Holiday 2013 – Days Three, Four and Five

You may have noticed that I’ve increased the rate of my reportage.

This is for two main reasons.

1) There isn’t enough content on each day to justify its own entry. See Day Two for evidence.

2) More importantly, I’m only six blog posts away from number 800. As you know, I like to mark each of these anniversaries with a feature-packed avalanche of content, and feel this can only be started on British soil. I’m going to have to squeeze all of my holiday adventures in before that.

Day three has now become completely unrememberable. Not unmemorable (though it was that too), but unrememberable. Nobody could remember it. Not even if their brain was a computer(‘s brain).

I think we went to the beach. We might have caught some sun. I might have worn sunglasses.

I don’t usually wear sunglasses. I bought them especially for this holiday in a Gatwick shop. Having viewed some photographs of me wearing them, I’m suddenly aware that they’re a bad idea. My eyes are the saving grace of my face. (The Saving Grace of My Face is the provisional title for my autobiography)

I need my terrified eyes to counterbalance the viscous smirk of my cheeks, mouth, chin and philtrum. This is a very delicate balance indeed. It’s a bit like this blog, with the eyes playing the part of my self-deprecation, and the rest of my face playing my prose. One false step, and the apple cart has lost all credibility.

Day four was a very nice day indeed. We went to a private beach that our hotel has some sort of relationship with. It was at a place called the Blue Lagoon. It was a lagoon, and it was blue. It was very tranquil. We swam. Lucy taught me how to float. I’d known how to do it before, of course. In the pre-beard days. But I had to re-learn it, like an amnesiac re-learning to furrow her brow.

We had a nice lunch and there was a big fluffy white dog there, who looked hot.

And hot he very well might (look).

I think it was 34 degrees. So hot, I can’t even be bothered to find the degrees symbol.

°

Ah. There it is.

Wait, that symbol is used for temperature as well as angles, right? I never paid attention in thermometer college.

Day five is very fresh in my mind because it is this very day. Not only can I actually remember things, but we actually did some things.

We went on an excursion, which was run through our holiday company. It’s a good way of having an adventure without having to use your initiative.

I could spend many paragraphs talking about the exciting things we did. Carpet weavers! Mud baths! Sulphur pools! Boat trip! Turtles!

(In fact, today we saw a turtle, a sea snake and a couple of lizards. I think we win Reptile Bingo.)

But instead of talking about those things, I want to talk about a couple of things that happened on the bus on the way home. This was the most boring part of the day, but was also the most recent. Events that have just happened always seem more exciting than those of a few minutes earlier. Forgetting the past is an evolutionary knack. It helps us get over the pain of childhood and being beaten up yesterday.

We was going down the road, right? Right. A policeman flagged us down. After a few (Turkish) words with the driver, he boarded the vehicle.

He was a proper Turkish policeman. He had a gun. (I didn’t actually see the gun, but Lucy assures me it was there. She has never been known to lie about firearms.)

Everyone felt very tense. I suddenly felt a wave of baseless guilt wash over me. I noticed there was a seatbelt sign in the bus, but I wasn’t wearing mine! What if he chastised me? My sphincter contracted to further conceal the small balloon of heroin that I obviously wasn’t smuggling over the border.

I didn’t want to go to a Turkish prison. They are legendarily uncomfortable.

My fellow tourists must have felt the same thing. There was a tension in the bus.

The tour guide finally – after four agonising seconds – revealed that the policeman just wanted a lift down the road.

Unfortunately, I had pulled out a knife after the third agonising second. I am now in a Turkish prison. The Wi-Fi is spotty.

Hahahaha! Not really! That was just a made-up end to a story with no climax.

(A Made-Up End To a Story With No Climax is the provisional title for my obituary.)

The other thing that happened on the way back was we passed a billboard. I don’t know what it was advertising, but it was illustrated with two cartoon pictures. One was of sarcastic comic strip cat Garfield. And the other was of Jerry from Tom and Jerry.

It was just the two of them.

It seemed like a strange combination. Admittedly, they are cat and mouse. But as far as I know, they’ve never even met.

Seeing Jerry solo was a bit strange. He’s almost always seen in conjunction with Tom. To have one member of a double act on his own is unsettling. It would be like seeing a billboard featuring Dec from Ant and Dec, but not Ant from Ant and Dec. Just Dec. Together with... let’s say... Norman Mailer. You’d wonder what the advert was for.

Don’t get me wrong – if I was going to choose only one of Tom and Jerry to feature in an advert, it would definitely be Jerry. Tom ain’t selling shit.

No kid is going to point excitedly at a sign that just has Tom on it. “Hey! It’s Tom!”

At least Jerry has some energy to him; some pizazz. Tom is a born loser.

He’s one of that school of Warner Brothers cartoons featuring a loser and a winner, and the roles are never reversed.

Tweetie-Pie and Sylvester; Bugs and Yosemite Sam; the Roadrunner and Wile E Coyote. It’s a strange dynamic for a work of fiction. If your protagonist is never under threat, where’s the jeopardy? How can the perennial winner be a hero?

I suppose it works on the basis that, in real life, the winner is the underdog. The mouse generally loses to the cat, the bird loses to the cat, the rabbit loses to the prospector, the roadrunner loses to the schmuck with a middle initial. It must originally have been an interesting inversion of the natural order.

But after a while, that premise must have worn off. Suddenly the story is just about a dick defeating a starving wretch. No-one cheers for the Roadrunner, do they?

That’s the thing, I suppose. I’ve never met anyone who cheered for the Roadrunner. Even though the bird and the mouse are ostensibly the heroes, we want to see them beaten.

Wile E Coyote is the real hero.

Which makes the whole thing quite depressing really. We keep watching, knowing that we’ll never get what we want. These cartoons are just harrowing vignettes of perpetual disappointment. It’s a wonder they’re so popular.

Anyway, I’d like to see a cartoon featuring Garfield and Jerry. I think they would enrage each other, and not in a conventional way. Garfield would be his usual curmudgeonly self, and Jerry – sensing that his foe was unwilling to engage in a chase – would get antsy, and would probably turn to drugs.

The final insult of this billboard was that Garfield and Jerry were not to scale. They were presented as being the same height. Ridiculous. That kind of unreal nonsense is part of the reason that I ignore all advertisements, and never give them even a second thought.

That sulphur bath smelled bad. I can still smell it. The mud made my skin feel nice, though.

There are photos of us all mudded up, but I’m not ready to share them. Also, the internet isn’t working here, so by the time you read this, it will be Day Six. Who knows what kind of reptiles we will have seen by then?

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Oh. It's working again. That's good. It's still today. See you for Reptile Watch 2013 again tomorrow. Chris Packham will be dressed as an egg.