Before we ditch the EU, can we please remember what travel used to be like?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/05/european-travel-before-the-eu-freed-us

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The spontaneous European citybreak is such a joyous and completely routine thing now that I wonder if we’ve forgotten how things were before the European Union set us and our rolling luggage free. Talk of Britain leaving Europe is now so socially acceptable that we really do need a reminder of how, for all its flaws, the EU has made our lives richer in unquantifiable ways.

Of course it was always possible to nip to Lisbon for the weekend, the anti-voices argue. Yes, except we didn’t. You needed a lot more money before EU competition rulings broke the stranglehold of the monopoly air carriers. And somehow it used to feel more culturally daunting before the lower prices got everyone else doing it.

Planning a trip to Barcelona the other day, I blew the dust off a quaint artefact from my bookshelf: a Rough Guide, just out of nostalgia. Pondering the question of getting there on a budget, it suggests booking a charter flight by looking up “listings magazines or local evening papers”. You could, it suggests, as if it might be quite daring, try a “no-frills” airline. But then, a warning: “These tickets can only be bought over the phone.”

We must have had a lot of time on our hands back then. When we weren’t attempting to get through to something called Debonair on our landlines, we were having to “stay a Saturday night” (what was that all about?) to qualify for an Apex London-Barcelona return at the thrillingly “reduced” fare of £270. In today’s money that would be £414. And that prehistoric era isn’t really all that long ago. My Rough Guide dates from 1999.

Diplomacy: no piece of cake

In other matters of retro Europe, black forest gateau topped an Observer list of 20 of the best ever chocolate recipes this week. I have a confession. I once attempted to introduce this monstrosity to France – and worse, to pass it off as Irish.

I was studying French, and employed by a family with almost as many children as the Von Trapps. Their terrifying mother insisted I serve up an “Irish dish” for dinner. But my country in the 1980s had little by way of distinctive cuisine beyond Tayto crisps. So my sister, ingeniously, sent me a recipe for BFG.

Sourcing those famous Irish ingredients – morello cherries and kirsch, and then locating the right kind of whisk for the cream – was bad enough. But the result was such a triumph that Madame asked me to scale up le gâteau irlandais for a formal dinner party. And that is when national pride and my own credibility were busted: the guests included a stern Tyrolean aristocrat (think the baroness in The Sound of Music) who unmasked me as a fraud. This dessert, she told the appalled guests, is entirely German. The European project still had some way to go.

Fashion fatigue

Ah, Barcelona. You soak up the modernist architecture, Gaudì, Picasso, Miró, the cathedral. And then you find yourself on the Passeig de Gràcia, drifting into one of the biggest branches of Zara in Spain: European fast-fashion heaven. But soon you are in hell: the subterranean changing rooms. David Cameron was mocked when he told a women’s magazine the other day how he shops. “I’m put in a changing room and clothes are passed to me under the door,” he said. But that’s exactly what is needed on the high street. Women all over Europe would rejoice if promised a regulation on changing rooms. Can’t Cameron include such things in his red lines? The debate would be over instantly.

@ButlerKatherine