Lurking ‘Euro-menace’ waits to ruin your summer holiday

Date: 18/07/1996

IT is holiday time and for Euro-folk like you and me that means it is time to go under cover, incognito, inflagrante de disguiso, if we are not to be disturbed by the menace now plaguing holiday resorts the length and breadth of what we persist in calling the European Union.

The menace I am referring to does not call it the European Union. It calls it the Common Market. You and I might think the terminology outdated, but the menace does not like change. It is not impressed by clever dissertations on the evolution of the latest acronym.

Folk know what they know and they know this thing, this EU, latterly EC, formerly EEC, is fancy talk for the Common Market. It is a generic term, not a technical description.

In a nutshell it means 'That Lot in Brussels', the 'Big- Car-Fat-Cigar Brigade'.

So watch out for the menace wherever you go this summer. You may be up hill or down dale, beach-side or riverside, you may be skulking in the remotest depths of the farthest-flung 'special protection area' as designated by the European Birds Directive, quietly studying the mid-summer habits of the Purple-Crested Great Tit, but you can never ever be sure that the purple-anoraked great tit (no relation) is not lurking just around the next corner.

You can spot this menace by its ruddy complexion, its well-thumbed map of local attractions and its pot belly. It can be male or female, of indeterminate age, and it can destroy the will to live.

Let me emphasise that, in normal circumstances, the menace is completely harmless. But these are not normal circumstances. These are holidays and your guard will be down.

When you are gently dozing in the midday sun beside the hotel pool, with nothing on your mind but the application of a little more factor 75 to keep the beetroot tan under control, the menace on the next sunbed will strike.

You won't even notice. It will suddenly say, quite mildly: “And what do you do for a living then?” You now have just milli-seconds to save yourself, but you won't. Before you can say Jack Santer, your truthful response is out and your holiday neighbour will have you pinned down, with no exit.

The menace might be that lump of lard on the next bit of beach, or the mountain walker sipping a drink at the next café table, or the quiet type who has joined the same brass rubbing course. You will not know until it is too late.

“And what do you do for a living then?” it repeats, nudging you awake.

“I write about the Common Market,” I used to reply with a big cheery grin in the days when such a reference was a cast-iron guarantee of holiday peace. People would go glassy-eyed. Conversation dried up before it began. Beach umbrellas collapsed in upon themselves spontaneously. The sun went behind a big cloud.

There was always the odd character who would say “Oooh, that must be interesting”, but I would go for the jugular, cut them off before they got too chatty, hit them smack between the eyes with a few well-placed CAPs and ERMs and GRPs - the latter being a kind of glass-fibre compound, but nobody knows the difference.

It worked so well one year that a bloke I bumped into and verbally exchanged jobs with came up to me again the next day and said: “Excuse me. My wife is having terrible trouble sleeping because of this awful heat. Would you mind popping round to our apartment tonight at about ten-ish and telling her again what it is you do for a living?” But the days when the Common Market could guarantee holiday peace and seclusion - and cure insomnia - are long gone.

Call it what you like. Whatever name you attach to it, the Common Market is beginning to bite people on the bum. After years as a remote, abstract creation, it is impinging on people's daily lives.

And if you reveal that you work for it, or near it, your holiday is finished.

The menace has you in its grasp. Its chin juts out. It clenches its fists. It puts down its holiday reading matter, it draws in planet-fulls of breath. And it begins.

It can be a dentist, a shopkeeper, a car mechanic. Most likely, it will be a small and medium-sized enterprise in a shell suit with a string of grievances to air.

“Forty-eight hour working week? What am I supposed to do with 48 hours? Who do these people think they are. Got to work 100 hours a day just to break even, mate, and that will only get worse once we have got a single currency run by the Germans.

“And as for red tape! Don't talk to me about red tape. Of course, I blame the Common Market. People with their funny ways. Tell me this, if you are so clever. You work in the European Whatsit. How come my boy is not allowed to do a paper round?

“What happened to the enterprise culture eh? Tell me that if you can. Where is the encouragement? All we get are rules and regulations. Why can't we call Yorkshire pudding Yorkshire pudding, eh? What is going on? Just because it has not got garlic in it!

“And if you know all about it, why have I got to feed my dog after 8am and before 9pm under some new-fangled directive, and no wonder the price of beer is what it is. I blame the single currency - or I will when it is introduced...”

If the food is off, it is because of EU hygiene rules; if I cannot get ice in my drink, it is because of EU laws on Coca Cola displacement per glass; if the restaurant is full, it is because of EU laws restricting the number of tables per establishment.

Hence the need for a disguise.

When a stranger asks what you do for a living, say you are a bingo caller, a bouncer, a barrister. Say anything, but don't tell the menace that you have any connection whatsoever with you know where.

If anyone asks, you have never heard of the European Union. You have never touched it, been to it, talked to it, eaten it or even met anyone who possibly knew someone whose dad once thought briefly about it.

Got that? Good.

Have an EU-free holiday. Just stay on your guard.