My first UK holiday in years showed me what our country has lost

 I recently visited Britain – a bit in England but mainly Wales – for the first time in quite a while.

Having lived in France as The Telegraph’s France destination expert for many years I had a smashing time, thank you. The rain barely bothered me.

This was Wales. What did I expect? Sunstroke? Anyway, the principality looks good, and richly green, in the rain. And there were plenty of pubs in which to dry out. Externally, I mean.

Along the way, though, I noticed a few things which I’d either forgotten about, hadn’t noticed before or had cropped up since my last visit.

Among them were, in no particular order:

The demise of tourist information centres

Turn up in even quite big towns – Carmarthen, Swansea – ask for the tourist office and people look blank.

“It’s all online now,” a council fellow told me. “People look it up before they leave home.”

Not everyone. Not me. For a start, before you leave home, you don’t necessarily know everywhere you’re going to be visiting. And when you get there, do you really want to scroll through the infinite reams of hysterical promo material which constitute most official tourism websites?

Wouldn’t you rather talk to a real person who may address your particular interest without your having to wade through disquisitions on zip lining and activities for single mothers with school-age children?

Or, to put it another way, every town in France has a tourist office, as do many villages, and theirs is the planet’s most visited country. Could it be that this is one thing that the French have got right?

We seem to have lost all our family-run restaurants

Every French town has an abundance. Where are they in Britain? Don’t get me wrong. We ate well – but in pubs and chain restaurants.

The establishments where husband cooks and wife serves (or vice versa) cram by the score into city-centre streets in France. Although we looked, we found precisely none in our 11 days in the UK.

The health-and-safety obsession has gone into overdrive

“Welcome. Table for two? Any allergies?” This rang out upon arrival at nearly every restaurant we visited. It may be linked to a sense that Britain spends much of its time protecting everyone against, well, everything.

As if the average Briton were rather daft. (By a breakfast room toaster: “Warning: may get hot”; at traffic lights: “Stop at red light”.)

This assumption that Britons lack both gumption and resilience seemed new to me. Then again, given the epidemic of mobility scooters on city streets – I saw more in a week in the UK than in a decade in France – the question perhaps requires further research.

Nobody stays out late

Spending happy moments in a good restaurant which, last time I looked around, was humming with diners. Now it’s 8.45pm, I look around again, and everyone’s gone. Our noisy little party is all that’s left.

Waiters and waitresses are smiling but clearly hanging about, waiting for us to leave. This happened often. Was nightlife always this way? Have all those people really gone home? At this hour?

How do Spanish visitors cope with having to eat dinner before they’ve finished lunch?

Public transport is actually pretty good

“We’re going to travel by train and bus,” I said. “Ha! Good luck with that,” replied a wiseacre British friend. But over 11 days, public transport worked terrifically – frequent, reliable, operated by drivers, especially in Wales, who had clearly taken vows of helpfulness. It got us into small towns and villages which, were they in France, wouldn’t have seen a bus unless that bus were lost.

It meant we got to appreciate the landscape without having to navigate or negotiate a way through, and faced no parking problems. Plus public transport favours encounters.

Such as the three well-dressed young women who polished off two bottles of Prosecco on the mid-morning train from Manchester Piccadilly to Chester. Thus did they tee themselves up nicely for a day at the races. “Talkative” didn’t do them justice.

Slovenly speech has become an epidemic

I do wish that the language fairy might move among my fellow citizens and restore the letter “T” to its proper place (so “lighting”, not “li’ing”; “little”, not “li’el”; “better”, not “beh’er”), and banish entirely “Know what I mean?”, “No worries”, “Enjoy”, and “Mate”. She might also rid us of split infinitives and misuse of words such as “hopefully” and “decimate”.

I bumped into all these in spoken or written English during the stay – though, oddly, less so in Wales. It is, perhaps, more difficult to speak badly with a Welsh lilt. Most of all, I’d like the fairy to disabuse us of the notion that speaking properly is a snobbish affectation.

It isn’t. In France, second-division football players usually express themselves as if they were deputy headmasters. Like everyone else in the country, they wish to be taken for clever, not stupid.

The pubs are a mixed bag

Wetherspoons, 4pm, Tuesday afternoon, Carmarthen – the enormous place is heaving. Heaving. I can barely hear my wife say: “Do we have to stay?” Who are the dozens drinking through the afternoon on a Tuesday?

Might this explain the mobility scooters? Wetherspoons obviously does a fantastic job, but this is not the image I have when, from a foreign field, I imagine a British pub.

Fortunately, the Plume of Feathers (“Wales’s smallest pub” – about the size of our lounge) is nearby, with its memories of Richard Burton and Ray Gravell.

Swansea’s No Sign bar – venerable outpost of wood, wine, Welsh whiskey and warmth amid the mini-Vegas of Swansea’s Wind Street – also fulfils a proper pub function. It lays on a Wednesday night quiz. We took part. I wish to say no more on the subject.