ACFM - ACFM Trip 45: Holidays

Episode Date: August 25, 2024

Everybody hates a tourist, as Jarvis Cocker once pointed out, and the ACFM gang are no exception in this ACFM Trip exploring the allure of holidays. Keir, Jem and Nadia consider all the different ways we avoid work, from holy days and vay-cays to grand tours and gap yahs. Does travel make fools of us all, or […]

Hello and welcome. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. My name's Keir Milburn, and I'm joined as usual by my very good friend Nadia Idol. Hello. And my other very good friend, Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we're talking about this very summary topic of holidays. Folks, why are we talking about holidays, or what do we want to say about holidays, perhaps, is the best way to put it? We like to choose a relatively timely or topical subject, a lot of the time.

And it's the summer, lots of people are going to be going on holiday. And there's a lot of interesting concepts related to the notion of the holiday. And the word holiday, say, are we going to talk a bit about that? We're going to talk a bit about concepts around travel, concepts around tourism. There's an awful lot there. It says it's very much a barometer of cultural change in a way, changing ideas about what a holiday is, like who decides and what it's for, I think. Yeah, I agree. That's all really super interesting.

I think for me also I'd want to add more specifically like who goes on holiday. and who gets to go on holiday and not just, I think, like Jeremy said, a barometer of time, but like where different people come from and what your conception of a holiday is and how that might be different to a break or other sorts of travel that you're engaged in. And then, of course, as always, we're interested in the politics of this and power and how that relates to time, which is a topic that comes up a lot, and the concept of free time are the same thing. and also specifically the issue about free time being translated as going away, going away from where you normally spend time, is in general how we conceptualise a holiday until the staycation comes into play, but we'll talk about that and the politics around that a little bit later. What about you, Kea?

Oh, yes, that's all very good. I am a noted holiday sceptic. Well, here we go. I've uh yeah i actually do enjoy holidays but i always i always have a bit of ambiguity i don't like being a tourist and i've got i've got over that little bit and we can discuss that a bit later so i need you two to tell me what's so good about about holidays and tourism etc and that's what we will do but before we get into that let's just have our parish notices uh we want to remind you have a couple of ways in which you can engage even more with the acfm universe first of all you can sign up to our newsletter comes out monthly bonus content from the crew etc you can do that by

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Navarra. Media forward slash support. That's very simple as well, isn't it? All right, let's get into this topic of holidays. We should play Mawan Rizwan's comedy song, Never Been Skiing, which contains the amazing line because it ain't a holiday if you've got to do exercise, do you get me. Yeah, never been skiing. Because it ain't a holiday if you got to do exercise, you get me.

I heard it's really expensive. I heard you. you break your back. I heard it's really cold. I heard your lips get chapped. I heard you slip and look like a dicket. I ain't no dicket. I heard you have to sleep in a chalet. What's a chalet? Ain't that an onion? Perhaps you should do some, some, a little bit of clarification around the different sorts of terms of holidays, holidays, vacation, travel, tourism. They're not quite the same things are they. Should we do a little bit of defining before we move on? Yeah, well, we should probably explain first for listeners who might be outside the UK

and whose English might be American, that in colloquial British English, you use the same word holiday to refer to either kind of like a public holiday, a national holiday, or to refer to what Americans call a vacation. And that slippage is kind of interesting, and it kind of shapes the way we tend to think about these things. So it's worth saying that to begin with, isn't it? I mean, what is it? I don't know what it is in other languages. Well, the only other language I really speak is French, and that specific does not occur in French. Vacance is not the same as, it's not the same as a national holiday. God, I'm trying to think about it in Arabic now. I'll have to take a minute to think about this. Festivity, which is what the word Eid means, which is just a festivity, which is kind of like, I suppose, the same as like Christmas, which is, I suppose, a whole. holiday, although we don't really refer to that much in British English, is different to, at least in colloquial Egyptian, Egeza, which is like time off, which is actually the same as a bank holiday,

which will get onto bank holidays and what they mean in the UK later. But it's the same word as it is in the UK for like a holiday or like a national day off, in Egypt at least. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, that's interesting. In French, you use the same word for a party as you do for the national holiday, FET, which is like a festival. I'm Welsh, of course, and in Wales the term is holiday. I was going to say, I was waiting for what you're going to come up with. In English, that term holiday, as you can tell just from saying it to yourself, I mean, it originally comes from Holy Day,

and it refers to the special days in the calendar, which were declared in some sense holy by the church. And it did mean a day when people didn't work. it's connected to the idea of also not working on the Sabbath. It meant a day that was especially marked out, but it meant a day without work really specifically. I mean, that is a thing that links all of these concepts, isn't it, to some extent. They all linked as they are all not for work.

You get asked when you book a trip away, are you travelling for work or not for work? Travel for work is sort of, by definition, different from travelling for work. And the concept of tourism is sort of, of, again, sort of by definition, you're travelling without any other purpose than to go have a look at a place or have some fun. So it is all really bound up with notions of work and how work shapes our experience of time, isn't it? I think tourism has more of a affinity with the idea that you're going somewhere to sample some sort of authentic

culture, to see how other people live, whereas holidays doesn't necessarily have that connotation? I think there's Venn diagrams going on, but also like subcategories. So I like what Jeremy has come up with, because I think if we think about this as this is supposed to be time without work, and all of those things, those categories fit into it. And you could do some tourism while you are on a vacation, but you can also have holidays which don't involve tourism, right? Or going anywhere if we're thinking about the category of bank holiday, which is interesting. But going back to like the origin of holy day for a minute, what's interesting there is that what I'm assuming, based on what you're saying, Jeremy, is this is before

the concept of the weekend even existed. So you needed to have this marker, which is saying this day in this calendar year, however that is counted, is going to be a day where we are not going to work because those days didn't necessarily come along regularly, right? Like every week or anything, which obviously the week is a construct as well. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Although, as I think we've talked about on the show before, at least according to some medieval historians, the number of holidays in a year was so many that it was like more than a weekend.

And then people weren't supposed to work on Sundays. The narrative, as I understand it, which might be flawed, is that there are a lot of days scattered through the year, including one day a week when people aren't supposed to work before the industrial revolution. And in the industrial towns and cities, that's all completely forgot. and about that's overridden people are just expected to work 84 hour weeks and then there's there's a pushback to recover first to recover sundays actually which has a big religious impetus as well as a you know workers impetus and then eventually by the end of the 19th century you've

sort of had this idea of the weekend the two days a week when you shouldn't have to work well first of all it'd be um you'd have saturday afternoons off which is why you know sports sports events classically kick off at three o'clock, the afternoons off, came before Saturday morning's off. This begs the bigger question, which maybe we can try and answer by the end of this episode, which is that, I think I know the answer, but it's interesting to think about if we were free, if we had lives free from capitalism and free from wage labor, like how would we think about time off slash time away slash holidays? Because of course, and we're going to get on to talking about this, the concept of the holiday is so important to a lot of people's

daily lives, because it is this thing very strong in British culture I find of something to look forward to, which is the holiday, which is the break from all different aspects of work, right? So like the routine of work and, you know, doing the work, being in the same place as the work, etc. And I'm just wondering, like, in our utopia, what that would look like what would people feel like they need and we almost don't know that it's an unknown unknown in a sense like we don't know what that would look like what people would feel they need one way into that is to do is to start on on a sort of like a little bit of a history of holidays you know in particular working class holidays which is sort of tied up with the invention of work

and the invention of like clock time and then you know that those sorts of things we've already started on that with it with this idea that first of all you get you get you get something called the weekend. Actually, you don't. It's not first of all, but you get Sundays off. And like the working class holidays, it's traditionally associated with the summer, partly because there were a lot of feast days, saints days, which took place in June, July, August, because that's when you've got the most food, etc. So you had sort of like religious holidays. So that's sort of the root of summer holidays to some degree. Yeah, that's an interesting point. It's interesting to think about this in terms of

climatic differences. I know this is a thing we're going to keep coming back to. I don't know if you can hear, you can hear on my mic actually the pitter-patter of a classic English summer. It's absolutely pissing down so loud in this room. We had it yesterday in the south. We had it yesterday. We had a tropical storm. In other parts of Europe, in hotter places, like the Mediterranean, which has ended up having a big influence on northern European people's ideas of holidays as well, I think, eventually. Obviously, there's a tradition of people not working at all really during August, which is partly, that's partly just because it's too hot to work. And also,

within the agricultural, the cycle of the agricultural calendar, there isn't a lot to do in August. You're just letting the crops ripen before you harvest them, basically. So that was always the case a little bit. I guess that was also the little bit of the case still. That would have been a bit the case, even in places like Britain, when it was an almost entirely agricultural economy, there just isn't a load that needs doing in August. So people would have that time off, yeah. Presumably, that's why all the feast days are then, is because there was times in which in agricultural societies there isn't a lot of work to do, so you stick your festival days there.

I guess so, yeah, I think so. But then also, there's also this phenomenon, as well as the invention of the weekend over the course of the 19th century, really. Then there's also this institution of the public holiday, which I know it goes back at least to the 18th century, to the whole idea to some extent of the nation state being governed by a government that sort of has an eye on what everybody's doing at all times. But this notion of the public holiday, these particular days in the year,

on which all work is supposed to cease, I suppose those are direct inheritors and institutionalisation. of the old religious feast days and holidays, aren't they? And Saints' days as well, yeah. Which, of course, for people, and again, for people outside the UK, it is always really amazing to reflect on this. People probably won't know this. But in Britain, it's still the case that our public holidays

are not referred to generally as public holidays. They're officially and colloquially referred to as bank holidays because they were the days of the year when banks would be closed within what would otherwise be normal business hours. And of course, whether banks are closed or open is the thing that determines whether the nation is at work or not. It's really sort of extraordinary, isn't it? That is hegemony for you.

