Whats the point of going abroad if you're just another tourist carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty miners sons from Kettering and Coventry with their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios complaining about the tea, ooh they dont make it properly here do they - and stopping at endless Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watneys Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in their cotton sunfrocks squirting Timothy Whites sun cream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh cos they overdid it on the first day.
And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellevueses and Bontinentals with their International luxury roomettes and draught Red Barrel and swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending to be acrobats forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into the queues. And if you're not at the table spot on 7 you miss your bowl of Campbells Cream of Mushroom soup - the first item on the menu of Internaional cuisine. And every Thursday night there's bl**dy cabaret in the bar, featuring some tiny emaciated dago with 9 inch hips, and some fat bloated t*rt with her hair Brylcreamed down and a big a*se presenting flamenco for foreigners. And then an audio-typist from Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhorrea trying to pick up hairy legged wop waiters called Manuel.
And once a week theres an excursion to the local Roman remains where you can buy Cherryade, and melted Ice Cream and bl**ding Watneys Red Barrel.
And one night they take you to a typical restaurant with local atmosphere and colour and you sit next to a party of people from Rhyl who keep singing "Torremolinos, Torremolinos".
And complaining about the food.. "ooh its SO greasy isnt it"? You get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr Scholl sandals and last Tuesdays Daily Express and he drones on and on and on about how Mr Smith should be running this country, and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up all over the Cuba Libres. Then sending tiddly postcards of places they dont realise they haven't even visited.... "to all at number 22, weather wonderful, food very greasy, but we have managed to find this tiny little place hidden away in the back streets where you can buy Cheese and Onion crisps and Watneys Red Barrel". And spending four days on the tarmac at Luton airport on a five day package tour with nothing to eat but dried BEA type sandwiches and you cant even get a glass of Watneys Red Barrel cos you're still in England and the bl**dy bar closes very time you're thirsty. And the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the plastic ashtrays and they keep telling you it'll only be another hour although you know d*mn well your plane is still in Iceland and it has to come back and take a party of Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can come back and load you up at 3am in the morning. And then you sit on the tarmac for four hours because of 'unforseen difficulties', ie. the permanent strike of Air Traffic Control; and when you finally get to Malaga airport and everyones swallowing intravioform tablets and queueing for the bl**dy toilets and queueing for the bl**dy armed customs officers, and queueing for the bl**dy bus that isnt there, waiting to take you to the hotel that hasn't yet been built. And when you finally get to the half-built Algerian ruin, called the Hotel del Sol, by paying half your holiday money to a licensed bandit in a taxi; there's no water in the pool, there's no water in the taps, there's no water in the bog, and there's only a bl**ding lizard in the bidet!
And half the rooms are double booked and you cant sleep anyway cos of the permanent 24 hour drilling of the foundations of the hotel next door. You meet appalling apprentice chemists from Ealing pretending to be hippies, and middle-class stockbrokers wives from Esher, busily buying identical holiday villas and suburban development plots just like Esher, because the Labour Governments got in again.