HOLIDAYS IN THE SUN

There are benefits in being a grown up. Admittedly I don’t quite know what they are, nor do I feel like a grown up (just a grown old), but as they say there’s no smoke without fire : I suppose if other people see me as an adult, there must be at least some slim element of truth in that.

After all, the Inland Revenue and the Council taxbastards see me as an adult, so I suppose that is exactly what I am. At least, partially. At the very least, I’m doing a relatively convincing job of being an adult. But don’t tell anyone.

There are benefits. I don’t know exactly what they are, at least, I haven’t worked out what they are yet (beyond being able to stay up as late as you want at weekends), but there is one very important benefit I have discovered, one benefit that outweighs almost everything else.

Almost. And its not about holding hands in public without being told that you’re doing Satan’s Work. (Huh? I though God was Love, so all Love and Lovemaking must surely be holy?). It’s far more important than that.

It’s about Holidays.

I never, never have to go on Holiday with my parents again.

For some strange reason, my mum and dad thought that it would be a really good idea to pack the four of us off together and take us to the same place every fcking year for exactly the same two weeks at exactly the same time.

That’s not a holiday. It’s more like a prison sentence. For two weeks, the four of us, a philandering father, a terminally ill mother, a manically depressed twin bother and me were all packed off like sardines in a crushed tin box, and when we got there subjected to various punishments.

I had two options. Either I sit on a beach for two weeks roasting like a chicken, or spend two weeks inside the zoo known as Rental Car Hell.

Sure, there’s nothing wrong with the beach. Nothing at all. I quite like it actually, sometimes. The Sun is after all, a good thing. It’s a warm ball of fire 93 million miles away that just happens to keep us all warm, but hey, that’s mostly good. No, the worst thing was that, like a military operation, going on the beach was mandatory. I felt like a Gunnery recruit being disciplined by Sargeant Hartman.

Anyway, whats the big deal about the beach anyway? It’s where the dirt meets the water. It’s where you’re surrounded by fat white blubberwhales of white trash soaking up radioactivity in order to toast themselves into a healthy looking crisp, surrounded by screaming bratty kids kicking sand all over, surrounded by disco boats and teenagers pumping out anodyne, idiotic music at deafening volume, and where there is nothing to do but sit and read boring books and listen to music whilst you feel incredibly warm, quite uncomfortable, and as if you’re being slowly cooked like a boiling frog.

If I’m lucky, I only come out in a heat rash, a genetic condition I inherited from my grandfather who spent his whole life fighting The Boche and The Huns in the Egyptian Desert

Sure I’m a grumpy old man. But you wouldn’t want a grumpy old man on a beach, would you?

But that’s just a bonus. An extra feature. A DVD bonus special extra.

The real joy is that I never, never have to endure Rental Car Hell again.

My dad’s idea of a holiday was to stick the four of us in a very confined space, with closed windows, and baking sun. To careen at stupid speeds on Cliffside roads, inches from enormous drops in the baking sun or the frozen night, and to listen perpetually to a tape of Bonnie Tyler’s Greatest Hits.

I Need A Hero. Total Eclipse of the heart. Loving You’s A Dirty Job But Someone’s Gotta Do It. Bland, crap, anodyne, stupid music for bubbleperms forever tattooed into my bored soul. For me, it was like torture. In Iraq they play captured Muslims Metallica to try and get them to confess their sins. In Spain, they play us Bonnie Tyler.

I’ll confess to anything. The Moon landings. JFK. Sure, I killed Kurt Cobain. Anything. Please Mummy. Make It Stop.

That’s just one part of it. There’s others : endless days, seemingly unstoppable fifteen hour stretches of cramped confinement inside baking cocoons, like a greenhouse or a zoo, the sun beating down on us like an permanent lamp. It was kind of like a German POW camp. The lights never went off. I didn’t have a baseball to throw from one end of the room to another.

I had a selection of crappy cheap paperbacks, awful all. I had Bonnie Tyler yelling in my ear. I had the sun beating down on me. Whilst my Dad, like some demented father from The Shining drove like a madman, somewhere, anywhere, and I didn’t even know where.

Come to think of it, I didn’t think he did either, but that’s almost beside the point. Onward we ploughed into the valley of death. We ventured into barren desert, seemingly driving in circles, never knowing quite where we were.

And all of a sudden. The car would screech to a halt like Starsky & Hutch in the middle of nowhere. We’d be dragged out, and sat down in some ‘authentic’ canteen somewhere in a village that had one bar and one newsagent that closed at 4pm, and my Dad would order a pint – A PINT – of Squid whilst we’d pick through whatever leftovers the cook had lying around, as it was inevitably 3.50pm.

Seen Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom? One day, I swear, we had that happen. A plate of grey soup and sheeps eyeballs. Because my dad wanted something authentic. Next to that, Shark Sandwich (which I actually had, the meat is tougher than Tyson) seems a positive letdown.

Of course there’s more. We’d been out in the sun so long even the sun took turns to roast us. Even then, sometimes it got bored, and sunk, like my hopes of ever enjoying a holiday.

Coming home was always the best part, if you like The A-Team and Starsky And Hutch. To the right of us, concrete, hills, rocks. To the left, a sheer drop of 80 feet to the sea. And no barrier. And it’s dark. And all these funny foreigners drive on the wrong side of the road anyway.

What better thing to do than race through the canyons and cliffedges at 80 miles an hour in the pitch darkness, not knowing where you are, or where you’re going… with a certain watery death just inches to the left. And here I am, dad, stuck in the middle with you, boiled like a egg, tanned like a chicken, and listening to Bonnie Tyler, close to midnight, in a rattling car racing towards a cliff edge.

So yes, there are some advantages of being grown up, and being able to make some decisions for yourself. I just don’t know quite what those advantages are right now mind you. I’m sure I’ll think of something.

But is it any wonder that we turned out the way we did?

© copyright Mark Reed, April 2004

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