That is what hegemony looks like when one section of society in its institutions are the ones that decide whether everyone else is at work or not, the banks. Yeah, and it's kind of like the cultural, like, removal of, even like for us, like May Day is still a big day in lots of other countries, you know, for all sorts of reasons, you know, not just in a left-wing kind of connection. And we've almost lost that with the May poll and whatever. I mean, obviously that's still happening in parts of the

UK. But people's fixations are on these bank holidays where you get two in May. And I think it's two in May and one in August. I don't even know how many we get now. And it's not. And it's not, they're not really referred to in relation to, especially the August ones, in relation to anything else. So it's not like they are, I mean, in London, obviously we think about it as like Notting Hill Carnival. That's when, that's what happens on the second May bank holiday, a second, sorry, August bank holiday. But they're not in relation to like anything historical or cultural, which I think is a very interesting phenomenon of how that's been ripped away from like cultural narratives in the UK. They are mainly linked to like Christian holiday.

I think. The bank holiday actors in 1871, which is quite late. I was surprised when I looked that up. Before that, you had like Christmas Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday were like seen. They were national holidays, basically. Then they added Witt Monday. That's the one in August, isn't it? I think that one. Boxing Day became a bank holiday. New Year's Day was made a bank holiday only in 1974. And then the first Monday in May was made a bank holiday in 1978. That that's it then. There's no more bank holidays being added to the English calendar since that point, which is sort of interesting where you'll have two added in the 70s. And then obviously Jeremy Corby, in, it was it the 2018 manifesto where they were going to basically create

more bank holidays? Was it six bank holidays? I'm not sure. I love it. I love it. That was the acid manifest. It was the acid manifest. But like Britain's got an incredible incredibly like small amount of national holidays compared to nearly every other country, basically. Certainly every other European country. Yeah, definitely. It's really interesting, I think, where you're what you're comparing to. Because obviously, if you're comparing to America, America does have lots of what they call holidays. You know, Martin Luther King Day, this day.

They have all that, they have loads of like Mondays or random Fridays off, but then they only effectively get a week of going on holiday. Whereas in Britain in general, people take longer than that. But then obviously in a lot of Europe, people take a whole month off. So it depends what you're comparing to. And it's really super interesting to think about what this does to the psyche and how it relates to work. And to what extent these become rituals of license or whether people see them as rights in a sense. And like how it affects your ability to work. Yeah, it's a relationship between different conceptions of holiday and work that I'm super interested in. We should play Vacation by the

go-goos from their debut album Beauty and the Beat from 1981 and yes if anyone's wondering the club night I run with friends and DJ at is called Beauty and the Beat the name originally that they got from an album by Adam I think American experimental hip-hop artist I was initially a bit reluctant to choose that name for our night because I thought it was a bit of a lame pun but then when I remembered it was the title of the go-go's first album. I became happy with it because I do sort of love the go-goes. Fantastic example of a certain kind of American new wave pop and really good feminist icons in their way.

I think the go-go's vacation. to be spent to love Vacation all I ever wanted Vacation had to get in Vacation with Vacation is to be spent alone

Before we get to the Leave the 19th century I just want to mention a couple of things That are just interesting That we don't really fit into any other narrative I feel like we've got to talk about because they lead into a whole set of other

phenomena. I think we've talked about this on the show before but it's always good to hear about the grand national holiday. Oh yeah yeah. We did actually, we mentioned that in the episode on strikes. Yeah, but it's an interesting concept in it. So this is a pamphlet from

William Benbow in 1832 very early on in the British working class movement. And it's a proposal for like we all take a grand national holiday and have a national convention. And so it's another way of putting, we'll all have, we'll have a general strike for a day, have a national convention and draw up the new constitution of the UK. But it's just sort of interesting that he frames it in that way, a grand national holiday.

And of course, that is linked to the holidays, the time when you're not at work, basically. You know, we can't all get together and discuss how we'd like the country to be run on a work day, of course. I'm still in favour of that. I'm going to bring it at brand national. need to start work and have a national convention that, you know, liberal democracy is totally broken. We do need to. I'm bringing

it back. Grand National holiday, that's what we need. I'm not for it. I can't use that phrase now because people will think, I mean, everyone get on a coach to Benidorm. Because that's what people now think holiday means. And I suppose it's worth thinking about, well, why

how did that come about? How do we get to the situation where holiday means, you know, going somewhere hot with your friends and or family to have some fun. And from a class point of view, I think there's two main things worth talking about. On the one hand, a lot of people will already know this, but over the course of the 18th century in particular, it becomes a feature of elite culture in various parts of Europe, but especially in Britain, to undertake what is known as the Grand Tour, which is a tour with variable destinations around Europe, but particularly focusing on Italy at a time when Italy was being

sort of rediscovered as the sort of fountainhead of post-renasance European culture and also sort of classical European culture. So aristocrats or aspiring aristocrats with enough money, would take that months off, sometimes a couple of years and go travelling around. Months off from doing what? From aristocrating. That's a good question. months off from doing what? It's a very good question. You're right. They wouldn't be months of. Is it a holiday if you don't work on the other end, is the question? I think foreign travel just wasn't very common before. I mean, this goes back to like the

1770s or something ridiculous like that, doesn't it? Hang on a minute. Foreign travel has happened forever. Well, not from British aristocrats. Well, it's true and it's not true. Like, if you read biographies, have even fairly minor members of the gentry or even the emerging middle classes, say from Elizabethan times. And they do spend a lot of time kind of gadding around, sort of Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, they go to Paris. Also for the fashion, they had to do it for the court. The court required that so that you would come back with the latest information and comparison of who has what. Yeah, and, you know, the fact that Latin was the kind of vernacular language of learning meant that, you know,

someone who spent a few terms doing their Latin at Oxford. They could go at a Paris and they would have a there was a sort of lingua franca and people did also learn other languages so the grand tour is more specific because it becomes this very specific idea that it's not that you're going there to work for a bit traveling for work for example is a lot more common than people think it was a lot of the time even in the middle ages we still have the term journeymen in our vocabulary because in northern europe including in britain the tradition was that after if you were a craftsperson after you'd finished your apprenticeship you spent another seven years literally traveling around from place to place, like looking for work and learning

new skills. And that was called being a journeyman. And sometimes people would go to like to the continent from Britain, for example. So it's more common than people often think. But the point about the grant tour was that it was, I mean, the grant was basically like a gap year. And I think it has a lot of similarities as a concept with a gap year. It's a kind of class entitlement. It's a way of developing a particular form of international consciousness. And I would say this is also true of late 20th century, early 21st century concept of the gap year. Although nobody is saying this explicitly, really what you're supposed to be doing with the Grand Tour is you're supposed to be going out there, meeting people, getting some experience, making some contacts,

developing a particular worldview and outlook, which will make you a part of a kind of highly cosmopolitan, international ruling elite, basically. That's a distinction, isn't it? It's basically, in a way, it's like rounding off, finishing off your education. So what you do in the Grand Tour is you visit the sites of classical antiquity classically. Yeah, exactly, yeah. And there's something interesting there because it's, I suppose it's like an enlightenment thing, isn't it, this rediscovery of like the lost knowledge of the classics, etc.

In ancient Greece, you know, and some sort of education was seen as like the dividing line between the civilized and the barbarian, or the civilized and the slave or something like that. And there's a little bit of that rediscovery of that. What you're going to do is to round off your education, get this education, which will separate you for,

from the working classes. Which the Soviet bloc had the same idea. You know, there's various different kind of, quote, unquote, like empires or points over history where it's like, these guys are part of our like ideological domain or whatever, like doing travel within these countries will teach you, like there's an understanding within the culture or within like, you know, the state narrative or whatever, is that you will learn some things. There were loads of trips.

I was reading about this from East Germany to, you know, like Moscow and whatever. and people were really encouraged to, like, go and see how, you know, different people within the block lived. And the same obviously happened in Arab countries. Like, it's definitely in the mid-20th century in terms of pan-Arabism, like, you know, to travel around where you can speak the language and discover about other Arabs, which, of course, is a complete construct, you know, like the Arab concept. So all of these things fulfilled different cultural and political needs or, like, desires within a certain class or group in a certain point in time. and it's super interesting. These are, we're kind of going into, like, the bigger question of, like, how and why people travel,

of which, you know, holidays is a subset. I was trying to make a distinction earlier between, like, holidays and tourism, and tourism is where you go to experience the culture or something. I don't know if it completely holds that, but you can see, like, perhaps that does trace back to this tradition of the tour, the grand tour. There's a distinction between time off work

where you go and recover from work, and you might just want to go and sit in the sun or whatever or go to the seaside. But you don't go to Blackpool to discover how people in Blackpool live and experience the authentic culture of Blackpool, but you might go on a tour to Italy or something like that. I don't know if that holds up. Yeah, I'm not 100% sure.

Because I'm not sure, like, I think it depends, this might be like there's subjective things here, but it depends who's defining you as a tourist, as in if we're going to talk about tourism as in like experiencing other people's culture or like going like physically moving around and seeing quote unquote seeing the sites in another country it's like well you know if you're going to someplace in Spain to lie down and you know as an English person and read you know read books and have a full package holiday and a resort which will get to what a resort is

for you know five or six or seven days because you just want to relax from work you're not on a tour necessarily, but you are going to be definitely viewed within the category of, you know, tourist from that country's perspective. You're definitely a tourist, even though you're not doing any touring and you're probably sitting down on the beach. I think, yeah, I think that's right. I guess the nation of tourism has something, I think it always has something to do with consumption. You're travelling in a way, which is sort of consuming the context as a sort of spectacle. And then even in that really limited sense of British people going on a packet holiday

to a Greek island where they're not there because they're interested in even in Greek food or whatever there's still some sense to it's just the environment itself the climate and the weather is part of what's being

what they're paying for and that does get classified as tourism I guess and then there's going travelling as well which is sort of tourism but it's slightly further afield I think very much associated with gap years.

