I am at my most xenophobic, snobbish and judgmental at self-service breakfasts in foreign hotels. The rude woman who elbows in to seize the last sausages — well, not only must she be German, but also an avatar of all that is ghastly about the German people. And that awful man with the Inger-land tattoo on his leg — well, look at the way he loads up his plate! How greedy, how common. I’m embarrassed to be the same nationality.
It’s a relief to know after reading Lucy Lethbridge’s history of tourism that holidays have always been an opportunity to vent our prejudices and snobberies. As she writes: “There is nothing so undesirable for the high-minded traveller as the sight of his or her own countrymen and women following their guidebooks along the same path.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge was furious that after the ravages of the Napoleonic wars “peace had set John Bull a-gadding”. In 1818 he bemoaned all these “excursionists”, vulgar people traveling “with leaky purse and open mouth”. Shudder.
