I'd never been on a package tour before and to start with I was hugely amused.

The flight was marginally more comfortable than a flight hanging from the webbing of a Hercules, and despite the fact that I'm quite bendy, being shoved into a middle seat between two very fat men from Wimbledon with very strong B.O. tested my endurance skills to the limit. I quite enjoyed the in-flight meal – it kind of reminded me of British Army survival rations, but with cake - whilst the in-flight movie was something juvenile involving kids and magic and a lots of gurning British actors past their head set radio (£5, non-refundable) actually (rather to my delight) had Jonathan King's "Una Paloma Blanca" as one of the 12 tracks. Very family friendly.

I had a go at reading one of the four holiday books I'd picked up at the airport, a fascinating read called "Modern Combat Pistols".

"Did you know that they rate the penetration power of bullets by a measurement called 'AIT (goats at Strasbourg)'?" I said, holding the book up to the fat Wimbledonian to my right.

The Wimbledonian gave me a look.

"It refers to a famous European experiment where a great many goats of the approximate size and cardio-vascular capacity of a human being were shot broadside through the lungs with a variety of handguns."

He began to turn slightly greenish.

"You hear that screaming child four rows down?" I remarked. "Apparently the 185g jacketed hollow point .45 caliber Remington bullet has a measured penetration when fired into a block of standard ordinance gelatin of 17.1 inches. I bet I could fire through all the intervening passengers and seat-backs and still blow its little head off."

The Wimbledonian disappeared to the toilet and never came back.

At the airport an orange woman with a cylindrical canary yellow hat and a clipboard herded us all up.

"Don't you have any luggage, Madam?" she said.

"Sorry, no," I said. "Should I?"

"Of course not, Madam, but, you know; most holidaymakers bring a change of underwear, that sort of thing," she said, trying to be chummy.

"Who wears underwear?" I said, and she backed off, grinning uneasily.

I tried hard to eat the evening meal – paella - but had to retire early to my lovable cell plus balcony to drink the bottle of single malt I'd grabbed in duty free. The cell was non-smoking, and when I lit up a Montechristo on the balcony an elderly couple downwind started tutting and fake coughing.

I fared much better with the Full English Breakfast, the toast made with some strange slightly sweetish Spanish bread and slightly bitter baked beans. The greasy bacon no doubt mopped up the whiskey still coursing through my lard-hardened veins and soon, with the aid of a credit card and the hotel shops, I was down on the beach in a tasteless golden bikini one size too small.

Two of my other books were "Deconstructing Disney" by Madonna and "One Hundred Reasons Why I Fucking Hate America" by Noam Chomsky (or something like that). However my eye had been caught by a slim volume called "Tomb Lovers" whose blurb read "When archaeologist and eighty-fifth in line to the throne of England Lady Professor Mary Sue Fotherington-fforbes-Smythe meets a hunky globetrotting Indiana Jones-style adventurer, they are soon uncovering each others' hidden treasures."

I flipped forward to the sex bit with "her heaving bosoms like the domes of Constantinople" and "his twitching member that subconsciously reminded her of the Obelisk of Hatshepsut" but I couldn't concentrate.

"Oi!" I yelled at one of the teenage Lotharios lurking on the beach. "Can you get me a cheap bottle of vino collapso?"

"Anything for you, beautiful lady," he said.

I looked at his sixpack and bulging Speedos and suddenly changed my mind.

"On second thoughts, follar te. I've got literature to study."

Soon after that I nodded off and didn't awake until the sun went down.

So ended my first day as a package tourist.