About this time every year insurance providers go public with alarming reports of countless woefully underprepared Brits launching themselves recklessly onto the hazard-strewn roads of Continental Europe.
Sure enough, here comes alcohol addiction support group AA (who apparently do insurance as well) with the shock revelation that as many as 3.6 million carloads of Brits will spurn the staycationary delights of Bournemouth, Blackpool, Bangor, Brighton et al. to ponce around in Euroland.
Quite clearly, such behaviour not only smacks of rank disloyalty to the motherland, but is also insanely dangerous – as foreign roads are notoriously hostile and dangerous places. The important thing is to buy lots of insurance and, ideally, to buy it through a trustworthy brand like AA.
Even before issuing their press release, AA were already reporting a huge surge in applications for special European Breakdown Cover, with as many as one in ten drivers planning to take their cars to Europe this summer. Some of these drivers, AA reveals, plan to travel by submarine tunnel (45%), while some (the vast majority of the rest, presumably) intend to take the ferry.
Bizarrely, a quarter of Eurocationing drivers said they thought is was worth paying extra for “the experience” of travelling by ferry, something they could easily replicate by heading down the local bingo hall and spinning around ’til they puke.
Perhaps it’s some peculiarly British penchant for maritime masochism that inspires this blind devotion to sea transport (however fleeting the “experience” may be), as 32% of those surveyed by AA insisted that a ferry trip is ‘an important part of a driving holiday’.
AA Foreign Driving head Rosie Sodastream explains that people living in London and the South East are more likely to “venture over the channel” because “France is a lot closer for them”. Mysteriously, people living in Scotland are the least likely to “venture out” of the UK.
By car that is.
If the vote goes that way, people in Scotland may all shortly be venturing outside the UK, leaving UKIP members north of the border with a brand identity crisis of monumental proportions.
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