I am currently away for Christmas with extended family and family friends in a very nice part of southern Europe.
It is lovely here, but I’m thoroughly fed up with the endless comparison to the UK. We all come from a smallish town in the midlands and if we see something nice here it is immediately ‘yes that’s lovely. Not like the shit hole we live in’. We see a palace and it’s ’you wouldn't see that in our town centre, would you?’ Well clearly fucking not because we live in a old fishing town not in the middle of London.
Then we’ll go to a nice restaurant and it’s ’no point in opening a Michelin restaurant where we live, it’s too deprived’. Or walking back to the hotel it’s ’at home you’d be watching chavs vomiting in the streets, not like these lovely clean streets’.
It is so wearing. I defend the UK and I’m told they’re joking and not to take it so seriously but it is endless.
Various mentions of the ‘lower class’ people at home too. It is driving me mad. Why are people so obsessed with doing the UK down? I know it has got its problems, but it is not that different from other European countries which also have their prosperous and struggling areas.
Not sure it matters but these are left leaning people too, not people desperate to criticise the country as a way of voicing political criticism.