The dark side of summer | Michael Moran Aug 5th 2013, 02:56
Some sit at Nigella and Charles’ table, others take a trip to Auschwitz. But misery tourism is never a good look
It’s the time of year when those of us that can afford to tend to take a holiday. I’m just back from mine. Frankly I can’t bear them, and long to get back in the urban swim, to roll around in the fox-muck of news and social media in the manner of my personal lifestyle guru Fenton the dog.
One of the first links I found on my return, however, was so preposterous I had to do something online news readers have to do worryingly often these days: check a few sources to be sure that I, or the tabloid news site I was reading, hadn’t been taken in by a spoof.
Apparently customers have been thronging Scott’s restaurant in Mayfair, desperate to sit at Nigella Lawson and Charles Saatchi’s favourite table, scene of the famous argument. The possibility remains that it’s a cruel scam dreamed up by the restaurant’s PR team. But it is depressingly plausible.
A few days before I’d dragged my ostentatiously bored daughter around Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. It’s a tourist attraction because Queen Victoria used to stay there sometimes. It’s peculiar enough to tour someone else’s holiday home. But as we commoners solemnly shuffled past the velvet rope that separates riff-raff from things the royal behind might once have rested on, I caught my wife’s eye. A thought flashed between us: “Why are we woolly liberals worshipping relics of a woman who benefited from the oppression of around half the people on Earth?”
The operation of the British empire was sustained through a mixture of indentured labour and unapologetic military might. Why were we encouraging our daughter to look in admiration at the things that this unscrupulousness had bought?
We are not alone, it seems. Misery tourism, whether conscious or unwitting, is all around. Torture chambers, prisons and massacre sites are all tourist attractions these days.
Pol Pot’s killing fields have been preserved by the Cambodian authorities for the edification of curious holidaymakers. The standard Auschwitz tour – now, unbelievably, a favourite of stag groups visiting nearby Krakow – includes trips to the Schindler factory where slave-workers toiled to fuel the Nazi war machine that was intent on killing them. From Fred and Rose West onwards, the houses of grisly killers are more often than not demolished, to pre-empt the macabre tourism that would otherwise follow. Even art galleries, which should be a joyous celebration of mankind’s creativity, too often have us shambling past gloomy roped-off portraits of popes and tyrants, with only Guernica or the occasional Saint Sebastian to lighten the collective mood.
What makes us seek out a cheap holiday in other people’s misery? Or, as in my case, a mid-priced holiday in the product of other people’s misery? An unthinking worship of fame perhaps – regardless of its origin? Or a Calvinist reflex that dictates time off should be filled with some kind of (preferably unpleasant) education, rather than honest slacking?
It seems critical thinking takes a holiday too. As long as we’re having fun, being distracted, provided with material to fill our facebook and instagram feeds, we’re able to hive off the challenge to our principles. It’s a useful skill if we ever need to marvel at a carefully preserved Unity Mitford ballgown.
I don’t blame the National Trust or English Heritage for the way we blandly consume historical privilege. I don’t blame the Polish or Cambodian tourist boards for “dark” tourism. It’s impossible to decouple the interesting bits of history from our shared legacy of brutality.
But we need to keep in mind the stories behind our visitor attractions. And our restaurant tables. Time spent away from work shouldn’t be a complete holiday from thinking as well.
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