds of miles? God knows – one thing’s for sure, the whole thing makes me want to chuck my UK passport into the Mediterranean Sea and change my name to Αιμιλία (Emilia).
Greggs’s Tenerife outpost might technically represent a leap into international territory. But given that half the 13 million travellers who pass through the airport every year are travelling to and from the UK, it’s arguably the safest bet the chain could have made. However much it might pain me, there’s no danger of those tourists clamouring for anything more exotic than a when their flight lands, or the whole time they’re away for that matter. It’s enough to make you wonder why they bothered making the trip in the first place.