So what’s Tenerife like? Well… it was formed in 2600 BC when a volcano erupted under the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Morocco. The volcano’s name was ‘Nigel’ and it was quite big. Because the eruption also caused a few other Canary Islands to form, possibly a bit of the west coast of Morocco and I’m guessing, a small part of Marbella. Where the Marriott now stands. The natural vegetation here is… predominantly quite green, and there are little mountains all around. Brown ones. They’re quite pretty. The indigenous people are… not really indigenous at all but came from Spain when the then King… Philippe, or Carlos IX, or Rodney III, came over on a boat (probably) and declared it their very own and built the shopping centre.

Basically, I have no fucking idea what it’s like. I got off a plane. They told me I was in Tenerife and I believed them. A very nice man in a white Toyota taxi then brought me to our resort, where they lock us in for 12 hours a day and then allow us out ONLY to go find dinner. Then we have to return in time for curfew otherwise our ankle bracelet trackers send 10,000 volts up our legs. That gets you back in a hurry.

Ok, we should go ‘exploring’. We should hike up the other volcanoes here and get bitten by the doubtlessly exotic insects they have, possibly even snakes!!! We should take a boat ride round the southern tip of the island, diving off the side to catch wild oysters. In our teeth. Or we could take a motor-bike out, fall off it, as all tourists do, and spend three days checking out both the hospitals round here and also our health insurance limits.

But we’re not really here for that. We’re here to rest. And play with Lila and Joey. And, trust me, you don’t want to sit in a car/coach for 2 hours with Joey to go to a volcano that he doesn’t really want to see. Yet, oddly, he’ll happily sit for 2 hours this afternoon to watch his beloved Spurs lose at Crystal Palace. But that’s a different kind of ‘concentration’, it’s a ‘commitment’.

So, due to being actual inmates in a Tenerifian prison, albeit a very upmarket prison, we lie in the sun, we read our books, we swim, we take walks along the fabulous promenade, we play, we rest and we lie down some more, once the resting gets a bit tiring.

And it’s actually quite liberating, all this ‘doing nothing’. Feeling no pressure to do anything at all. How wonderful.

Happy hols,

A xxxx