I suppose the title gives away that I’ve just been on a holiday of sorts. Take heart, this is not one of those 500 word essays that have to be handed in by Monday describing my holiday or I’d get detention.

Holidays from hell start when you leave your passport at home and have to rush back through peak time traffic to go back home and get it. I think it’s just karmic when one thing starts going wrong because you know everything else will go wrong. The next thing that happens is, because you’re flustered and worried you might miss your flight, you end up talking to the girl at the check in counter in a louder than normal voice. She gets highly offended and you belatedly realise she is the God of Seats and she neatly sticks you between a mum with a 6 month old baby and a 137kg man with asthmatic tendencies who will pick your food from your tray and dig his huge elbow into your side and snore really loudly while the little infant will spew its milk into the remaining meal while screaming so loudly that you want to open the emergency exit and jump out. In this day and age you may not be allowed to throw the screaming child out. The authorities will get you for it.

You get to the destination and decide to go and lie down in the sun and become a nice toasted brown like the models in the magazines you have brought along with you to read but you go a bit heavy on the pina coladas and with the high alcohol content and the hot sun you fall into a coma-like snooze while you drool in your sleep on the beach towel. Karmic again that the sun moves and you end up burning your skin and instead of going the nice toasted brown you were aiming for you are now a perfect lobster red.

It gets better. You eat some dodgy seafood and get holiday stomach syndrome, you step on a sea urchin and almost die of toxic shock to your system while trying to damage the eco system by hunting for shells to display on your mantelpiece at home, the taxi you had booked to take you to the airport from your hotel doesn’t turn up and you barely make it to the check in counter at the airport and because you think you’re going to miss your plane you indulge in a bit of déjà vu and speak in a loud voice to the bloke at the check in counter who is in a bad mood because his partner seemed to be giving someone else the eye at a party last night so you will have to bear the karmic brunt of it and get shoved between the overweight geezer and the smelly toilets right at the back of the plane. You vow to take Anger Management classes but anyway, it’s too late for now.

You proudly display your 3 shells out of which one is a live shell and fills your home with an unbearable stench and for two and a half weeks you’re unable to figure out what the heck that smell is, show off your lobster skin and generally brag to family and friends and colleagues what a wonderful time you had.

Ditto me.

🙂