L'Enfer, C'est Les Autres

Here's a word of advice. If you want to spend your next holiday abroad becoming closely acquainted with your local council's list of ASBO recipients, then I heartily recommend that you book yourself a cheap deal to Marmaris in Turkey. Do it now before someone else gets out of jail and beats you to it.

I recently made the unfortunate blunder of booking a really cheap holiday to Turkey and believing that I wouldn't end up wishing I had asked for the pilot to land a little to the right in Iraq. Don't get me wrong - Marmaris is hot, cheap and is nestled in a pretty part of the Mediterranean. The locals are very nice (if a little cheesy and persistant in their habit of calling themselves Gino and attempting to breakdance to bad Turkish hiphop at the first possible opportunity) and the food (if you avoid the horrendous British slop that seems to follow us around holiday resorts like a bad case of genital herpes) is very good. You can get a delicious, traditional meal for a tenner if you know where to go.

The only problem is that the sort of people who seem to end up holidaying alongside you in Marmaris are from the same family tree as those who ruined Spain back in the 1980s/90s. Thinking about it, it's a natural progression that if you select holidays for less money than it takes to buy a decent handbag, you're not exactly going to end up bumping into the Prince of Monaco. What you actually get is a band of illiterate thugs who like to tattoo themselves with their children's names (usually anything beginning with a 'K': Kyle, Kayden, Kane, Kayleigh, Kanya, etc.), who shop exclusively in Primark and Farmfoods and who have no doubt done their bit for society by bellowing through the school gates that their foul kids be allowed to eat burgers and chips for school dinner. If you're lucky, your income tax will only have paid for three quarters of their holiday via the magnificent Welfare State.



I know I sound like a terrible snob but there's no mincing around this issue. I usually only get offended by this section of society when I come across them letting their flea-ridden dog shit all over the street (if it's not too busy mauling an infant) or letting their kids set fire to random public property while the parents demonstrate the vast range of ringtones offered by their mobile phone to their toothless cohorts. But when you have to share a plane and then a whole week's holiday with them it starts to make you want to reconsider your rash earlier decision to never ever go on holiday to Wales with your parents ever again - even if you have to pretend to be enjoying the pottery museum and the butterfly centre & gift shop and then sit in a tent with your dad every night doing a wet jigsaw in the dark.


I suppose I am the only one to blame for booking the damn thing in the first place, but in my defense, I spent considerable amounts of my company's valuable time researching Marmaris once I had been convinced by the travel agent to book it over the phone (I actually phoned up to book a holiday in Greece but they were all too expensive for a tight arse like me). I should have read the warning signs. I should have spent more money. The woman on the end of the phone was a woman called Zilla (probably dressed head-to-toe in pink velour with a framed photo of her semi-retarded son Dionne on her desk). She had one of those foul, barking East Yorkshire accents which makes the speaker sound like an elephant seal clearing its sinuses. Obviously, we quickly built up a rapport which culminated in her telling me she had been to Turkey on both honeymoons and only caught Hepititis C once, while simultaneously duping me into revealing my credit card details and desired travel dates. Before I knew it I had paid £500 for a holiday in Turkey for two and was frantically trawling internet review sites for assurance that I hadn't done something incredibly stupid - which I blatantly had.

So that is how, last week, I found myself on a plane crammed full of half-drunk scoundrels with bad hair extensions and the collective intellect of a cucumber, baying at full volume in pig-English about how much they were looking forward to getting plastered on the beach and shagging a Turkish breakdancer called Gino. And that is why, after a full week of hanging out with a bunch of people who have never read a book EVER and who think it's OK to yell at their their young children to 'shut the fuck up' whilst blowing cigarette smoke over them, I have decided that I shall not be recommending Marmaris to you, and why I have already urged my mother to unpack the tent, dust off the windbreak and start stockpiling tins of Heinz spaghetti bolognese in preparation for next year's holiday to Cardigan Bay...