Yeah, culturally, this going traveling, I didn't really understand this when I used to come to the UK, you know, as a teenager and my friends at my street, they wouldn't say, I'm traveling. They wouldn't say, I'm going to travel or I'm going to, they would say, I'm going traveling. Like, it's a very, very specific, like, syntax to the way it's talked about. And you're absolutely right. Like, that's a different concept. It's pretty historically specific as well. I mean, people only started to talk that way, like, towards.

the end of the 80s. And it was a sort of a cliche people made fun of by the mid-90s. And I'm not sure, I'm not even sure if really young people still talk about it that way or not. Yeah, and they probably don't. That's exactly the time frame where I would have heard that. I always think of it as a really Gen X thing. The gap year, you know, being able to travel around previously inaccessible parts of the world quite cheaply, maxing out your white privilege. Of course, there's a long history and we haven't spoken about this and this is maybe for another episode as we say quite often on this podcast but there's also a relationship of you know the the gap here or that kind of like world not just to like the grand tour and stuff but to the expedition and to you know the white

man going and discovering like having adventures like not just discovering but like you know like big adventures yeah totally yeah there is i think you can totally trace a kind of genie from imperial expeditionism, which is a phrase I've just made up, it's good, to the culture of the gap here. There clearly is a trace. We're not the first people to say that. Thinking about this tension between tourism and travel,

that is relevant to what we're talking about now, because the grand tour is like, that is the moment of the invention of travel, as we're talking about it, although that's not the term people use. People were, like, you know, gathering around for work forever, or even just to have a look at stuff,

to go visit people. Pilgrimage as well, pilgrimage to Canterbury or something like that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But the Grand Tour is kind of historically important because it is sort of what we think of as capital T travel. It's not quite a holiday. It's sort of tourism has a very obvious ideological function in incorporating people into a certain idea of European Enlightenment culture at exactly the moment when Europe is trying to legitimate to itself enslaving and colonising the rest of the planet. And then there's a history which, which goes back to that moment and which you can trace right up to the present of sort of contrasting that with the forms of holiday and leisure

that become available to poorer people. The other history, going back to the 19th century, as I wanted to think of sort of along the side, that genealogy, is the history of the working class holiday. And we've already talked a bit about the sort of reclamation of the weekend. And what happens for people in industrialised Britain and then other industrialising parts of the world, over the course of the late 19th into the early 20th century is the right to the weekend gets

asserted, the bank holidays become introduced, so there are some long weekends. You know, a bank holiday is always on a Monday except Good Friday, which is on a Friday. So you get a long weekend. The idea that you might be off work, therefore, for long enough to actually leave where you usually live and go to a fun place where you can play with your family and friends. And that eventually extends by the early 20th century into the idea that, that what it means to go on holiday for most people in Britain is to go to a place with a beach for a few days, maybe for a week. In Britain, there's an entire class of place, an entire category

of town, which before the second, the last quarter of the 19th century, mostly they were fishing villages, if they existed at all really. And that is the seaside resort. And then for about a hundred years. These are really thriving places. Whether you're talking about Blackpool and Southport on the northwest coast, you're talking about Scarborough, up and the northeast coast. You're talking about Bournemouth on the south coast, places like this. There's a thriving, thriving places, really popular places to go. This is what people think of as going on holiday. You go to one of these places for a week or so. There's some like history to fill in a bit before that, I think. because like in a sort of like mid 19th century you get the railways develop really quickly

and so that's when you get the development of the seaside towns but they're originally like their middle class sort of quite at market sort of resort basically places to go to and then one of the really big things that introduces the idea of you know a week off or a couple of weeks off initially a week off is like wakes week which is sort of like the lancashire mill towns where there'd be a lot of like holidays anyway as in local holidays or local sort of festivals and then the mill owners would use that as an excuse to shut down their mills for maintenance for a week and so basically people would take advantage of that and they could get on the train and go for perhaps a day trip to one of the seaside resorts so yeah and so and like wakes week

is like a tradition that kept up into the 70s really I think that's probably what it was was like wakes week from because basically it would also be that different towns like north of Manchester would do different weeks where they would they would shut the factory down so that the resorts like Blackpool wouldn't get overrun they were unpaid with holidays they you know you wouldn't get paid for wakes week and so you wouldn't go away for the whole week and then the tradition built up of like basically doing a savings saving through the years you could take a week off and go to a seaside sort of resort that tradition of a week off it was one block as far as working class goes, holidays go. It's really tied up with industrial work.

Do you know what I mean? And the need to do a week's maintenance and all that sort of stuff. It's all unpaid, of course. And it's only to like, you have to go to like 1938 to get their first act, which gave people the right to an annual weeks paid holiday. You didn't have paid holidays before, like the late 1930s, basically. That's a sort of interesting one. They're sort of like technology tied up there in lots of different ways, you know, the need to basically do maintenance. And we may as well do it when people are sort of like really focused on festivals anyway and wanting to take time off. And then you get the one week unpaid holiday, then you get it paid by national laws or a right to one week's holiday. And then by the 1970s, like most people have got two weeks paid

holidays. That's sort of the norm for like a working class holiday. And if we wanted to take that history through, we'd have to go into like package holidays abroad, which start to come in and overtake sort of like working class holidays to British seaside, to English seaside. Resorts. In the late 1960s until the 1970s, you get air travel becoming cheaper, and so you have people taking two weeks in Spain, primarily, and the Mediterranean plays this big role in the sort of working class holiday. And it's only by the late 1970s that, like, more people are going abroad than to English resorts. That's where you have the sort of crossover. And that shift, the shift to the package holiday, the package holiday to the

Mediterranean. I think has had a really big impact on British culture and even political culture actually. So I have this pet hypothesis, which I'm sure is correct, that a really important contributor to the shift towards Euroscepticism and eventually the Levate winning the referendum in Britain is the fact that people's experience of holidays and people's experience of contact with Europe outside Britain that massively changes. Because if you go back, That's like my grandparents' generation. My grandparents, I remember my grandma telling me, you know, my grandma being, my British, you know, North London, relatively working class, Jewish, grandma telling me about one of the

first foreign holidays she ever had, and it was a holiday to Normandy with her husband. And that is the kind of place people would go. People would go to places like Northern France. And for business and commercial reasons, people would have contacts with the low countries, with Holland and Amsterdam, going back hundreds of years, with places like Hamburg. northern Germany, and they'd go on holiday, maybe as far afield as Brittany. But these are all places that in terms of the climate, in terms of the historic culture, the religious culture, the rates of industrialisation, they're very similar to Britain,

even in terms of landscape. They're flat, rainy places for the most part. So people didn't feel like these are incredibly alien places to us. These are a really different culture. Once people stop going to those places, because why would you, you can have a week from the Mediterranean, why would you want to go have a week on the English channel, you know, northern French Atlantic coast? It's much wetter. It's just like being at home. So once people start doing that, people are going to these places, but their idea

of what Europe is, is, oh, it's these places where everybody's Catholic or even like Greek Orthodox. And, you know, the political history is, you know, all predicated around the struggle between, you know, the Communist Party and fascists rather than kind of social Democrats versus liberals and conservatives that you have in Northern Europe. And so people develop this quite understandable conception that those places might be nice to visit, but they're completely alien culturally to British culture. And I think that's a real, it's a real driver, I think, of Euroscepticisms. But that does say something about, you know, the nature of sort of tourism that I would say, I think that experience people have had, even, even, even

that experience of going to these places like Benidorm, that become these little kind of islands of a certain kind of Britishness abroad. And mostly what people have been confronted with in those contexts is difference. And it's a difference they might kind of enjoy in certain ways, but also be very conscious of not, you know, not really, you know, meshing very well with their cultural norms. And, but it hasn't really, it didn't really promote a sense of kind of unity or kind of cosmopolitaness. It promoted more a sense of insularity that once people got back home. And I think there is something going on there in the way in which tourism as a kind of negative concept, it implies a non-errasia of the difference between the

self, the tourist, and the culture or the place which they're consuming, they're experiencing. It does imply a kind of objectification and commodification of those things and of the experience of travel, that it doesn't have the effect that historically travel is thought to have of really changing the person. Tourism doesn't change you. Maybe that's one of the things about tourism, actually. Maybe that's one of the things that defines tourism is it doesn't change you. Well, it doesn't necessarily change you. I mean, it does change a lot of people, but the act of tourism doesn't necessarily change people, especially the way that it's done in a very commodified way. I think you're right. But I think while on one hand, like, I am very sympathetic

to people wanting to, like, people of all classes to travel and be able to travel and to be able to experience other countries for whatever need, you know, whether it's like, you know, Brits abroad in specific resorts or whatever. Like, I don't have an issue with that. It is a continuation of some kind of empire. What gets me, I guess, with some of the attitudes, and this comes to speak back to what you were saying about like Brexit and the leave vote, etc, is the entitlement. And that's something that I haven't quite unpacked. I don't quite understand it, which is how it becomes part of a certain narrative. I'm not saying, obviously, everybody feels this way, but that it is your right to go to Spain and be on a resort and, you know,

be as English as possible and like, you know, do all of the same things that you would do in the UK, but like in the sun. Like, it's understandable. But I think there's often, in terms of the narrative, there's a kind of entitlement behind that. There's a bit of history to that as well about the development of package holidays, which goes back to like Thomas Cook. There's a statue of Thomas Cook outside Lester Train Station. He was like a Baptist or something like that, but he was a teetotaler, basically. So his first trips that he organized were to temperance rallies and stuff like that,

then he thought, oh, yeah, this is a good idea, actually, you know, because you book a whole train, et cetera, take 500 people to a temperance rally somewhere. And then he started to say, well, we can do this. If we just take away all of the difficulties associated with travel so that you don't have to understand the language, you might not even have to speak to a foreigner and you can have to reach travel, et cetera. So he invents the all-inclusive package.

He basically invents travellers' checks as well, basically, so that you pay one price and everything's included in that price. And this is in like 1850 or something like that. And, you know, that idea of like a package holiday where everything is sort of taken care of and you don't have to interact with the native population. And so, like, yeah, Thomas Cook and his guides used to go on the tours and, like, do everything for you.

