We'd all be better off staying at home

Published in the Evening Standard

Ah, Easter is upon us, the season of chocolate eggs, a long weekend and Jesus films on the telly. I'm not a Christian, and yet this has always been one of my favourite times of year. Nice Jewish boys are not meant to feel this way: indeed, the veteran Jewish politician, Greville Janner, used to joke that the mere word 'Easter' was enough to induce a migraine. (Janner was thinking of those Fiddler on the Roof days when commemorations of Christ's crucifixion had an unfortunate tendency to turn into pogroms against the Jews).

But for me, Easter is something to look forward to. It coincides with the Jewish festival of Passover, which I love, and heralds in earnest the arrival of spring. (Besides, you don't have to be a Christian to find the Easter story - whether told in church or in a re-run of Jesus of Nazareth - pretty compelling.)

Yet many Londoners are about to miss it. They could be on their way to Heathrow this very moment, ready to hop on a plane for a few days away from it all. I don't envy them one bit.

For one thing, they could well be about to become a statistic. Figures released yesterday showed that getting off a plane to find your bags have taken a journey of their own is not a freak accident, but a regular occurrence. The Air Transport Users Council found that last year 5.6 m bags went awry from flights run by the 24 major carriers operating in Europe. Top, or rather bottom, of the league was the self-styled world's favourite airline, with British Airways admitting that 23 bags went missing for every 1000 BA passengers.

It happened to me in January, at the start of a family holiday to Cape Town. After 12 sleepless hours, I watched, pale and red-eyed, as the carousel revolved emptily: when you're the last one left at baggage reclaim, and the same lonely cardboard box is all that's on offer, you know the curse has struck. What followed was 24 sticky hours wearing clothes you never wanted to see again, let alone wear. But the bags reappeared the next afternoon without too much trouble. Others have much worse stories to tell, of cases that never resurface, of meagre compensation payments, of honeymoons ruined by baggage that appears at the end of a holiday, too late.

Even without luggage separation anxiety, the notion of flying at a peak time like Easter fills me with dread. The sweat, the congestion, the delays: you need a holiday to get over the holiday. And by the time you've recovered from the ordeal of getting there, it's time to turn around and head back.

Enthusiastic flyers will laugh all this off. A few hours of logistics and then you're in Prague or Tangier. What could be more wonderful?

That's hard to dispute; the jet plane is indeed one of the great advances of human civilisation, enabling people to see places and cultures that would have remained forever out of reach. Having flown my family to Africa this winter, I'd be the last to denounce all air travel.

But, as in so much else, it's the degree that counts. An annual foreign holiday has come to seem like a basic requirement for many Londoners - even if our grandparents would have regarded it as the height of luxury - and few would want to eliminate that pleasure. But such trips will only account for a small portion of the air traffic taking off this weekend. The rest will be holidays for frequent fliers, who now see an aeroplane the way the rest of us see a bus or train. Think of the poster campaign for lastminute.com, urging consumers to 'Get your 5 a Year' , as if five annual trips to the likes of Phuket, Morocco and Sardinia were an essential staple of healthy living.

In fact, that's a habit the planet simply cannot sustain. The carbon emissions from flying are of a quantity and quality that puts them in a different, more stubborn category from almost anything else. The environmentalist George Monbiot estimates that on a return flight from London to New York, every passenger produces roughly 1.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide: the very quantity we would be allowed to emit over an entire year, were we to make the overall cut in emissions necessary to save the earth from catastrophic climate change. What's more, because aeroplanes release all kinds of gases and particles, flying is estimated to have a warming effect 2.7 times that of the carbon dioxide alone. Monbiot's grim conclusion is that "aviation's contribution to global warming must be reduced in the UK by some 87% if we are to avoid a 2C rise in global temperatures." In other words, lastminute's 5 a year is positively damaging to our global health.

If that all sounds a bit killjoy-ish, there are other arguments for avoiding Heathrow and Gatwick. Just ask those jetting off to Milan or Mauritius whether they've ever been to Inverness or the Brecon Beacons or St Ives. Often, we're so busy looking out to the world, we forget the treasures in our own back yard. That's especially true in London, where our new, and cherished, position as the global capital can make us gaze outward, missing the treats closer to home. There's a risk that our international status will increasingly detach London from the rest of Britain: by holidaying in this country now and then, we can make sure we stay connected.

New technology could help. This week the French TGV triumphantly set a rail record, bulleting between Strasbourg and Paris at a stunning 357.2 mph. (Remember that the InterCity 125 was proud to do, er, 125 mph). If we had one of those here, we could get from Kings Cross to Edinburgh in 64 minutes. Suddenly we could reach the furthest corners of the British Isles in a jiffy.

In the meantime, an Easter trip to Wales or the West country can mean hours stuck in traffic jams (a seasonal tradition in its own right). But my answer to that is not to get out my passport and fly. No, I'm going to spend this weekend in the greatest city on earth: I'm staying right here.

Posted on April 5, 2007 11:33 AM

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