Canariensis

My sincerest apologies for not posting for an age, but I have been on vacation in the Canary Islands -- specifically Tenerife. Richard and I rented out a holiday villa with four friends and prepared to while away an entire week lounging by a pool and cursing passing clouds for getting between us and our beloved sun. However, as this wonderful holiday abroad approached, Richard and I started to have misgivings. We looked forward to the sun and the fun, but we did not look forward to sharing our villa's pool with various other people staying in the vacation compound. Richard and I had hoped to have a private pool, however, none of the villas with private pools in our price range had seemed very nice. Therefore, the group had settled on renting a villa in a resort property where there were bound to be other guests using the pool.

In the days leading up to the vacation, I kept having nightmarish visions of the kinds of people who would be awaiting us at the pool in Tenerife.

However, upon arriving on the island, this is what actually awaited me, Richard and our friends:

None of the other villas in the fourteen villa complex were occupied -- not one! Not a single other villa had people in it. We had the entire compound, let alone the pool, to ourselves for a week. Being responsible adults, we decided to blast loud music from our villa, push each other fully clothed and screaming into the pool and play hide-and-seek, cops-and-robbers and sardines just about every night we were there.

With all that excitement at night, I spent my days in Tenerife doing little more than this:

After one week of this utter laziness, I was happy to return to reality. Nevertheless, the time away had been wonderful and as we gathered our belongings to make the trip back to Britain, I paused to make an addition to the villa's guest book. 

Where other families had written rather generic and predictable messages of praise for the villa, I scribbled out this:

Haggis-Attack was a team name from one of our earlier games; it was inspired by
the fact that three of our friends are Scottish.

Once I was certain the villa's owners would be sufficiently aware that the week in Tenerife had been the stuff of stars, hearts and unicorns to us, I returned the guest book to it's table and we all hopped in two cabs to the airport. At the airport we waded through a sea of British and German tourists, passed through security and spent far too long wandering around shops that attempted to sell goods produced in the Canary Islands - which, in case anyone is wondering, are goods that consist of any material that can be extracted from a cactus or a palm tree. These tacky-crap-produced-in-the-Canaries stores all came under the blanket name of Canariensis. Canariensis is a type of palm local to the Canary Islands, but everyone agreed it just sounded like the shops were named after some sort of sexually transmitted disease.

Richard and I arrived home to our apartment after a beleaguering odyssey which consisted of riding a crammed budget flight, a bus, a commuter train, the last tube train on the Hammersmith & City line before the London Underground closed for the night, and then another bus -- and, I might add, while waiting for this last bus we saw an astonishingly violent fist fight break out between two drunken groups of people in front of a chip-shop across the street. Since our return, I have been adjusting to a life where I have to wake up at 9am and reacquaint myself with one nasty word: deadline. Of course, our lovely vacation is easily remembered every time I see Richard's perfect tan -- granted, this makes me instantly notice the glaring inferiority of my own sun exposure which is best demonstrated in the most family-friendly way by using these Ken dolls: