From Torquay to toreadors by Bill Kay

I've just been listening to a podcast of the latest in a long-running BBC radio show, Excess Baggage, about the origin and growth of travel guides, which got me thinking about my own journey.
Travel guides began in the early 19th century when mass leisure travel began thanks to the provision of commercial sea-going services from Britain to the Continent, and later the advent of the railways. Of course such ventures were only for the rich but, in comparison to the aristocrats doing their obligatory tour of Europe's capitals, money and therefore saving money were becoming a factor in travel plans. The guide books offered to replace human guides at far less cost, and was therefore an element in the great expansion of travel purely for the fun of it.
It occurred to me as I listened to this that I had undergone a similar expansion of my personal horizon. For the first 12 years of my life I never left Britain. Holidays took place either on the sunny south coast, where there are many seaside resorts from Brighton to Torquay, or up to Scotland to visit my family. Even these were quite ambitious projects at a time when many Londoners didn't get much beyond the nearby areas of Kent, Essex or East Anglia.
And then we went to Switzerland. That is virtually unthinkable now, with the British pound fetching only 1.64 Swiss francs. Back then, though, a pound was worth 12 francs. I suppose the early package holiday firms thought they had to offer something different from a beach holiday, though it was the Mediterranean beach holiday that eventually captured the big business because of its combination of sun, sand and cheap booze.
My mother was always keen on getting one over on her family, so bragging about a trip to Switzerland must have been right up her street. The first I knew about it was the brochures arriving in our flat, and finally settling on two weeks in Interlaken, a tiny village in the mountains and, as its name suggests, between two lakes.
We didn't fly, that would have been far too extravagant. It was a train from London to Dover, ferry across the English Channel, and then night train across France to Switzerland. I remember thinking sniffily that these French trains weren't up to much as the lower-class sleeping compartments had six bunks instead of the four then customary in Britain.
But at the age of 13 I did things on that trip that I rarely, if ever, did again. Pleasure trips across the lakes. A train up the 13,600-foot Jungfraujoch mountain in the Bernese oberland, still rated Switzerland's most popular railway journey, to an ice palace. A train south to Lake Maggiore in Italy, to be taken round the magical palace of Isola Bella. Somehow my parents let me get my hands on a bottle of Chianti - they couldn't have realised how strong it was, for I drank the lot before weaving off the train at Berne.
We did go back to Scotland on holiday in later years, mainly because mum had found a swanky hotel in the golf resort of St Andrews where my wealthy uncle used to take his family. Otherwise, though, we never holidayed in Britain again.
A couple of years later we joined the trek to the Med - Lloret de Mar on the Costa Brava near Barcelona, where I got such severe sunburn that I was reduced to lying on my front in my room for a few days until the blisters finished cooling my back.
I was becoming interested in journalism then and also in the hotel was a family whose father was Alf Brockman, editor of Parade, a rather shady mag produced by the News of the World. It didn't lead to anything in terms of work, but it was great to talk Fleet Street with a real live editor and he gave up a lot of his holiday to humour me.
The most glamorous trip of that holiday was the coach into Barcelona, either to go sightseeing or to take in the bullfight. I was mesmerised by both, and thoroughly hooked on foreign travel.
Alcohol played a part in that trip, too, not because I drank too much but because the local bodegas had the charming custom of letting you pour as much wine or vodka as you wanted from huge barrels, and then telling the patron at the end of the evening how much you had had. This probably worked well when the customers were locals and everyone knew everyone, but I suspect that quite a few British and German tourists (the majority) soon realised that they could get away with accidently underestimating how much they had consumed. Anyway, when we went back two years later, each barrel was supervised by a member of staff, who took your money drink by drink. Shame.
By that time the tourist industry was in full swing. Hotels were being built as fast as they could clear a plot of land, and some bright entrepreneur had decided to head off the trips to Barcelona by constructing Lloret's own bullring - no atmosphere, second-rate matadors, but who cares? It makes a change from lying on the beach.