Welcome to Ibiza

Our holiday was canceled and we were transferred to a Thomsons Gold hotel.

Some background information for those of you who don’t know me personally: every year my family goes to Es Cana, Ibiza, for the last two weeks of season. Variation is nice, but we know all of the bar staff around here so we get free drinks. I know my way around the resort – and increasingly those neighboring it – like a second home. We’ve always been to family-style hotels. For the last five or six years we have been to the hotel Cala Nova and stayed in the premiere, double-sized, sunrise-facing and sea-surrounded rooms, from the balconies of which it is possible to steal wifi from nearby apartments

The flights have changed this year though, and the Cala Nova is apparently closed for the two extra days that we’re here. Thomson tried to send us to the Hotel Cala Llonga in, well, Cala Llonga, but we declined as Cala Llonga is a barren land consisting of a beach, a tack-shop and up to two bars (subject to season).

We ended up in the Hotel Panorama. On paper it sounds perfect: right in the center of Es Cana, with a huge balcony overlooking the quaint harbor, and our bar of choice thirty seconds away. We were greeted with free luminescent green cocktails in funny glasses, and had our suitcases delivered by a bell-boy with an Oxfordshire accent.

In reality, the hotel hides a dark secret: it is a Thomson Gold hotel. I imagine that many of you will not have had the misfortune to experience a Gold hotel; take my advice: if you’re under the age of 55 and find yourself in a Gold hotel, get the hell out of there. The shortage of young blood in Ibiza in the last two weeks of season is bad enough as it is, without being confined to a 16+ hotel. Sixteen is only the theoretical bottom-limit, by the way; in practice, apart from the Thomsons rep, I am the youngest person here before my parents, and they have a good thirty-odd years on me. In turn, my parents are also about twenty-five years younger than the bulk of the other guests.

It isn’t that I have anything personal against the senior citizens of the world, but most of them are pretty disgusting. I’m not really bothered if they discover what I think of them; most of them think I’m a freak anyway.

They aren’t just old people – they’re old people in their holiday clothes. That means swimsuits, bright colours, tops that allow their bingo-wings to flap freely in the wind. I realise they are just as entitled as me to enjoy their holiday, but I don’t really want to have to look at their veiny legs, sagging breasts and dun eyes wherever I look.

Luckily, I am never going to grow old.

Tomorrow I’m on the pull, anywhere but here.