Afternoon:
10°c
Sorry, kids - it's France on the cheap this year
Jonathan Prynn, Consumer Business Editor17 Jul 2009
To quote Alice Cooper: school's out for summer. At 3.30 or, in the case of my sons' Hammersmith primary, 2.30 this afternoon, the little rascals will pour by their thousands from the school gates of London, not to darken them again until the second week of September. It is a memorably blissful moment for the children but one of foreboding for the parents.
The free six-hour-a-day child care is over for seven weeks. The state is taking its annual break.
Although for the private schools, of course, summer's already arrived: they have been down in Cornwall trashing Rock for several weeks now. I could never understand the apparent principle in education that the more you pay, the less you seem to get.
As well as the normal summer holiday worries - how many hours a day can you legitimately let them watch daytime TV before social workers start sniffing around, that sort of thing - there is a new anxiety this year. Let's call it euro-shock.
Since the fanfare of the euro's launch in 1999 it has wavered helpfully between 1.40 and 1.50 to the pound.
So on holiday in France, Spain, Italy or any of the other euro-zone countries you could knock off around a third from the euro price to convert to pounds.
To take my standard unit of value - the café lunch for four with wine - a typical �50 bill converted to between £35 and £40.
But over the winter's financial crisis the pound became the global currency pariah. It lost between a quarter and a third of its value on the foreign exchanges (40 per cent against the yen, just as well few of us are holidaying in Nagasaki) although a little of that ground has now been made up.
Even so, after commission and other costs, the tourist pound is still pathetically close to parity with the mighty euro.
That same lunch, with a little inflation and kids' bigger appetites (do they have to eat so much?) thrown in will probably cost �55 this summer.
So that will leave very little change out of £50 once the credit-card bill has arrived, thank you very much.
Multiply that over the two weeks and you are looking at hundreds of extra pounds. Even in the cheaper euro-zone countries - Greece, for example - the cost of living will feel much closer to home this summer.
So far I'm not picking up much sympathy for this whinge. Nobody's forcing us to dash across the Channel. Why not follow Gordon Brown's example and take a summer break in Britain? Well, several reasons.
One, the British. I love them but, boy, it's nice to have some distance every now and then. Second, the crowds. There are too many of us at the best of times.
If we're all staying at home this year, as the experts predict, I may as well just park my car on the M4 now and have done with it. And I haven't even got on to the weather.
Oh, and yes, we've got a holiday home in Normandy. Perhaps I should have mentioned that.
So 2009 may be remembered as the summer of austerity. Not in a grinding post-war Sir Stafford Cripps kind of way, of course.
Our sacrifices are less onerous these days. But if the boys start asking for Magnums on the beach this summer, they can forget it.
Not at �2.50 a go. Sorry, lads, but it's mini-milks all round this year. Get over it.
Flee to the Shires, repent at leisure...
There's no one smugger than the ex-Londoner. You know the type, exchanged the Brixton studio for the Hampshire rectory and, boy, do they bang on about it.
The faux rural celebrities, the Kate Winslets and Elizabeth Hurleys of this world, are the worst.
So I was delighted to learn this week that the annual exodus of families from the Smoke to Shires has slowed to a trickle in the credit crunch.
Don't get me wrong, I think the countryside's a lovely idea, and gorgeous to look at. But no one can seriously want to live there.
We confirmed Londoners (and, by the way, I was born in Devon) see the great move out as an admission of failure, that you ain't quite going to make it. My advice? If you are still thinking about it, do the Dick Whittington thing and turn again.
Is Terry set on being the new Ronaldo?
John Terry's agonised struggle over whether to sell his all-time hero status for an extra £80,000 a week at Manchester City is an object lesson in reputational self-destruction.
He is in danger of descending in status from Chelsea's Ryan Giggs to its Ronaldo.
In the modern era, genuine one-club career footballers are rare and revered. Those who allow their agents to use negotiation by tabloid to play off one employer against another are all too common.
Chelsea, for all their faults, have been good to Terry, a rough-edged East End lad who got in enough scrapes early in his career to justify being dumped in the “more trouble than he's worth” category.
Now, as captain of his country with a trophy cabinet full of silverware, he has achieved more than only a handful of players in the history of the English game.
That, and £6 million a year, should be enough.
• I still think there is something odd about this recession.
Sure, times are tough for those out of work, although 0.5 per cent interest rates have taken the sting out of it for many homeowners.
Returning home from the West End the other night at 2am - not a frequent occurrence - I stopped at the bus stop for my normal 94 bus home to Hammersmith.
Twice the bus turned up and twice I was turned away because it was full. That hardly ever happens to me, even in the morning peak.
If staying in really is the new going out, London is not listening.
