package holidays with greasy chips and hot bodies

I cannot decide whether or not I like package holidays. You know the sort - the ones with the bored travel company 'rep' who tries to make you feel welcome by singling out your family to be the only one without the 'welcome pack'. "Oh dear, we are one short, but you won't mind" and "Can I see your paperwork just to make sure you should be here? Nothing to worry about".

This 'welcome pack', if you had it, would tell you about all the rip-off trips to see distant and obscure carpet factories, candy floss spinners or sponge divers. In any of these places you will spend about three hours watching people work, thinking how tragic their lives are, and then being brow beaten into buying a silk carpet, unique candy floss or exceptional bath sponge for thousands of whatever-the-currency-is. Your rational mind will have been washed away by endless cups of sweet hot liquid, purporting to be tea, and you will only realise that the beautiful carpet is quite the wrong colour and design for your home decor once it has arrived through the post about 12 weeks later - if indeed it does arrive.

These holidays generally take place under an azure blue sky, in the blazing sun, by the beach, in a hotel with a swimming pool, and unavailable sun beds. Your room will have a balcony which is constructed with a low enough surround for the smallest child to peer over to enjoy the view of the local builders, at 6 in the morning, power digging foundations for the new hotel next door. If the balcony is carefully designed, the child will be able to scale the railings and fall unhindered and powered by gravity into the cement mixer or the swimming pool some six floors down. Bye bye.

Swimming pool is a misnomer. Actually, very little swimming takes place in a hotel pool because it is generally used as a means of cooling down by simply plunging into it with a very sweaty and very hot body. In fact, very sweaty is enough. You don't have to have a very hot body, but it helps. Where was I?

The food, oh dear, the food. There is a tendency in such places to produce poor quality British style food just because it is assumed that the British won't eat anything else, including good quality British style food. This is the 'greasy chips with everything' mentality. I don't know why they think that people from Birmingham, Bradford and Bognor Regis wouldn't like anything else. At least good British food would be a start - a spicy Chicken Tikka or king prawn fried rice for example.

At least on our just completed holiday in Rhodes we could find genuine Greek food in the local tavernas and nearly everyone spoke the lingua franca, the vehicular language, of, guess what? English. I have yet to go anywhere in the world where I cannot use English to communicate reasonably effectively with the local population where the vernacular was unknown to me. Luckily my rusty French comes back when I need it, but I digress.

The Austrian with whom I got chatting on the local bus in Rhodes assured me that there was no point in the British learning any language but English. He proclaimed that there is only one language which is used in international business and commerce and it is...well, we all know, don't we?

I didn't get onto the cultural and personal identity aspects of language as it felt rather pointless under the circumstances, but I did mention I had learned Welsh. He made no spoken comment but looked bewildered. With a broad smile symbolising the affinity and world peace which can only be maintained by effective communication and understanding, I bid him 'aufeder-whatsit' in his local language and alighted from the bus into the blazing sun.

Now don't burn, don't even allow your self a sun tan, because all this leads to melonoma and melonoma is a serious and potentially lethal skin cancer. Yet so many people still go on these package hols to the sun. Are we all suicidal or merely idiotic? Perhaps we just think 'well, I have to die sometime, so I want to have had a tan before I do'. I guess that's fair enough.

So, do I like package holidays? That requires thinking and you shouldn't have to think on holiday, so I've no idea. Now, where's that carpet factory?