Читать книгу Crap Days Out - Gareth Rubin - Страница 5

There’s no getting around the fact: we are a nation who love a rubbish day out.

Other countries might be content to spend their holidays relaxing in the sun with friends and family, but we in Great Britain know that the only way to spend one of our rare bank holidays is to get up early and spend half the day driving to a tourist attraction that is worse than even our most cautious expectations.

So from childhood we are raised to expect the dire. With every trip to Stonehenge, Madame Tussauds or the York Quilt Museum our parents were saying: ‘Son, this is what your weekends are going to be like from now on – just a bit crap. So don’t get your hopes up.’

But we don’t learn – because we don’t want to. In adult life we dutifully keep up the tradition of inflicting painful days out on ourselves. From getting naked on our freezing beaches to visiting museums entirely about pencils, we seek them out like truffles in the soil. Maybe it’s just part of our culture, maybe we do it so we look forward to going back to work on Monday – but for whatever reason, rubbish days out are part of who we are.

So the sites and attractions in this book are the ones you will be going to whether you like it or not. And you might as well go into it with your eyes open – after all, forewarned is forearmed. Join us.