Apologies to the Scottish Tourist Board, but I cracked. Last summer, we plumped for a ‘staycation’ and by the end of the school holidays my bank balance and my wellies were begging for mercy.
I’d rather spend a fortnight in a shark pool on a deflating lilo than repeat the experience, so I booked our blue complexions a week in the Costa Del Factor Fifty.
Sweet Gods of Ambre Solaire, the anticipation was thrilling, right up until I remembered that the holiday countdown is like prickly heat – you forget how irritating it is until you’re heading back to the chemist and trying to work out the Spanish words for ‘calamine lotion’.
Yep, despite enough planning to launch a military coup, I always end up setting off for the airport with hair like a burst suitcase, a wide-eyed deranged expression and a faint whiff of Toilet Duck.
As always, this year I vowed it would be much different. I would be organised, prepared, preened, plucked, and I was not setting foot on an aeroplane with a bikini line that could benefit from a shampoo and set.
At least, that was the plan. In the end, I finished work at 8 a.m., leaving me exactly twenty hours to shop, pack and mobilise my troops. Doddle.
Step one – hair. While I was making breakfast, I slapped on the monthly ‘dye-out-of-a-box’.
I was on my way to a foxy shade of Kate Moss when a combination of a laugh and a flick somehow sent a yellowish blonde tress straight into my eye. After reacting in a cool, calm manner involving screeching panicked statements about being blinded for life, I dunked my face in water and headed for the optician. No permanent damage done, but my eye would sting for a day or so.
Off I set, looking like something out of Pirates of the Caribbean, for the next task of the day. ‘Remind me to get you socks,’ I told ten-year-old Low the Elder, at the start of a gallop around Matalan.
Two hours later, we made it home with T-shirts, shorts, jeans, swimmies, a natty cowboy hat… but no socks.
I suddenly realised that I’d forgotten to put on any fake tan, so I slapped some on and carried on with the next job.
I won’t go into details here, but let’s just say the new gizmo I’d bought for hair removal made my one good eye weep when I tried it on my oxters, so there was no way it was travelling below the Equator. I threw extra-large bikini bottoms on to my packing pile.
Next, I pulled out the mini-laptop that I take on holidays, only to discover the children had somehow managed to download a virus while playing something to do with fighter-pilot ducks.
I put the iron on the wrong setting and melted the blouse that I’d owned for approximately three hours.
Husband and I threw out our annual threats of divorce when he criticised my packing and refused to let me put anything in his case because he said ‘it would crush stuff’.
I went in the huff – then sat on my case to get it shut and broke it.
We ended up in the loft at midnight, dragging out two floral cases we bought in Santa Ponsa in 1988.
Four hours later, the alarm went off.
Husband turned to look at me and screamed. My fake tan had somehow formed into a pattern that roughly resembles how the Earth looks from space.After a quick clean of the house, we set off for the airport – and yes, as predicted, we had hair like a burst suitcase, a wide-eyed deranged expression, a faint whiff of Toilet Duck. This was complimented by one good eye, a dodgy hair-dye job, a husband in the huff, suitcases from the Eighties, excess body hair, sockless weans, and a pigmentation issue that looked like the outline of South America on the left-hand side of my face.
But next year it’ll be different. It will.
Anyone know the cost of a fortnight in a shark pool in July?