Sure, but that speaks to my point, is that you can't, you know, if you're an Egyptian and you have an Egyptian tour and you can't set up the same thing, neither in the 20th century, near in the 21st century, where you just set up a package tour and then send everyone to England because we don't have the same rights globally. And that doesn't work in terms of, like, power on a global scale. this does not happen. So we don't have that kind of free movement. So it is directly

linked to, you know, like hierarchies of nations and nationhood and passports and rights and whatever, to even be able to think, right, I'm going to make money out of this scheme and allow English people to have these. I don't want to call them, you know, pleasures or, I mean, privileges or luxuries, because I don't want to, you know, use derogatory terms towards these sort of things necessarily. But the very very. infrastructure that allows that to happen is one that comes from, you know, empire and privilege on a global scale. Yeah. When Thomas Cook starts organising his first sort of like foreign package holidays, there's no such thing as a passport. Of course. That's interesting. Yeah, yeah,

of course. Because the passport is invented in what year? I remember finding this out recently. 1920, actually. I mean, it's associated with the first wave of kind of immigration controls, isn't it? before that, there aren't really countries that don't want anyone who wants to come to come. There are actually, it's not entirely true. There are waves of, there are wave and wave of restrictions and on foreign trade as a workers coming to Britain from places like Oden, for example.

Yeah, and population's been thrown out of countries. It's not mediated via this one document, which, of course, is a hugely political one, which has a, still continues, to have a huge effect on so many people, including, you know, people, in my family where half of us have one passport and the other half I have another passport and so you can't travel together because there are different rules and regulations around passports

like it's a big, and obviously us now, all of us who are in the UK, who have lost our right to travel around Europe, well, in the way that we would have beforehand. We should play the chorus from the classic 1972 song Sewech, which translates as the wanderer, etymologically related to Sayyah, the word for tourist in Arabic, from one of the gods of 20th century Egyptian song, Abd al-Halim Hafez, with the lyrics by Muhammad Hamza and composed by Beliq Hamdi. It was part of the vibrant Egyptian music scene from the early 1970s, and I would be very surprised if anyone living in the Arab world of any age does not know this song.

I was shocked to find out it was only 14 minutes long, which is incredibly short for an Arabic classical song, we should play the chorus with the famous line that rings true to almost all of us from the global majority who live in the West, which translates as, reassure me what foreign lands have now done to the brown-skinned one.

So that is Sawah by Abdul Halim Hafez. just to me, Habib, Sallim, to Ali. Tommin'none to that sort of Brits Abroad thing as well. That Brits Abroad thing is sort of like, I think it's most associated with somewhere like Benidorm,

where there's big communities of expats as well. So those are immigrants. But when British people live abroad, we're not called immigrants, of course. We're called expats. At least we are according to the British. Shall we explain that concept for people? Because there's maybe listeners who don't understand. So Brits Abroad is like a concept.

It's not just like, it's not a descriptive thing. It's a concept of a certain type of like British experience abroad, like British sets of behaviour abroad associated with all of those things you just said? The idea of the Brits Abroad is based on this cliche, really based on the behaviour of British tourists conventionally in Mediterranean resorts where there's very high concentrations of British holiday makers, as we say, people on vacation. And their behaviour is that they drink an awful lot, they tend to behave violently, they behave loudishly. It's not totally dissociated from the image of the football hooligan, the soccer hooligan, they'll have a lot of

casual sex, you know, in a way they wouldn't necessarily do back in their own towns. That's the image. And of course, this is obviously freighted with all kinds of sort of class anxieties. Not just anyone who grew up in a middle class household, but also anyone who would have grown up in a sort of self-consciously political household, who's like in my age or probably anyone younger or a bit older, would have had some awareness of this, would have been conscious of this as a stereotype, that a lot of people find that really embarrassing and people really want to differentiate themselves from.

Because on the one hand, there obviously is a level of snobbery involved in the idea that it's really bad, it's really sort of vulgar. And I certainly, like I have read definitely articles by cultural studies scholars citing people like friend of the show, Bactin, saying that, for example, Brits a broad discourse. the discourse which points at and is kind of gorps at and makes TV documentaries about and is shocked by the behaviour of Brits Abroad is basically a snobbish elitist discourse that is based on a general distaste for the vulgar plebium pleasures of

you know of sex and food and drinking and just having a good time and not really hurting anyone and but I've always whenever I've read though when I have read papers saying that I have felt like there was just, there was really kind of a problem because I just kept thinking about the fact that, well, amongst people I grew up with, you know, it definitely would have been the case that people who were not at all middle class, but, you know, people whose parents were like active trade unionists, for example, would have shared this kind of quite excruciating embarrassment of that sort of behaviour and would have seen it as in some sense embarrassing and something that you didn't really want to associate yourself with. There are the holidays where you go and you just drink

for two weeks and have lots of sex when you're young. I sort of club 1830. And I have been on a club 1830 holiday, although Alice was 35 at the time. It was a fucking nightmare as well, because the reps, it was the Ibiza, the reps basically earned their commission by getting you to go on drinking trips or go drinking in a like a big pub crawl or go drinking on a boat or something. And we weren't interested in that. We wanted to do the other thing that Ibitha, the other culture that built up around

Ibitha, which is, of course, central role in dance culture. So you have these different forms, don't you? So the Brits abroad thing is, like, associated to some degree with, like, perhaps sort of, like, older, middle-aged sort of working-class Brits, who may have, maybe expats moved to Spain after they've, you know, retired, etc. Or near retirement and basically vote leave and find themselves without a right to stay and all these sorts of stereotypes. But there's a younger sort of culture as well,

and that's moved through different things. So a Brits abroad also has this sort of British sort of idea that what you're going to do is go on holiday and get absolutely obliterated through drinking drugs. The more that there were drugs involved in that in the sort of late 80s, early 90s sort of Ibiza sort of thing, there was probably a lot less fighting involved. Isn't this just like the macro level

of the Saturday night in the town centre? as in like it's the same architecture of what plays out in the weekend, plays out in the holiday. And the reason why it plays out that way is because of how going back again to work, like how work is situated in our cold, you know, rainy countries where, you know, there isn't a joie de vivre or like a day-to-day enjoyment of sitting outdoors in the cafe and watching, you know, life go by and having a two-hour lunch or whatever, you are like, work, work, work, work and be miserable. I mean, obviously, I'm exaggerating.

It's not like that for everyone, but that you are constantly, this is the bit that I'm interested in, you are looking forward to the weekend or in the holiday. Like, you basically go mental, like you let out all of this kind of resentment and this pressure from the rest of the days, which is in a way, quite a, I don't want to. I'm trying to find a word that's better than saying, like, it's kind of like it's a disorderish in the way that, you know, an eating disorder is, this kind of like hyper-protestant squeeze release and this kind of payoff idea, which sits very strongly in British culture of like if you work hard and you are miserable at this point, then you get to have fun at this point. And that also bleeds in for a lot of people into festivals. And going back to what we're talking about before and we've spoken about it in the festivals, episode. and other places around this idea of a ritual of license of when the holiday or the weekend or the festival starts to fit into a, you know, especially neoliberal culture in a sort of way or, you know, historically as well, where the way the population is kept in check is by saying you are going to have this opportunity to go absolutely fucking nuts, then it's what allows you to have a docile population. Because otherwise, people would demand more in their daily life, which is a kind of politics which I would like to see. Yeah, I think it's a really important point, this notion of something to look forward to. It really does structure one's experience of life and industrial and then post, even more so post-industrial capitalism. I think you're completely right. The idea of the holiday is the thing that you look forward to and the thing that really

legitimates the fact that you spend most of your time the rest of the rest of the year doing stuff you don't like. I think it is deeply ingrained in the culture and it's not just, and it works at almost every level of the class structure. I mean, I would just say, just anecdotally, I said this on a podcast, Lanfinitenin the other day, we used this term anecdotally in a sort of denigratory way, but usually what that means is based on my actual experience

of living in the world, which is as good as an evidence for anything as anything. So based on my experience of living in the world and knowing people of different social groups throughout my decades on the planet, I mean, it's true even of people who are really part of social elites, you know, the people with the high value jobs in the city or the people doing workings of advertising

and media, it's still a norm, even in those contexts, for people to on some level hate their job, even though they might actually enjoy the feeling of power they get from doing that job. On some other level, they know that it's not a good thing to be doing with your life. But the thing that legitimate is, you get to go to Thailand for three weeks a year or something. And you get to take the kids. You make sure the kids get those experiences. experiences as well. And that becomes the thing that legitimates, really, the whole, your whole sort of structure of existence. So from that point of view, I think you're really right. It's something that philosophers, from like Heidegger to Derrida have talked about,

the way in which our whole relationship to time is really fundamental to how we think about ourselves and our relationship to the world. And, you know, it's a cliche, but it's true that, you know, monotheistic religion in particular, especially Christianity, really, really sort of takes off and becomes a global phenomenon, partly because it's able, to promise people in this very convincing way, this idea that, well, however bad your life is, like afterwards, you have something to look forward to. You have heaven, you know, the eternal life, whatever. There's something to look forward to. So that idea of something to look forward to, you know, the future, you know, being in some way, you know, a future, which even if only

temporarily, in this case of the holiday, will be a lot, lot better than the present, is what makes the present tolerable. I think it's really, really important. It's really important. And I think, and it's, it's not just, on a personal level, it's really interesting to me because I am one of very few people that I know who, I think this is for all sorts of, you know, cerebral and whatever, like things to do with my character and my experience of life, is that I don't look forward to things. I don't really understand it conceptually. Yeah, I don't have that thing, basically. And so I actually find it very irritating on a

libidinal level when people like count down towards things because I always want to say like don't you want to make a situation where you can change where you know you feel good about something now which obviously is a big ask and it's not actually something that I say to people out loud what are the structures that make it so important that people count down the days towards something

and are able to continue to have like you know, quite a shit life day to day because I can't do it. Do you not have any sort of excitement or I'm looking forward to that at all? I mean, I have it much less than I did when I was younger. I've never looked forward to anything. No, no, I don't know how to.

