Yes, well, I’ve been on package tours many times before, so your advert really caught my eye. Why, what’s the point of going abroad if you’re just going to be treated like a sheep? Carted around in buses, surrounded by sweaty, mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry, their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea, how “they don’t make it properly, do they? Not like at home”. And stopping at endless Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney’s Red Barrel and calamaris and two veg. And sitting in their cotton sun frocks, 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, Continentales with their international luxury modern roomettes, and swimming pools full of draught Red Barrel and fat German businessmen pretending to be acrobats and forming pyramids, and frightening the children, and barging into the queues. And if you’re not at your table spot on seven, you miss your bowl of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup – the first item on the Menu of International Cuisine! Every Thursday night there’s bloody cabaret in the bar featuring some tiny, emaciated dago with nine-inch hips, and some big fat bloated tart with her hair Brylcreem’d down and a big arse presenting “Flamenco for Foreigners”! And then you’re surrounded by adenoidal typists from Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhoea trying to pick up hairy, bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel! And then once a week there’s an excursion to the local Roman remains, where you can buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleedin’ Watney’s 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, “I love the Costa Brava! I love the Costa Brava!” and complaining about the food – “ooh, it’s so greasy, isn’t it?” And you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday’s Daily Express, and he drones on and on and on about how Ian Smith should be running the country, and how many languages Margaret Powell can speak, and then he throws up all over the cuba libres. And sending tinted postcards of places they don’t realise they haven’t even visited, “To all at 22, weather wonderful, our room is marked with an X, wish you were here. Food very greasy, but we have managed to find this marvellous little place hidden away in the back streets, where you can buy cheese and onion crisps and Watney’s Red Barrel, and the accordionist plays ‘Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner’.” And spending four days on the tarmac at Luton Airport on a five-day package tour, with nothing to eat but dry British Airways-type sandwiches. You can’t even get a glass of Watney’s Red Barrel because you’re still in England, where the bloody bar closes every time you’re thirsty! And there’s nowhere to sleep, and the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the plastic ashtrays. They keep telling you it’ll only be another hour, but you know damn well your plane is still in Iceland, and it has to come back and take a party of Swedes to Yugoslavia, before it can load you up at 3 a.m. in the morning. And then you sit on the tarmac for four hours because of “unforeseen difficulties”, i.e. the permanent strike of air traffic control over Paris, and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take off at eight! When you finally get to Málaga airport, everyone’s swallowing enterovioform tablets, and queueing for the bloody toilet, and queueing for the bloody armed customs officers, and queueing for the bloody bus that isn’t there, waiting to take you to the hotel that hasn’t yet been built! 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 bog, there’s no water in the tap, and there’s only a bleeding lizard in the bidet! And half the rooms are double-booked, and you can’t sleep anyway because of the permanent 24-hour drilling of the foundations of the hotel next door! You’re plagued by appalling apprentice chemists from Ealing pretending to be hippies, and middle-class stockbrockers’ wives from Esher buying identical holiday villas in suburban development plots just like Esher, in case the Labour government gets in again. And fat American matrons with sloppy-buttocks and Hawaiian-patterned ski pants looking for any mulatto male who can keep it up long enough when they finally let it all flop out. Meanwhile, the Spanish National Tourist Board promises you the raging cholera epidemic is merely a mild outbreak of Spanish Tummy, rather like the previous outbreak of 1660 which killed half of London and decimated Europe – even the rats were dying from it! Meanwhile, the bloody Guardia are busy arresting 16-year-olds for kissing in the streets, and shooting everyone under 19 who doesn’t like Franco. And finally, on the last day in the airport lounge, everybody’s comparing sunburns, drinking Nasty Spumante, buying cartons of duty-free cigarillos, and using up their last pesetas on horrid dolls in Spanish clothing, and little awful horrid donkeys with their names on, and bullfight posters with their own names on, like “Ordoney, El Cordobes and Mr Brian Pules of Norwich…” and 3D pictures of Kennedy and Franco. And everybody’s talking about coming next year, and you swear you never will, although there you are, tumbling bleary-eyed out of a tourist-tight antique Iberian aeroplane. And then finally, when you get to bloody Luton, you’re lying around for another four hours, while they find a plane that can take you back to Manchester. And when you finally get to Manchester, there’s only another bloody bus that you have to wait 16 hours for…