Cheap Holidays in Other People’s Misery: How the inverse of ‘Common People’ is a Brit abroad
This summer, an estimated 58% of young Brits will go on holiday to Europe for the chance to dance and drink and screw. In 2023, with the cost of living crisis apparently decimating our wealth, UK residents took 86.2million trips abroad. However, since the days that the Sex Pistols sang of cheap holidays in other people’s misery, there has been a change in perception among these lucky travellers. Now, the Brits want to dance and drink and screw just like the locals do.
Meanwhile, the locals in question don’t have to merely face up to cockroaches climbing their walls, but the rising tension of neighbouring fascism and wildfires raging towards their homes. It’s not without irony that the devastating, encroaching fires are fuelled, in part, by the travellers themselves as they devour gasoline, hurtling through the air on their way to try and find the least touristy taverna on the Insta guide.
Alas, we can’t be blamed either. For the most part, we come in peace after enduring a winter with an average of eight hours of daylight and working weeks in excess of the median. In fact, in our own minds, we come in peace like never before—wiser and more cultured thanks to the generations of travel that have come before and all the Anthony Bourdain boxsets we’ve sat through. However, if you listen to Pulp’s classic ‘Common People’ while perched in some Croatian canteen, you can’t help but feel a little like the sculpture student.
With the sun on our backs, the local €0.50 beer is suddenly so much better than the ‘expensive stuff back home’. And as you watch a fisherman reclining on the dock, forlorn from having failed to catch his quota, you merely see a weathered fellow sunning himself and remark, ‘That’s living alright’.
There is an intense sense of life dysmorphia to be found amid modern tourism. Croatia, one of the latest indie travel hotspots, has a GDP per capita of $18,570 while the UK’s sits at $46,125. Yet, we leave there thinking their lives are far richer in some deeper sense, never really paying much mind about the proverbial perils of relative poverty sending life sliding out of view, as Jarvis Cocker put it.
Of course, a nation’s GDP is a ridiculous measure of an individual’s quality of life beyond monetary riches, but to put it in a pithy sense, out there in Europe right now, there are more than a few figurative students from Saint Martin’s College, blissfully unaware of ravaging wildfires, rampant national debt, and rising unrest, saying, ‘I wish I lived like this’ while dabbling in a bit of class tourism, sunblind to the plight.
In this regard, the fortunate mass of British folks who get to galavant are pretty much the inverse of Cocker’s ‘Common People’ protagonist, if only for a week. The same song in Bulgaria is simply called, ‘My Fleeting Romance with a Brit’; it’s just that it’s so uncommon for the reverse situation to happen in Blighty, Pulp’s masterpiece became an ingenious way to frame a reconciliation of working class life.
Ironically, the Sex Pistols hinted at this Brits abroad inverse in 1977 with ‘Holidays in the Sun’ which opens with the phrase “a cheap holiday in other people’s misery”, before deviating towards an examination of commie paranoia. The line itself, is actually stolen from famed graffiti daubed onto the streets of Paris by the Situationist movement which read: “Club Med: Cheap holidays in other people’s misery”.
This was in reference to the French holiday organisation Club Med, which had recently opened its latest resort in the colonial reaches of the Caribbean where revolution was landing local lives in turmoil. Nowadays, the average tourist is more well-versed on such matters and doesn’t want to merely spiritually shelter themselves in the walls of the resort. But there are undoubtedly ‘Common People’ corroborations to be found in the living like a local ethos.
As we sip our bafflingly cheap beer in the southern rays and marvel at our own ‘authentic’ experience in a place far less privileged than our horrid home, we might do well to remember that our brief escapes are daily life for the locals, dealing with less sunny realities, devoid of rose-tinted Ray-Bans. We leave with tan lines and memories. The locals remain, facing the roaches on the wall we so easily overlook. It turns out that our fleeting romances with the ‘true heart’ of some chosen foreign land are just as superficial as an aristocrat dreaming of how “cool” it is to be poor—no matter how well-meaning our intentions, it’s worth reconciling that we are, in fact, the “uncommon people” we never thought we’d become.