It's not, it sounds bad, but it's actually not. Like, it's, I just, it's just not part of my brain. Like, I actually think I'm just not made, made that way. My friends make fun of this all the time, you know? But I don't, people say, oh, you've got, you know, this coming up. You must be really looking forward to it, and I just go, no. And it makes it sound like I'm a bit mental.

But, yeah, I realize that I'm in the minority. These days, I look forward to podcasting, but that's it. There's nothing else. No other excitement in my life. Actually, yeah, no, I think that some of that comes from social proof as well. No, you make a joke, but, you know, it's also about, like, conjuring up the feeling. And I think maybe that's something that I struggle with in terms of holidays, maybe people are able to conjure up a feeling of how they felt last time they felt, you know,

whether like free or unhinged or whatever, whereas maybe that is something that I struggle with. We should play an absolute killer club classic Madonna's debut single, Holiday. Interesting fact we'd about that. According to some report, come across the very first release of this single, they didn't put Madonna on the cover because they wanted people to think she might be black and they thought they would lose a black listenership if they didn't, if they featured her, given how, what a visual artist she was to become. That's really interesting. But my 12 inch copy of it does definitely have a picture of Madonna on it. Either way, as I say, a club classic, Madonna holiday.

Celebrate Holiday Celebrate If we took the holiday Took some time to celebrate Just one day out of life It would be It would be so nice

When I was a kid, we used to go camping, but primarily in the UK and then they're into France a little bit. And then we did a couple of trips to France where we did Euro camping, which was like drive somewhere and the tents already set up. But it's not very glamping. It's quite basic. And I definitely didn't fly until I was 18. I'm pretty sure I didn't stay in a hotel until I was 18 either. Seems fucking mad now. But almost definitely that's true. And what do I like to do now?

Yeah, I am a bit of a skeptic on holidays. I've always had this sort of like feeling that when I go on holiday, I have a sense of loss of autonomy, basically. And that loss of autonomy comes from the fact that like basically you're sort of, you go somewhere, you don't know how things work, and you sort of your prey to your time being structured by the infrastructures for tourism there because people have to manage these big numbers, etc. And so you sort of like end up doing the things which tourists do in that area.

The thing that's pulled me back and made me sort of settle into it a bit more is food tourism. I really enjoy like going and looking and finding nice food. Well, I'm afraid I will have to give quite a complicated answer to a holiday, what a holiday is to me. I think for several reasons. Like one, it becomes more complicated when you are from more than one place because I think I would go for the definition that a holiday is going somewhere, which is not where you are from. And when you're from several places and I do a lot of travel to Egypt and when I lived in Egypt to the UK, that's definitely a break. It's a change from where you are, but I would consider that travel, but I wouldn't consider

it a holiday, partly because the conception of my conception of home is complicated. It's not really clear to me where my home is or if I have several homes or, you know, this is not some kind of fixed thing for me. So I would say that I do a lot of travel because, you know, when you have divorced parents and they both live in different countries and they're not the country that you live in, you end up doing a lot of travel, but also because of diaspora reasons, the people I went to school with who are people who are really important to me and relationships are the most important thing to me in my life, I would say. I end up doing a lot of travel. In fact, all of my money, I would say, well, the vast majority of my money goes on either food or travel, and that includes

traveling into central London, which is fucking expensive. But anyway, or traveling around the UK, which is also expensive. But for me, so a holiday, it took me quite a long time to figure out in my 20s when I'd moved to the UK, that going back to, or I don't know, even go if back is the right way, of putting it, but going, you know, to Egypt to see family or going to visit Dad in whatever country he lived in, you know, that's really filled with emotions and ties and links and relations to place. So that's, like, important, but it's not a holiday. So for me going on holiday, definitely, I would say the older I get, the more I enjoy the, like, not needing to think around certain things. But I enjoy both. So I would say, you know, going on a tango

dancing trip to Romania where everything is organized by the tango school and I don't need to think and I can just like enjoy the environment and the experience and it's all kind of organized for me is a pleasurable one and I get a lot from that but also I have to say that I probably feel the opposite in terms of like the loss of autonomy I don't feel like I have very much autonomy or freedom in my life in the UK and certainly not in Egypt but I can still I still retain, talking about, you know, what I can remember and conjuring up feelings. Actually, I'm going to contradict myself in terms of what I said earlier, because I can still remember the feeling of, you know, travelling around Bali and traveling around Argentina and

traveling around Japan. And I just, in those three places, I felt so free. When I am away from where my homes or various conceptions of home, as a human, I feel a lot like I just just have a spirit which I don't have when I'm in my, you know, home countries. So that is a pleasurable way of going on a holiday to me. But I also do a lot of travel, but I don't consider that tourism because I tend to go to places. The vast majority of my travel is a third category, which is going to a place which is not home, or I don't have ties to home, but from which I know people who live there and I live with them or I'm taken around in their life because I'm lucky enough to know people who live all around the world. So it doesn't feel like tourism, but I'm

definitely in a place which is not somewhere that I'm from. I've been to 36 countries. It's a huge part of how I live and how I want to interact with the world. This might be a rest of world phenomenon, it might be a being from several countries phenomenon. Like, I'm not entirely here when I exist in England and in English. That's not the whole of me. There's another part of me which is animated by the Mediterranean or Arab countries or places that have norms and values which are not part of my Englishness. So that is basically, I spend a lot of time and effort on travel, but only I'd say a small portion of that is a holiday. Yeah, that's very interesting. thing. When I was growing up, we ended up moving sort of every few years for various reasons.

You know, my parents split up when I was eight, but even before that. So, and by the time I was in my late teen, I was really sick of it. I was sick of having to move school and move town, and I didn't really like having to move around. And also, holidays had just not been part of my life at all. There certainly, there'd been no foreign holidays at any point growing up. what holidays I had been had been basically short at Mace one week holidays to equally rainy parts of Northern Britain to the one that I was growing up in, which were nice. I wouldn't present them, but it just wasn't, you know, it wasn't really part of my life. And I became really conscious in my sort of late teens and early 20s that certain kinds of travel were very much part of the culture, of people who were sort of maybe similar to me culturally, but economically a lot better off. you know, I grew up in a sort of weird class position of people being, parents and family being quite highly educated, but we were genuinely poor, like we were, we didn't really

have a lot of material comforts. So, um, so I was really conscious of, I thought of holidays as things other people did were, and I as sort of, but I associated that, that difference from my experience with also, you know, the fact that, you know, I was very conscious that unlike everyone else I knew, like I hadn't just sort of grown up in one place. And I was always a bit jealous of the people who'd grown up in one place because you develop a kind of relationship to the place and to people that you can't have if you get moved around every three or four years as a kid. But also, obviously, I felt sort of superior in other ways.

And my superiority had to do with my greater experience of mobility and living in a very different types of place and even in different countries. And so for all these reasons, I was quite conditioned to be quite anti, just anti the idea of the holiday by the time I was in my early 20s. And I think I'll come back in a minute to why I would say anti it. But subsequently, partly because of it, partly being a parent, partly just sort of calming down a bit, partly because I'm generally a fairly hedonistic sort of person, I guess by my kind of late 20s. I got very into the idea of the holidays. and the things I mean the things I like to do on holiday are just things that they're not at all unusual

I like to get away from the city I like to be in the mountains I like I also like some sunshine and I like to not have to do a lot but I like to be able to hike a lot if it's possible so it's completely typical of somebody belonging to my class fraction going about several hundred years it's very typical in that sense

but I do it is a big part of the year. To some extent the year does get organized around holidays. This is the big question because I see this as the signifier because this has been a revelation to me. Do you do emails? Yeah. Oh, you do. Right. See, that's not a holiday to me. If it involves emails, it's not a holiday. I tried it like one time. I tried not doing email on holiday and there was such an avalanche of eating. By the time, it was such a nightmare coming back to like 700 emails. and also I mean personally I mean maybe I'm just not enough of a heeded is not enough of a holidayer but to me it's not you know it's not a big deal to like have to if I'm away somewhere like really beautiful and like really nice and I'm going to be having fun with like the kids and Joe for like eight hours of that day it's not a big deal for me to like spend an hour writing and spend an hour answering emails each day like it's not a big deal really to be honest and it's also not a big deal to have to spend like a couple of days of the week like doing writing It's not like I will put in a full working week.

It's not a massive deal. That's interesting. I think it's a character. So I think that's a character thing or maybe the type of work. For me, it's absolutely like I am not, I am not checking a single email. Like my emails go off my phone. It's taken off my phone when I'm on holiday. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But also, but to me, this is part, I'm sure this partly has to do with the fact that, of course, like I said, for me, for years and years, I was really anti-holiday. Just the whole idea of being on holiday was like anathema to me. And it was for the reasons we've talked about, because I had quite a strong intuitive sense by the time I was in my early 20s that the culture of organising your life around holidays and holidays being the thing you look forward to to justify doing a job that you don't like

is part of the way which capitalist social relations are normalised and people are encouraged to put up with them. And I was there for, I was quite against it. And I was influenced in all this by sort of situationist anti-work ideology. And I always remember my friend Roger Drew when we had a conversation about this saying, yeah, his summary of what a kind of situationist, no travel, jamie, never work ever, attitude to holidays should be. And it was going on holidays, simply an abdication from the responsibility to try to make your whole life a holiday. And also my kind of anti-holiday feeling was.

reinforced by all that it was also reinforced by the fact I was really influenced by punk and punk ideology and something I always like to talk about is the way in which in loads of punk songs the idea of the holiday is figured as a sort of you know bad thing so we've we've played the clash before classic clash anthem hate in war says I don't dream of a holiday when hate and war come around meaning you know I'm going to stay in the city I'm going to stay in fight I'm going to participate in the class struggle I'm not just going to fuck off to some commune and try and escape from me. an explicit critique of that kind of neo-imperialist adventurism.

