Budgie-smugglers, apple-catchers … call them what you will, there’s no doubting there are strong cultural ties that bind us to our more extreme swimwear choices.
I spent my first holiday in Spain for years. Andalusia. I’d forgotten what a vast business holidays are here. What Seattle is to computers, Bangladesh is to T-shirts, and Guangzhou is to small plastic toy cars with cartoon drivers, so Spain is to getting your bits burnt. Spain invented tourism. Obviously people had to go places before Spain came up with sea, sun, sex and sangria, but tourists tended to do what it said on the package: they toured. They went to look at things. Tourism was cities and ruins and self-improvement, not snoggery.
It was the Spanish who had the uncharacteristically blue-sky idea of taking the interest out of travel, of removing the place from the destination. At the moment when aeroplanes got to their destinations more often than they disappeared into oceans, and working people thought it was safe enough and cheap enough to go away for a couple of weeks abroad instead of staying in Torquay or Bournemouth, the Spanish realised that the one thing that had been putting most Europeans off being tourists was the touring bit, the self-improvement, the churches and the ruins and the guide with the raised umbrella saying, ‘This way please – we have half an hour to do six centuries of frescoes, so no talking.’ The Spanish brilliantly discerned that what really attracted people was each other. The dons heard a mysterious disembodied voice saying, ‘Build it and they will come.’ (He probably said it in Spanish.)
So they built Malága, and come they did, in their hundreds of thousands. They came because of the sun, and the bit of water, and the cheap wine and the paella, but mostly just for the sun. And the Spanish also realised that if the tourists wanted to go and see something exciting or edifying, then they’d just look at each other. And it turned out that most people would far rather look at each other than some old statue without arms. And to those who pointed out that they could have stayed home and looked at each other on the bus, the answer was plain: not in this colour, and certainly not wearing that. Where else could you see that particular swatch of human colouring range from deep-flayed puce to wizened-sideboard teak, and wearing such spectacular attention-seeking clobber?
It is no accident that both the British and the Germans so often find themselves rubbing peeling shoulders as guests of the incredulous Spanish. The Poms and the Krauts are the two most dowdy dressers at home, but when it comes to packing for the summer, then some pantomime switch is flicked on in their heads, some exhibitionist pheromone perhaps contained in suntan cream. The astonishing ability to throw caution, taste, sense and decorum to the breeze is particularly strong in both the Germans and the British.
It has always been a matter of mutually fond embarrassment, but now something has happened on the beaches and lidos and swimming pools of Europe, and of course it’s been precipitated by the French, who are people who wear more casual clothes on holiday than they do formal ones at funerals. Nobody looks quite as uncomfortably creased, polished and preened as a French man trying to look relaxed. A French woman has just been turned away from the municipal swimming pool dressed in what they’re calling a burqini, which is essentially all her clothes and a headscarf. This is the accepted sharia outfit for mixed bathing. The pool guard turned her away for being unhygienic, a swimming hazard, unfavourable and a fashion disaster. At the same time, it transpires that it is illegal in France for men to approach swimming pools unless they’re wearing Speedos. The shorts that most of us wear are apparently unhygienic. In response, an English holiday camp has banned Speedos. Europe is now bristling and pouting and posing its particular pet intolerances about what you should wear to go swimming.
A tracksuit with three headscarves is a bit of a red herring, or perhaps a shoal of kippers. If you’re that modest, most women don’t want to swim with men at all. The Speedo thing, though, is interesting. The bits of Europe where they’re still popular generally coincide with places that still elect Communist mayors, where the most popular occupation for women is either housewife or prostitute, and where the local drink is made out of distilled plums or potatoes. So very tight budgie-smugglers, as I think the Australians call them, being the home of budgies, or apple-catchers, as they’re known in England, are generally popular all the way down the Black Sea, on the right-hand side of the Adriatic, and on the south side of the Baltic. So it’s Ukranians, Serbs, Romanians and Bulgarians, and very, very small costumes are very, very big in Albania and in Hungarian spas. Germans, of course, adore them and always have. They wear them wherever possible. The Brits, the Italians and of course the Americans wouldn’t be seen dead in nylon girl pants. As far as I remember, Australia is pretty much split down the middle. A lot of them wear very baggy board shorts, but there’s also quite a lot of muscle Marys in lifeguard-style tanga.
The point of this argument in Europe is, like most arguments in Europe, not about what it says it’s about. It isn’t about swimming trunks. It’s about comparing versions of liberal intolerance. So the French banned women in burqinis because it’s an insult to women. Muslims complain it’s intolerant of faith. The Brits banned budgie-smugglers because they’re offensive to women and children. Very brown Polish men say it’s an infringement of their right to wear whatever they like. And actually we’re having this row because we’re so fed up with and frightened about having to argue about the things that really matter, like unemployment and house repossessions.
What no one has yet asked is: what’s worse in Speedos? A very little one, or a very big one? I mean, if your budgie-smugglers contain, say, a day-old chick or a cockatoo, which is worse?
What’s also interesting about Europe at the moment is that naturism is declining. Its particular sexless, healthy and rather dull image of hiking and caravans and woodland clearings is disappearing under a new Puritanism and the fear of paedophilia and sexual impropriety. The French, also, contrarily, have given up going topless on the beach. Again, this Bardot-esque symbol of equality and freedom has been usurped by so many plastic breasts and Ukranian students on the Riviera. It’s been a weirdly Calvinist summer here. Europe’s existential chickens have come home to roost. Or perhaps that’s budgies, or maybe cockatoos, or kookaburras, and the occasional albatross.