What I did on my holidays

Sitting here now typing this the whole Mexico holiday thing seems like a distant dream. It’s quite scary how quickly and easily real life takes over on returning – by the time I got to work on Friday it was as if it had happened to somebody else. Friday was a day of breathtaking dullness, punctuated intermittently by yet another colleague happening by to see if me and the Other Half had got engaged while we were away (as an office romance we appear to be public property as far as the progress of our relationship goes). Ten different people checked out my left hand, winked and said “ooh, no proposal then”, including my boss. I wouldn’t mind, but a) both of us are still married to other people (me and the Other Half that is, me and my boss also are but his marital status really isn’t so important to me. He’s short and balding but pretends he isn’t either, and laughs VERY LOUDLY at least three times a day in order that people are awed by his full and frankly wacky life, although it generally simply causes people to look up briefly from their desks, mutter “wanker” darkly to themselves and carry on surfing the jobs pages) and b) if it keeps up the Other Half may well suspect that I’ve been sobbing into my pillow every night at the complete absence of a ring from Elizabeth Duke and a heartfelt invitation to wash his pants and have perfunctory sex on a Wednesday night for the rest of my life. Not that I have anything against marriage proposals of course. I mean, in principle, I’m sure being taken out for dinner in a classy yet popular restaurant during the busy evening period, accepting a massive square-cut solitaire after a moving assurance that the rest of my life will pass in a blur of adoration and expensive shoes, and being toasted in vintage Veuve-Cliquot while other diners sigh enviously and wish they were me is a lovely lovely thing – I’d just prefer not to finish the evening with the sentence “I suppose I’ll have to tell my husband then”.

Anyway, hollybobs. For a couple of bitter old bitches like me and the Other Half it was an absolute peach of a holiday. We spent a fortnight in complete luxury, openly laughing at other people’s shortcomings. Marvellous. We completely alienated every other British person there (thankfully only a few, but relentlessly set on befriending anyone with an accent east of New York) by variously running away whenever we saw them, being curt to the point of downright bloody rude if approached, and having endless noisy sex for a whole fortnight (if the couple from room 1904 weren’t such miserable fuckers I’d be apologising at this point but frankly they deserved it). We had to endure an hour and a half minibus ride into Cancun (think Blackpool on a Friday night only less classy) with these people, for an evening excursion to the “rep show” which was so excruciatingly bad that I can’t bring myself to describe it any more deeply than two salient facts – the Other Half will no longer be able to look at Tina Turner without shuddering, and they had to give an old man from the audience a pink wig and let him join in so that he didn’t kill us all and then celebrate by killing us all again. Apart from all the whining middle aged people (more of them in a minute) there was a young couple who were so utterly bereft of personality or backbone that it made me want to bring back National Service, and I'm a proper hippy. The girl was so thick that when we passed a restaurant called Bubba Gump’s Shrimp Shack she was convinced that it had been there for years and was the inspiration for and therefore written into the film rather than a being a gimmicky restaurant which came off the back of the film. Her main argument was that “there were lots of real-life things in that film, weren’t there?”. Give me strength. Our least favourite couple were a particularly unpleasant husband and wife combo – he was the sweatiest man I’ve ever encountered, and she had a voice that made you want to clutch your head and make a high-pitched keening noise until it stopped. The husband was one of those people who at the slightest provocation will make a very unfunny remark and mug, wink and leer at anyone in the vicinity in order to involve them. He almost came with delight when the baggage carousel broke down at the airport on the way home, but by then most people were wise to him and simply looked the other way. He did get stung for excess baggage at Cancun airport, probably due to the sheer volume of hotel property they’d stolen (he was mopping his sweaty neck with a nicked towel all the way from the hotel to the airport), which pleased us immeasurably.

I could spout on and on and on for hours, maybe even days about how many horrifically dressed Americans we saw, but anyone who’s ever been anywhere that Americans go on holiday will be fully appraised of that already. The girth of their waistbands was matched only by the height of their hair (and that was just the men. Oho. I thank you), and they all, male and female, had spectacularly horrible shoes. There’s so much more to tell, so I think I’m going to have to do this in instalments. Ooh, it’s worse than a slide show, isn’t it.

And I didn’t even have to look at a dolphin, let alone fondle one. Hurrah for overpriced excursions……