And, you know, it's really, it's about people joining the Peace Corps, which is the American equivalent of the VSO in Britain, the voluntary service overseas, which is basically the same thing. It's time to taste what you rose there. Right. God will not help you here. Grace yourself, my dear. Race if so, my dear. Grace if so.

am I here? It's a holiday in Cambodia. It's tough kids, like it's alive. It's a holiday in Cambodia. Don't forget to pack a old wife. The sex pistols, you know, holidays in the sun, a cheap holiday in other people's misery. And really, I would say from the age,

by the time I was kind of 17, I was already just feeling absolutely appalled meeting people, usually at that age people slightly older siblings or cousins coming back with their stories of how fantastic it had been to go to India or how fantastic it had been to go to Thailand because absolutely central to their narratives

about how fantastic it was was the fact that everything was really cheap to them. You know, you just had to pay for this really expensive flight but then you could live on almost nothing because the food was cheap. And I think that's because those people are really poor. They're really poor because they've been super exploited by people here for 200 years.

I couldn't believe people were doing it. I'm interested in where, like, you know, curiosity plays into all of that. Because that's, you know, obviously what you're saying is true in terms of all of the dynamics. But isn't that at least partly overridden by your curiosity to see what the world is like? Yeah, it is. And I'm not totally, I'm not, I am sort of justifying this anti-holiday position. But I would say to some, to a certain extent, I still have that anti-holiday position. That is partly why I've adopted a form of going on holiday, which isn't really like that.

We usually go to one place and we stay there for a few weeks and we go there because it's a nice place to be and it's cheap and it helps gets away from the city. But a lot of what I do there is just the same stuff. Like I'll keep doing a bit of work. I'll keep chatting to my friends on the internet, whatever. So maybe I am still sort of anti-holiday for those reasons and in all those ways. maybe the thing I try to do is something sort of different. But in other ways, yeah, I completely accept all that. I think all those questions around the relationship between the tourist

and the place they go, you know, the visitor, the person from the Western air and the Asian culture, the question of the relationships between all those things, it is really, really complicated. So I was really just explaining why, you know, why, for various kind of overlaid reasons by the time I was in my early 20s. I was just very, very sort of hostile to what most people's idea of a holiday. And like I really, the thing I really, really hated at that time.

And again, I wouldn't justify this now, but I really hated the culture of like interrailing where people would get like a special ticket and they'd visit it with like one city and then go to another city, then go to another country, then go to another country. And to me, it just seemed like,

well, you just, it seemed like just aggressively sort of objectifying these places, that you obviously weren't going to really absorb any sense of like what life in those places was like by just kind of tearing through them and checking them off your list. I mean, now I can entirely see what the appeal of that is. I can see

this sort of sense of adventure. There's also this sense that if you're in Europe, those places all belong to a certain common culture in a way. So maybe you were sort of immersing yourself in it just by going from place to place. And also, they just shouldn't be, there doesn't have to be some kind of moral

judgment placed on people wanting to do that. You're not doing anyone any harm if you just want to go to Rome and look at the tourist site and then go to some other place that's famous and look at the tourist sites. You're not doing a, you know, you're not doing a bad thing. You're not necessarily hurting anybody. Well, we should talk about that

perhaps, but, but I think can we return to that, the Sex Pistol songs? I think that, well, the slogan from the Sex Pistol songs, I think that does get out one of the key tensions that go through holidays or tourism. That at a cheap holiday in other people's misery, it originates as like,

a piece of graffiti in Paris in May 68. I think it's like Club Med, a cheap holiday in other people's misery. And then Jamie Reed, who's the designer for the Sex Pistols, he picks it up and he uses it in a magazine he does called Suburban Press. Cheap holiday and other people's misery, he links it directly to Spain, the trend growing to become dominant in the late 1970s when this has been put together,

where Spain is still under the rule of a fascist dictator, Franco. There's that element of it, which is, let's go and we'll ignore the complex political relationships or political situations which allow us to go there sort of thing. And tourism was a really big part of, like, Franco's growth model. Watching holiday and other people are misery. The situation, I want to go to the new Belsen, I want to see some of history, because now I got a reason of an economy.

Oh, now I got a reason, now I've got a reason, and I'm still waiting, now I got a reason. The situation's critique of tourism is sort of like, like, Gidea Board sort of talks about, like, if you can get somewhere, it's not worth going. If you can get somewhere and, like, there's a tourist economy there, It's not with going. It's the same as a place you've just left. It's already integrated into the world capitalist system. Do you know what I mean? So the thing you're going to look for, that's not

there because capitalism's got there before you. I mean, it's very simplistic, though. It's a very, very simplistic thing. Yeah, it is. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he just also not true. It's also not true. Like, he makes an important point, but it's also just not true. Like, if you're going from the UK as a tourist to Cairo, it's a very, very, it's a very, it's completely subsumed by, you know, the capitalist economy, it is a very different place. Mumbai is a very different place. Mexico City is a very different place. You know, the Isle of Sky is a very different place. Yeah, yeah. But look, like, you know, we can't take him too serious. He just wanted to stay in Paris and drink wine, basically. He was a raging alcoholic. But like, there is that tension, that tension of, like, people go there.

You want to go somewhere in order to experience some difference. But, like, being able to get there, relies on this similarity, basically, this, that capitalism has already gone. there. And so there's that tension between, you know, you want to go somewhere where it's possible for you to do it and like, you know, it's easy for you to do it. And yet there's that drive to experience the authentic culture, you know, that's tourism, that's travel. So it's like things are different. Yeah, but like there's that search for like the, to get more and more authentic. And then there's a problem of like, does it do any harm? Well, there's lots of literature about that, about the problems of tourism. And one of the things that tourism does,

of course, it diminishes the difference, basically, and increases the similarity. Do you know what I mean? Primarily because as that builds up, you move from, like, you know, small businesses doing tourism to, like, larger businesses doing tourism and, like, acting as a, the front line of integration into, like, into much more global forms of capitalism. I wouldn't defend the board, but I think it is, that's one of the tensions, basically, between ease of going somewhere and the amount of difference that you're searching for, that search for authentic difference, which gets diminished by the search for it. We have to play, Ain't Going to Go by the Alabama 3,

in fact just Alabama 3. Alabama 3 are a band who, they're basically, they're most famous because their song, woke up one morning was used as a theme tune on Sopranos. They used to be good friends of mine, Alabama 3. They formed in Brixton, but they're from all they're like from, Glasgow, Wales, etc. all have their last name as love in a sort of like cult-like thing. D. Wayne Love or Jake used to come

to have holidays at my house on me, and Alice's house, when he'd want to get away from Brixton to sort of like detox a little bit. They had a very hedonistic lifestyle still do. Unfortunately, Jake died a couple of years ago. But his holiday at our house used to be, he'd come and watch our film collection all night, then sleep all day, basically. But they've got this fantastic song called Ain't Going to Goa from 1997 from their album, Exile on Cold Harbour Lane. He's got some amazing lyrics. One of which, let me just read out these lyrics, they're great. I don't need no freaky-diki, fractal geometry, crystal silicone chip.

I ain't walking long lay lines, reading no high times, put me on another bad trip. Ah, well, Timothy Leary, check out this theory. He sold acid for the FBI. Well, he ain't no website wonder. The guru just went under. You can keep your California sunshine. that's an acid communist song

I don't need no FK, DK, fractal geometry crystal silicone chip I ain't walking long lay lines reading no high time put me on another bad trip Oh well

Timothy Leary Just check out this theory He sold assets for the FBI Well he ain't no website Wonder The guru just went under You can keep your California sunshine Yeah I believe you Dway

Well, well, I would contest some of the historical details there. I would also say that I always loved that track. Alabama 3 were big in our house in the 90s, like before the Sopranos. And my favorite song of theirs is the one about Chairman Mao. But we should just say that. The lyric of that, which is a song. used to do live is chairman Mao says power comes from the barrel of a gun

chairman Mao said change must come change must come from the barrel of a gun yes sorry um no um and uh yeah but of course

within the 90s rave culture there was this real divergence between on the one hand the idea that the whole point of rave culture was to make your own community a place where utopian joy could be experienced you know Exodus Collective in Lutum became famous or even maybe notorious for never traveling anywhere.

Or it was really hard for anybody to get them to show up at festivals. They weren't really engaged with other people's political struggles. But their argument was always, you know, we're about, we want to make Luton a better place. We're not just kind of traveling around like these sort of globe trotters or even like Spiral Tribe. And I always remember it was one of the guys from DIY, who famously said, he didn't want to go on holiday because you would miss the weekend. I mean, really, it might practice that continues to this day of promoting and organising dance parties. It started off, so me and my friends willing to organise, like, just parties in our house, but partly as a sort of rejection of this idea that

you had to go somewhere else to have a good time. We didn't want to go to a beat, we didn't even want to have to go to a club. We wanted to be able to make our own lives, kind of as joyful as a holiday. And there was that. And then the converse of that was people traveling, people going off somewhere else to do the rape, whether it's spiral tribe, you know, fair enough, you know, changed a few lives like travelling around the country, but eventually just leaving to go settle in the south of France for very good reasons. I mean, I wouldn't judge them for that. And the ultimate manifestation of this wasn't even Ibiza culture. It was Goa trance, the ground zero of the whole Sightrans culture. The global Sightrans scene has its defenders, including among serious

critical scholars, people who will point out that in places like Australia, there have been real meaningful connections made between indigenous communities and Saitrans. But for the most part, my position on Saitrans is informed by the work of scholars like Aaron Sordana, the American critical geographer who wrote psychedelic white, which is a very searing critique of the Goetrans scene as a deliberate exercise in, as a very obvious exercise in neo-colonialism. And the kind of the whiteness of the music. I mean, to me, Goetrans, it's the whitest music that has ever been, and it is, and it's sort of inseparable from the fact that it's, it's a global culture, which is all about facilitate, enabling highly privileged people to have very intense experiences

in a way that absolutely does not challenge the power structures from which they come and to which they return in any way whatsoever. It's no surprise, it's really, really big in Israel. But nonetheless, you know, it's produced some memorable music, so we could say we should play a bit. Let's hear a Guru Josh Infinity. I mean, one of the best books I've ever come across, well, the best book I've ever read about this notion of tourism as at least partially negatively marked concept is the great British sociologist John Ory wrote this book, The Tourist Gaze.

