Aquatic mammals and open wounds

The tickets arrived this morning for hollybobs - just over two weeks and the Other Half and myself will be jetting off to Mexico for a fortnight of cocktails, beer and, well, cocktails. Our resort is on the Caribbean coast (I know that as it was the subject of a particularly vicious argument yesterday....well, I said it was the Caribbean, he said it wasn't, I said it was, he said it wasn't, he later apologised and I was vindicated - and that's the closest we've come yet to having a proper row. I know, we're sickening), and there's plenty of opportunity for snorkelling, lazing around, and, regrettably, swimming with dolphins. We saw the dolphin excursion in the brochure, and the Other Half immediately went "ooh" a lot and said he'd always wanted to do that. Since I'm dragging him off for a day to look at the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza I thought it would be the decent thing to do for me to accompany him on his excursion of choice. Between you and me though, the thought of swimming with dolphins leaves me a bit cold - I know everyone sees it as some magical life-affirming experience, and that dolphins are revered by the sort of people who wear t-shirts with wolves on them and have dreamcatchers on their rear view mirrors (are these people really sleeping at the wheel? What on earth is the point of having a dreamcatcher in your car???), but as far as I can make out they're really just big rubbery things that in all probability smell of fish. And given my irrational fear of pretty much every animal on the planet, I'm fairly sure that the whole thing is going to freak me out. I looked at the website relating to the dolphin encounter in Cancun, and it was frankly quite creepy. Much was made of the fact that I might get to kiss a dolphin - I'm not entirely convinced that I want to be in the same body of water as one, much less kiss it. Why on earth would I want to kiss it??! The website also used the word "caressing" as in "you will have the opportunity to caress the dolpins as they swim around you". At this point I began to wonder whether I'd in fact stumbled across an, ahem, specialist website - I mean, isn't it inherently wrong to actually invite people to caress animals? Apparently there's also the chance to "cradle the dolphin in your arms". Well, count me out. I have visions of a group of us standing around in waist-deep water, awkwardly holding a dolphin each and wondering how long it is before we can put it down again. No thanks. Factor in every girl's nightmare of potentially having to wedge myself into a wetsuit, and I'm thinking of taking a note from my mum excusing me from swimming with dolphins as it's just plain wrong. I may be wrong and it may change my life in an as-yet undefinable but deeply spritual way. I might become an altogether more serene, loving person who's at one with the universe. But I really don't see how lurching about in a glorified swimming pool with creatures who eat mackerel for fun is going to do that for me. Urgh.

Am now off to have a lovely hot bath as I was very drunk indeed last night and fell up the kerb on the way home, landing ingloriously on my face. How impossibly glamorous. I have a very bruised hand, sore knees and a lovely scab on my lip that a friend thought was a cold sore. When I told the Other Half he suggested that I tell people that that's what it is. Of course - it's so much better say I have herpes than to simply explain that I had too much beer and therefore too many feet to control comfortably.

Bless him.