Holidays Are Great Until You Actually Take One. I Can't Even Find The Plunger

Bay of Pollenca credit: Author

I started a new job last November. And come this October, I realised that, bar a few days around my birthday, I hadn’t taken any time off. At all.

Worse than that, my vitamin D craving was becoming hard to ignore, so I did what any other sane person would do: I booked a flight to Mallorca.

I’ve been coming here every year for over twenty years and absolutely love the place. Not Santa Vulgar or Shagaluf mind, no, my preferred destination is at the other end of the Island; Pollença, more accurately, the porty part of Pollença. It’s where I caught Covid a few years ago, but I’ll forgive it that minor indiscretion. It also happens to be where my family has an apartment; which rather helps.

No nightclubs, no drunken yobs vomiting their last mouthful of paella Stella in the streets, and no kiss me quick mobs from Barnsley downing another jug of sangria to spoil the otherwise gentle patina. It’s Cocoon-on-Sea, and I love it. If God were thinking of creating a heaven on earth, then he made a mighty fine job of it.

It’s as if He was sitting back, and whilst quaffing a glass of Louis Latour Château Corton Grancey Grand Cru, thought, hmm, my work isn’t quite done yet, I’ll just add in the Tramuntana mountains, et voilà, Port de Pollença is now complete.

And it appeared that all His work was done. Yesterday I woke to a beautiful sunrise, had breakfast overlooking the bay with an old friend, and had lunch with a founding member of an iconic British blues band. Well, he was sitting at the next table, but that counts doesn’t it?

I lay on the beach, luxuriating in doing precisely nothing at all, except for ordering another vino blanco. Total bliss, that is, until the clouds came over and I realised that it wasn’t.

Because you try to have a good time in a place which completely revolves around the sun actually making an appearance when it, er… doesn’t. It’s like watching Raquel Welch in One Million Years BC without your man sausage perking up a little; it’s impossible.

So I thought I’d do a little sightseeing instead. Where to go? Palma? Been there. The Tramuntana mountains? Been there. Soller? Been there. Valledemossa? Been there. You get the drift. After so many years coming here, there’s nowhere I haven’t been.

So I opened a bottle of wine and tried to ignore the smelly drains, the canine deposits on the otherwise beautiful Pine Walk, and, worst of all, the cyclists. Because unbeknownst to me, my quiet, relaxing break had coincided with the climax of the lunatics’ season.

Now, those who know me know that I have an inherent dislike of cyclists. They wear ridiculous clothes, take up the entire road, and think that wearing Lycra in public beyond 20 years of age is somehow acceptable.

Here in Mallorca, and especially in Pollença, it has become an epidemic of gargantuan proportions. And I blame two things: the Parliament of the Balearic Islands for making the roads so good, and Bradley Wiggins.

If they’re not getting in the way of my latest attempt to drive from the port to the Lluc monastery in the mountains in under 30 minutes (for the petrolheads, it really is a fantastic piece of tarmac), they’re monopolising every bar from Alcudia to Formentor. Somehow regaling anyone unlucky enough to be within earshot of their latest drafting cadence or magnificent pelotons (which, when sporting Lycra clearly two sizes too small with legs akimbo, is not for the faint-hearted). For this reason (amongst several others), the locals don’t like them either, but they’re not allowed to say so publicly.

And then I decided that I needed a shower. Which would have been fine except that on occasion, the apartment entertains guests, and it appears that many have no scruples when it comes to liberating half the Bay of Pollença down the shower trap. And as plumbers will know, showers don’t like this.

This became clear when the bathroom quickly began to resemble a wet room. So I looked around for the plunger I bought last year when exactly the same thing happened. No sign, so the next half an hour was spent on my hands and knees extracting everything Mr and Mrs I Couldn’t Give a Damn had deposited down there.

And that got me thinking. In reality, holidays are overrated. After all, surely I’d have been far better off staying at home? No need to pack the liquids in a Ziploc bag (to then not have to), no need to applaud yet another successful landing at Palma airport (is that something only people from Wigan and Southend do?), and no need to have to perform emergency plumbing. And that’s all without forgetting to mention an encounter with an attendant who had clearly skipped his anger management class, in favour of abusing anyone who dared to sit on a beach sunlounger. But that’s another story.

No, holidays are most definitely overrated. I’m leaving tomorrow, and I’m already counting the days until I’ll be back.

Postscript:

I am back at home and back at work. When I left Mallorca yesterday, it was 27 degrees and clear blue skies. In East Grinstead, it is 10 degrees, raining and windy, and, thanks to Storm Benjamin (I heard that the French had tried calling it something different, and that’s a hill I’m prepared to die on - the French will not name our storms, they’re ours), it is about to get a whole lot worse. Better to have loved and lost than not at all? That’s the problem with holidays.