Again, it's one of those books I remember coming across quite young, quite early in my own academic career and just being so happy because it seemed to sum up everything I had intuitively decided about why I hated tourists and I hated people, basically anyone who went on holiday, or I hated what they were doing because the tourist gaze is obviously related to the idea of the male gaze. It also draws a lot on Edward Said's notion of orientalism, the idea that Europeans sort of construct all this mythology about Asia and the East and they exoticise it and for the benefit of their own ideological

fantasies. And it's very easy to construct this position from which you say, well, yeah, essentially the tourist is the objectifier, the commodifier, the gazer, the spectator. And it's links to, as well, the situationist idea of the spectacle, the way the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the capitalism creates of itself and of society in order to prevent anyone having any sort of authentic experience. And I think it, I just think one can't really get away from the complexity of the fact that, well, there is truth to all that. There is a certain truth to all that. There is something in the logic

of tourism that it objectifies, it produces spectators, and it creates a particular form of subjectivity on the part of the tourist of someone who is always looking but never interacting, someone who is unchanged by

the difference they encounter, etc. And those are all potentialities. Those are all potential tendencies. Could I just add to that though? It's like the thing I was alluding to earlier when I said about I feel a loss of autonomy is like it's quite a passive situation it's a passive subjectivity the tourists well spectatorship is always passive within this register isn't it the tourist is always sort of counterposed in people's minds and in the register of this kind of rhetoric is counterposed to the idea of somebody who might do

something different who might have a conversation with somebody you know who lives in the place where they're going and might learn something from that conversation or might even however momentarily actually share the lives of the people in the place they're visiting and in some way experience some kind of self-transformation. I think that does express a real and an understandable set of anxieties around what capitalism, what capitalism does to all of our lives by turning every single possible activity into a commodity. And I mean, in a way, tourism is the original sort of manifestation of the experience economy, which a lot of contemporary economists and social theorists would say that one of the things that happens to capitalism, at least in the parts

of the world, where consumerism becomes most advanced over the past 50 years, is that the thing that we spend more and more of our money on is experiences rather than things. And the experience itself becomes an objective qualification. And to some extent, the grand tour and the package tours of Thomas Cook, they sort of invent that to a certain extent. Or they take it to a new level, like beyond the level of just buying tickets for a play or something. But all that does really, you know, it has to be problematized. It has to be problematized on the basis that if you carry this kind of critique to an absolute logical conclusion, you might just end up with a sort of mystical quietism. And, you know, again, another thing that reinforced my anti-holiday thinking when I was younger was reading the Tao Te Ching, the great Taoist classic, which specifically includes the line, the more you travel, the less you know.

without stirring you can know the whole world and and it did sort of and it was you know and partly my experience growing up of having to move from place to place like against my will really and not really enjoying it yeah it did also sort of reinforce this sense that well there's a real value to the quality of relationships you can have with people in a place that you can only get by living there for years and years and years I often say about political commentary like you really can't understand the politics of a place you've never lived so there's something to all that But at the same time, exactly, on another level, well, we do, we do, we live in a world, you know. And if you carry all this stuff to its logical conclusion, then you just say, well, everyone should just stay where they are and stay in their lane and not comment on anything they haven't experienced for decades and not experience anything and not go anywhere.

And all that is also, all that runs against another really important element of radical culture going back to the 18th century, which is the belief in the value. of the values both of cosmopolitanism and of hospitality. The idea that it's good to be cosmopolitan, it's good to have experience of different cultures and different places and different parts of the world. It's good to understand and try to appreciate differences and also take a certain pleasure from them. And it's good to be hospitable. It's good to welcome people and play from other parts of the world, from other places, from other lives. It's good for all of those things to happen. I don't think they're necessarily, I mean, contradictory, Because on some level, there's a certain ideal, there's the historic communist ideal of a world culture in which everybody is on an equal footing in terms of power and money.

And so everybody can enjoy each other's culture while enjoying its specificity and while also are now in new hybrids constantly to emerge. And then there's the reality of capitalism, which is, you know, people from really rich countries going around taking whatever they want from poor countries and up to the point of, you know, going and paying whatever they feel like paying to live and stay there. And so maybe there's not necessarily a contradiction between having a critique of the reality of capitalist tourism and the lived ideal and the kind of ideal of a world cosmopolitan culture. But it does mean, I think, these days, like I'm really, really. really wary and very wary of being at all judgmental about anybody else's like holiday practices or tourism or travelling. I'm wary of being judgmental about it because I think it's dangerous and because one doesn't want to be like judgmental about that kind of, I remember John Tricket talking to me about this one day actually, Labour MP John Trickett saying you don't

want to suppress or condemn a certain spirit of adventure in people. And even if that spirit of adventure, say this, this is my gloss on it, but even if it's only manifest in the desire for a week in Benidorm with the Lans, you know, it's still, you don't want to suppress that sort of desire for something more, for some joyful mode of becoming.

I agree. I really agree with that, yeah. I agree, which is why I've booked us all at a week's drinking holiday. We're all going on a pub crawl. ACFM does Where are we going?

Zanty. Yeah. A really classic recording, which is like a product of a certain kind of travel culture. This was really a product of the so-called hippie trail, the way in which people coming out of the counterculture of the 60s would go travelling around both the so-called Near East and parts of Asia, like looking for yogic enlightenment or cheap hashish. And one thing that came out of that was Brian Jones of the Roaning Stones,

famously, discovered this village in the Moroccan mountains, I think in the Atlas Mountains, Djayuka, which has had this practice for a very, very long time of playing this mesmeric sort of music, with many, many musicians all playing together, playing mostly wind instruments and some percussion. The so-called master musicians of Jujuca are still producing recordings to this day. But this is one of the first ones, I think it was recorded in 1972.

First released, I think it was released as Brian Jones presents the Pipes of Pan at Jujuca. And this is a bit of that. It's very rare that like being moralistic about other people's choices is in any way politically useful. partly because, like, those choices are structured by the infrastructure that's there. Do you know what I mean? You know, it's much cheaper to fly it than to get a train next to all of these sorts of things. But, like, there's a difference between, like, being moralistic about it and then trying to think through, like, what's going on with it, basically,

and, like, recognising the sort of the difficulties that gets produced by things such as tourism. And, like, the thing that always comes to mind is, like, Barcelona being sort of, like, overwhelmed with tourists. and really struggling to take action to take the heat out of the tourist economy, even though it's sort of reliant on the tourist economy. And so the Barcelona and Comu administration, which is sort of a municipalist, a left municipalist administration, unfortunately got voted out recently after like, I can't remember 12 years or something. They banned Airbnb and banned new hotels in the centre of Barcelona.

That's a way to try and take away the, like, deflate this acceleration of two, Because it was making a city unlivable, basically, making a city unlivable for the people who live there. I also do some work up in Sky with abundance. You know, on Sky, the flood of tourists that go on to Sky in the summer, you know, they're much more in a sort of bind, a real double bind than Barcelona because Sky is really dependent on the tourist economy. But, like, they haven't got the infrastructure for it. And so you just get a huge traffic jammed on a tiny island in the South. summer, et cetera, and trying to think about how you could have other forms of economic activity, which could then allow you to take the sort of, like, to deflate the tourist economy to some

degree. Ever experience, I just want to mention in terms of, like, the problems of tourism and what you might try and do about it is, like, in the 1970s and 80s, there was this thing in Wales, there was this movement called the Sons of Glendua. She used to burn down second home, so there's this big problem in lots of places in Cornwall, etc of people buying a second like a holiday home basically a home where you'd go on holiday and then pricing out the people who who live there who live there year round or who were born and brought up there and like yeah at this in the 70s and 80s there was a movement of burning

down second homes owned by English people basically all this sons of glendua thing which is a little bit extreme perhaps but there's no point being moralist but you have to raise that problem of like like tourism does produce problems and like you know you have to to think about what you might be able to do with them. And like, so the other thing we'd have to talk about that in terms of that is like flying, basically, that flying and its impact on carbon emissions, climate change, et cetera, which is like a hugely controversial issue. You know, you have this thing of like air miles.

How many flights, is it allowed you, are you allowed to take, etc? Then you have that the complications of, well, what if you're in love with somebody who's in a different country and the people talk about love miles or family miles, something like Nadia where your family is split around, etc. You know, I think the key of all of that is that like, if we just devolve that down to individual choices without thinking about the infrastructure that conditions and structures those choices, all you're left with is moralism, basically.

That's not a solution to anything. And it probably makes things worse, to be honest. You know, you have to think about other ways in which you can address these problems. What's interesting to me is how, like, the moral, and judgment that is banded around with flying. And I just think there's something really interesting going on there because I think it sits within the same architecture as judging like wear people buy their clothes.

It's that same thing. And obviously I haven't worked on climate change campaigns, but I've worked on sweatshop campaigns. And it's just really interesting for years and years to see people fall in this really smug position of like, well, I don't shop in Primark or will I don't shop there and judging people on an individual level, which is quite a like basically capitalist way of relating to other human beings.

Like that's the first thing. So I think there's something fundamentally wrong about like reaching for critiquing people like who flies where and how many miles or whatever that falls into like a capitalist architecture. That's the first thing. The second thing is like obviously flying is carbon intensive, but it's 2.5% of the world's carbon emissions. So even before we get to talking about love mild.

or not love miles or whatever. It's just really interesting that in the debate, in the UK, which I think is a pretty white debate, I mean, I rarely reach for, you know, race and culture when I make these arguments. I really don't like to. I'm very careful. But I think it is just, like, so white

because it comes from a place of being able to, like, ban that around because all of your friends and family are like a train journey away. Like, it's a completely different situation for a lot of people where, like, you travel because that's how you see your friends and family, and capitalism will not allow you the three weeks off to get on a train to get to wherever you need to get to or whatever.

So this is not even like starting to get into it, but those are like some basic principles. Like why the preoccupation with flying? And perhaps, you know, like I will, cards on the table, like unlike you guys, I've been flying since I was nine months old. You know, I was an unaccompanied minor when I was eight. like flying is a huge part of, you know, how I live my life, you know, and I don't have children and I don't have a car. So I kind of feel like I have, I have no guilt about my flying

whatsoever. But politically, it's quite problematic on the left. And it's, and I really don't understand how this still continues to be one of those things where people are very judgmental as, you know, as it used to be around sweatshops, if not more. Like, it's like, oh, you've done a bad thing like it's an identitarian thing to be someone who doesn't fly i just think it's bollocks like i don't think it's defensible i think for me the don't fly thing i think it has to be understood as basically a kind of identitarian gesture rather than a really serious political contribution and i think it is actually okay as long as one understands it on that level and is not judgmental about other people's behavior because i have made a point of trying not to fly for

holidays, like for all the time I've ever had holidays. On the other hand, if I was going somewhere, especially going somewhere where there was family, where I couldn't get there any other way, and they didn't have a problem with it. And also, I do feel like for our kids, it was a good thing to kind of set an example that you can use the train to get to quite a lot of places, and it could be fun, and it could be more an adventure than flying, and it's good to think about things like climate change and how your actions contribute to it, and it's good to not sort of a waste your privilege on extra carbon emissions. But conversely, I also think that I think it's important to be aware that it is just a kind of identity gesture. It's a nice thing to kind

of encourage the kids to think of themselves as kind of eco-conscious people, but it's also important not to confuse that with politically significant action. I think you're completely right. I think the actual, I mean, it's kind of extraordinary the fuss people make about it, given what a small amount of global emissions it is. And the reason people make such a fuss about it is because, of course, even though it's a tiny part of global carbon emissions, your personal carbon footprint is astronomically higher if you fly than if you don't. It's the thing you can do as an individual, which burns the most carbon out of anything. But that just demonstrates the extent to which is a totally individualized sort of discourse. Yeah, but to push back on that, right, is the reason it only,

so like we just take that to follow that through individually it forms a huge part of your carbon footprint the frame that the concept carbon footprint invented by shell i think as a way to try to individualize the problem of climate change but like you know part of the reason it only contributes 2.5% is because a tiny percentage of the world's population get to fly and like most of the flights are like by a very small percentage like most of the flights are by a tiny percentage of flyers who are frequent flies etc So that's the problem is we have to reduce flying as a principal mode of transportation

primarily because you can't have an egalitarian world in which everybody flies as much as we do. That's the problem, but there's no individual solution to that. That's like a huge reframing global infrastructures and overcoming huge inertial forces in order to do so problem. That's the general problem of how you tackle climate change, not just flying. Sure. But even within that, there's loads of people who are flying a by private jet, which we can happily say no, like ban that. And then there's loads of people who are still flying for business. And one of the good things about the pandemic was it proved that you could do a lot on Zoom that previously people were going like cross-Atlantic for having like one meeting, whereas I think it's way more important and valuable and morally correct to say people are traveling to be with their family and friends, rather than

people are traveling because they want to have one business meeting in New York. Do you see what I mean? Like there's areas where I'm willing to judge and other areas where I'm not. Well, that's, I mean, that's true. I mean, I don't think any of us are going to disagree that there ought to be publicly funded, high-spield rail infrastructure, you know, going preferably electrified and entirely using renewables, just all over the place. And of course, I mean, it's interesting to think about this actually. We've talked about cars on the show before. They were all pretty anti-car. I mean, one of the things that's really shaped out sort of family holiday habits is that, Jay, I got radicalised against driving by reclaimed the streets, even though I do have a

driving licence. My partner, Joe's never learned to drive. And then both our kids being London girls, spent so little time in cars as babies and toddlers, I think that's partly the reason why they just get really car sick in cars. Like the younger one still does. So I had to figure out places we could go on holiday that you could get to using the train and public transport because they just couldn't stand being in the car for like more than 10, 15 minutes anywhere. And that basically ruled out most of the UK. Like it's literally easier to get to almost anywhere in France, like on a train or a bus, than it is to get to like half of Britain, basically.

Like it literally is. But one thing that really that partly brings home is the fact that, you know, the transport systems are all interconnected, aren't they? And one reason, what for flying being such a big thing, because local rail networks and national rail networks deteriorated in loads of places, especially Britain. But that wasn't primarily because of the popularity of flight. That was because of the car. So in Britain, it was a conscious decision taken by planners in the 60s. That bloody beaching. Yeah, exactly. That Britain was going to become a two car per household

country that wouldn't need any trains anymore that led to a situation in which the railway networks are totally deteriorated. There was nothing like the necessary investment. in the national rail infrastructure. Well, I mean, Beeching closed down loads and those of branch lines, including seaside resorts to many seaside resorts, which is one of the reasons they're so run down. One of the new Labour MPs who'd been parachuted into a constituent in Wales was, he'd just discovered how terrible transportation in Wales was, basically.

I'm shocked. Everyone on the left pretends that they don't like flying. For me, it's a mesmerising experience. Like I remember 20th century, you know, I'm just old enough to remember 20th century travel like before 9-11, where you could literally take whatever the fuck you wanted on a plane and there were like no restrictions. And one of the sad things I think for like younger people is this kind of like loot an airport, especially if you're in the south, like experience where like from the minute you arrive in the airport, everything is restricted. You're treated like shit. You're not even allowed to bring a backpack backpack. Like you're carted through duty free or whatever.

But I even like in general the experience of going to an airport, like getting on a plane. And like you're saying, being above the clouds. Like I'm absolutely baffled by, and this is a lot of people who like shut down, like this is definitely like a sizable minority, if not the majority, who like pull down like the windows on the sides and like watch a movie. Like I can't watch a movie in a plane. I know people, not even in long haul. Like I'm just staring out of the window going like, this is incredible.

and it's the best writing space for me. I do my best writing on a plane. Like, I love what it does to my brain. So I really love flying. Maybe that's because I was inducted into it so young. I love it so much. I mean, definitely, if I was to pick, like, my favorite form of travel, it would be trains. I mean, but also I grew up, I grew up with that going around Europe on different trains.

I think it's amazing. Like, I think good train travel is incredible. And one of my dreams is to go, like, across the world and try. trains, you know, in a way that I don't know is possible, and I don't even know it's possible for like a solo female traveler necessarily, like, at all. But I love the experience of trains and trains in different countries. That's my, that's my preference. But I do also, like, you know, cerebrally and like philosophically and, you know, scientifically, like I love the experience of flying. No, I hate flying. And until you caught me out because I was going to say,

absolutely hate flying. I'm much prefer train travel. But like, I hate the whole, like, nature of it, you know, that there's sort of like the way that you're forced on, the tiny seats, I'm quite tall, so I'm always uncomfortable on flights, etc. And I do like it if you get a window seat and you can look down and like sometimes, you know, if you fly across London at nighttime, you can, you're on a window seat, it's quite amazing, you know, it's fantastic. But like the whole experience of flying is horrible because of the need to get to the airport a couple of hours early and all this sort of stuff and like that sort of thing. And I much prefer train travel, but of course train travel in this country is so unreliable that that can turn into an absolute, you know,

12-hour hellscape, a turn on a flip of a coin, do you know what I mean? Well, let me give you an advice, listeners. You want to get through securities? You want to make the long, tedious cues in an airport, so positively entertaining, podcasts? It's not podcasts in general, one specific podcast, ACFM. thank you and good night I mean one thing to say I suppose in a way I agree about flying and it might be like our most it might be my most

accelerationist opinion actually that I think flying is sort of flying should be recognised as an absolute one of the pinnacles of human achievement and we should make flying good like we shouldn't just be against it we should make it good but we do also

we absolutely clearly we need high speed rail and it's and I think it's really obvious it's going to be tediously obvious to our listeners, I guess, but those are both really good examples of ways of organising things, that privatisation and leaving things to market forces just haven't led to the best possible experiences for people, but you need all this stuff to be organised and regulated

in order for, because David Harvey famously says, time-space compression, the experience of things getting effectively close, together travel times communication times getting shorter it's one of the definitive experiences of modernity and postmodernity and whatever we're in now whatever our time in history but as long as we just allow capitalism to dictate the terms of glit of time space compression we're going to end up with both these terrible inequalities and this sense of alienation that pervade so many people's

experience of both flight and tourism that and I think you know it's a really obvious symptom of the fact that we need time-space compression to be a process which is organised democratically in a way that benefit to everybody and produces beautiful experiences of you know of hospitality and of travel and of holiday and freedom rather than producing the experience of us all just having these little pre-packaged like parceled elements of experience that stop us connecting with each other and that and it's true the anti-holiday critique is right that that is one of the possible outcomes of allowing capitalism to organise our time and our space for us. But we always have to, I think, be conscious of the fact that the desire to transcend the limits of our time and space is that's a powerful and liberating desire.

And we shouldn't allow capitalism to dictate the terms on which we think about it, I think. And so from that point of view, holidays are a good thing and they should be celebrated. And we should demand more of them, more and better holidays, rather than just accepting the holidays. the idea that the type of holiday that capitalism allows us is the only one possible. Yes, Jeremy Corby, no surrender, four-day week and a three-day bender. Go ahead. Thank you. Thank you.