Why Fly?

Probably like most people, I get a lot of emails asking me to sign petitions.  Petitions to make electric vehicles more affordable, ban petrol-powered leaf-blowers, stop housing asylum seekers on barges, speak out against children being executed in Saudi Arabia, free ethnic minorities from forced labour in China, provide safe and legal migration routes to stop people-traffickers, and many more.

Sometimes I sign these.  Sometimes I know I should, but I’m too lazy.  Sometimes I think, ‘I’d need to know more about the issue before I could decide whether this is a good idea,’ or, ‘I know they mean well, but this petition is so ambiguously worded that people might use it to justify all sorts of things that aren’t reasonable.’ 

Sometimes, I simply don’t care enough about the issue.  For example, I’m not worried about whether someone thinks it’s sexist for a supermarket to label the tampons aisle ‘feminine hygiene’, compared with the fact that in many countries, teenagers are missing out on education because they can’t go to school when they have their period, or that even in this country, many people struggle to afford basic hygiene products like sanitary protection.  Sometimes I actively disagree, for example with a petition to evict travellers.

However, I haven’t often seen a petition I disagreed with as much as one I saw a few weeks ago.  This demanded that schoolchildren should have two weeks per year of school leave to be taken whenever was convenient for their parents, so that their parents could afford to take them on holiday if it was too expensive to do so during the official school holidays.

First of all, this seems to be based on a misunderstanding of how schools work.  Learning is not a service which children provide to schools, which they just need to put in X weeks of per year.  Teaching is a service which teachers provide to children, which they can’t do if the children don’t all turn up for lessons on the same days.

Now, there are perfectly valid reasons why children shouldn’t be in school.  They might be ill, for example.  They might be more suited to home-schooling.

They might refuse to go to school as a political protest, as with the School Strike for Climate movement.  But the point of school strikes is that they are radical because they are a way of saying, ‘We should be in school, but we can’t afford to wait until we are grown up to turn into scientists and engineers who might find a solution to climate change.  We need today’s grown-ups to listen to what the scientists are saying now, and to take action now, if we are to have any future!’  If the children were simply using their annual leave, it would have no more force as a protest than joining marches in the summer holidays or at weekends.

However, this petition was about wanting flexible annual leave because expecting children to attend school during term-time ‘penalises’ families who can’t afford to take them away on holiday except during term-time.  The assumption seemed to be that children need, not simply time off school to spend with their families, but specifically holidays that involve going away, probably to another country, probably flying.

But why?  Why do we need to go abroad every year?  In particular, why do we need to fly, when climate scientists keep telling us that flying makes a greater contribution to climate change per person per kilometre than almost any other form of transport?

What do you do if you can’t afford a foreign holiday?  Well, you could do what my family did in the 80s and 90s, and camp in a field in Devon.  Or you could do what PDB11’s (rather wealthier) family did in the 70s, and stay with a grandparent most years and save up for the occasional holiday abroad every few years.

Can’t even afford UK holidays?  Well, some years we didn’t even go away as far as Devon.  Sometimes we went on living in Southampton as usual and found things to do locally.  I remember my mother once giving my brothers and me a budget sheet with a sum we could afford to spend on the summer holidays, and costs of things we could do for free (playing in a park within walking distance of home) or fairly cheaply (going swimming at the local sports centre, driving out to nearby places such as Danebury or the New Forest to go for a walk), or more expensive treats like a day out in London (covering cost of transport there) to visit the Natural History Museum (in itself free). 

We didn’t see ourselves as poor.  I regarded myself as a privileged middle-class child.  But we were privileged, as much as anything else, because our parents were good at thinking of things to do that didn’t cost much, encouraged us to borrow books from the public library, and weren’t too proud to buy many of our clothes and toys second-hand.

I remember a day when we caught the bus to the middle of town to visit the art museum in the Civic Centre.  This might have been the time when they had the exhibition of Lego sculptures, including a magnificent red dragon who must have taken thousands of bricks to build, or it might have been another time.  At any rate, there was plenty in the permanent collection to interest us, like the sequence of paintings of the adventures of Perseus (my class had just been learning about ancient Greek mythology in school).

The gallery didn’t charge for admission, but we discussed how much we thought the day out had been worth, and fed that amount in coins into the wooden clockwork man who pulled funny faces when he ate a coin.  Afterwards, we went for a walk in a nearby park, and asked my mother for ice-creams from a van.  She pointed out that even the very plain ice-cream cornets looked fairly expensive for what they were, and bought a family pack of four Cornettos from Asda instead.  It had all been a fairly simple, local day out – but as far as I was concerned, aged eight, it was roughly on the same excitement level that going to London for the day would have been.

Okay, I don’t have children.  But from my memories of being a child, children don’t particularly need exotic locations.  They need space to run around, new things to learn (which isn’t difficult when you’re young and everything is new to you), loving families, freedom to be creative, and stories.

A few years ago, I read a newspaper article in which a journalist described taking her four-year-old child on a proper old-fashioned beach holiday in Portugal.  They had spent a week or two playing on the beach, building sandcastles, paddling, looking for shells, and exploring rock-pools.  When the holiday was over, and the journalist asked her child which had been her favourite part, the child replied, ‘Watching Peppa Pig on the plane on the way home.’

I thought, ‘So why go to Portugal?’  If a child isn’t old enough to appreciate visiting a foreign country, what’s wrong with seaside holidays in Britain?  If there’s one thing we aren’t short of, after all, it’s coastline.

Sitting in a kiddie seat in the back of a car while going on holiday may not offer the opportunity to watch cartoons, but most cars have a CD player so that children can listen to recordings of nursery rhymes or children’s books.  The entertainment doesn’t even have to be aimed at children; I have happy memories of listening to Flanders and Swann while going on holiday, as well as children’s stories like Winnie-the-Pooh read by Bernard Cribbins, Just William read by Martin Jarvis, and The Terribly Plain Princess read by Penelope Keith.

Or there are family games like I Spy, The Parson’s Cat, and Pub Cricket.  When my brothers and I were teenagers with a cruel sense of humour, we and my mother devised a game called Bad Samaritans, in which one person would be a troubled caller to the Samaritans and another would be a listener trying to be as unsympathetic as possible.  My mother and I added variants over the heads of my younger brothers by calling up in character as, for example, Hamlet or Odysseus.

Adults, who have had more time to get bored with their surroundings than children, are more likely to want novelty when going on holiday.  But that doesn’t mean that even adults need to fly abroad every year to visit somewhere they haven’t been before.  The other day, PDB11 and I heard on the radio that the creation of the Pennine Way was inspired by American footpaths such as the Appalachian Trail - even though it’s only one eighth the length, as the Appalachian Trail wouldn’t even fit into Britain.

PDB11 and I had enjoyed reading Bill Bryson’s travel book A Walk in the Woods, describing his attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail with a friend.  Now, PDB11 said, ‘I wouldn’t mind walking the Pennine Way and releasing a copy of A Walk in the Woods along the way.’

So we might try that.  Not all in one go, and after our unsuccessful attempt to walk the White Horse Trail a few years back, we aren’t going to attempt to do more than ten miles a day while carrying packs.  But it sounds like the sort of holiday which would be a lot more comfortable than hiking the Appalachian Trail, but also a lot more interesting than sitting on a beach on Ibiza.