Reasons I shouldn't be allowed on holiday

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We were walking through one of those small, pretty Spanish squares with a church on one side when I spotted it. The hotel that I was going to book but didn’t.

The backstory of any holiday booking I make is one of hours of gruelling, painstaking research. After which I pick the very first place I looked at. But by that point, I’ve read up to a hundred reviews.

“That was the hotel I rejected, as the reviews said the church bells rang every fifteen minutes, day and night.”

We were walking back from the beach and it was slightly uphill. My not-husband Tom didn’t even glance back at me. His shoulders slumped a little, though, as he knew this would not be the first time I mentioned it.

I can’t stop myself. I have to point out all my rejected accommodations and the reasons they didn’t make the grade. It’s like I’m spotting exes and listing their shortcomings. Which would probably be slightly more interesting.

It got to the stage where I noticed Tom purposely choosing a different route back from the beach. The last time we found ourselves going past, he said rather tersely, “I can’t help noticing those bells have not rung once while we’ve been here.” Which was true.

This is just one of four ways (minimum) that I’m awful on holiday.

Here’s the second. My taste in everything goes totally out of the window. I’ll walk past shops selling floaty shirts and dresses, which are not my thing at all, and think - Hmm… Should I?

I’m looking at toe rings, shell necklaces, bracelets with letters which spell out the word ‘friend’. At one point I heard this sentence in my head – ‘Oh, that’s a nice ashtray.’ I do not smoke. Nor does anyone I know.

If I’m ever rich, I’ll have to put limits on my credit cards before I go away.

Number three. I love crisps. And what’s more exciting than holiday crisps? I don’t think this is like saying I love holiday egg and chips. As you get lots of different flavours. And I mostly mean you get paprika flavour, which used to be a solely Mediterranean thing. That’s changing now, but I wouldn’t eat paprika crisps in the dreary old UK. They are holiday crisps. I also really like barbecue ones on holiday but not at home.

I tried to find barbecue crisps abroad one year, but I couldn’t see the word barbecue or BBQ anywhere. I did, however, see some in a black packet and we all know that this is barbecue. It’s a rule much stricter than the cheese and onion/salt and vinegar colours debacle at home.

These black packet crisps also looked really posh, which I’m basing on the fact that they had the word ‘premium’ in big letters on the front. They also had a picture of a black bottle on the front to illustrate the flavour, which was very mysterious and intriguing. I couldn’t find any words for the flavour but got them anyway. As they must be barbecue.

Later I settled into a white plastic patio chair with a glass of wine and my pre-dinner black crisps snack. I put one in my mouth and it was a flavour I had never experienced before and I cannot say that it was nice.

I had a few more to be sure and then curiosity got the better of me. I put my glasses on and studied the back of the packet. And discovered that they were the worst crisp flavour in existence. Cockles. I fell to the floor in horror.

Food-wise, things got much better on a day trip to Barcelona. We’d done an open-top bus tour as I love an open-top bus tour. I’ll do one anywhere, including Southend-on-Sea, even though you could strongly argue that the only point of interest on the seven-mile route is the pier.

We then strolled around some lovely little back streets and found a sweet little tapas restaurant for dinner. It was full of locals, so we were very pleased with ourselves. I then ordered the best meal of my life. A seven tomato salad and gazpacho. This is basically my dream meal, as I love tomatoes and so I was very excited. But then something truly awful happened. When the waitress brought my gazpacho, it looked so good that before I could stop myself, I went, “Yummy yummy”. So basically, I can’t go on holiday ever again.