Sunloungers are brought to you by the same people who brought you hospital beds. They allow you to lie down for long periods and recover from the awful things that happen in life. You can sit up in them to read a book and take in liquids, and competition for them is usually pretty intense. Deciding where to go for your sunlounger is a two-stage process: The first is a visit to the travel agent where you browse through all the delightful colour brochures and decide whether you want to go to '7nts SC', '7nts HB' or '14nts FB'. Having decided, you then find yourself anywhere from Spain, Greece, Turkey, Tunisia, Majorca, Minorca, Ibiza, the Seychelles, Canaries or, in my case, Cyprus. Once you've established where your body is going on holiday, you then have to decide where your mind is going to go, and the place to decide this is the airport bookshop.
Popular destinations this year include Tara Road with Maeve Binchy, the Holloway Road with Nick Hornby, Cephalonia with Louis de Bernieres, Stalingrad with Antony Beevor or, a new and popular destination, Azkaban with Harry Potter. The Beach with Alex Garland is very unusual in that it takes body and mind to the same place. Strangely, there is a small group of people who decide to give their mind an absolute punishing on holiday and take with them the Mammoth Book of Puzzles.
In very broad terms, these are people who aren't mentally overtaxed in their daily life, whereas people who have jobs that are Mammoth Puzzles in themselves tend to read books that are the equivalent of putting your brain into suspended animation. Every year, an astonishing number of people choose to spend their holidays heating their bodies on plastic slats. Like a barbecue, the British only attempt to do this once a year, with the inevitable result that things tend to get burnt. The traditional recipe the British use for cooking themselves is to roast at 90 degrees for seven days, turning occasionally. Most cook from frozen but others like to defrost themselves first on the sunbed as this speeds up the cooking process.
It's important to keep yourself in the hottest part of the oven and this means continually dragging your sunlounger out of the shade and turning your body round at regular intervals. Women have the added complication of rotating their swimwear and bikini on a daily basis so that they avoid having those embarrassing tanning lines. A twang on their thong will deal with this for men. There are only two irritants to beware of on a sunlounger. The first is the ever-increasing number of mobile phones used by people calling their friends and family back home to tell them how much they're enjoying getting away from it all. The second is children.
What children like to do best is splash and the bigger the splash the better. If you can do a bomb that splashes 15 sunloungers at once, that's a real bonus. Kids can keep this up all day aided by the fact that they're actually underwater at the exact moment when 15 splashed people drop their books and say as one, 'You stupid little sod!' Swimming pools in resort hotels are not for swimming in. Their first and foremost task is to provide a line around which the sunloungers can be arranged. That is the reason why they come in all sorts of strange shapes and sizes. The beautiful pool at Le Meridien, Limassol, looks like the chalked outline of the gunned-down corpse of Caspar the friendly ghost.
Swimming lengths is therefore only an option if you have one leg shorter than the other and a poor sense of direction. The pool's other function is as a big blue dip to dunk yourself in when you've cooked long enough. There is no better feeling than slipping into cool blue water for a few minutes and then lying face down on the baking poolside tiles, feeling the water drying on your back and looking through the sun-dappled ripples of the clear blue water at your trunks resting quietly on the bottom of the pool. Very occasionally an adult attempts to dive into the pool.
This is usually a pot-bellied man with sagging faded trunks who stands on the side just long enough to capture attention before executing a colossal belly flop with a fantastic slapping noise. He then stays under water for the next five minutes dealing with the horrific pain and trying to find somewhere remote to surface. There will always be one young man in the pool who will do a superb burst of front crawl, pull himself out of the pool in one smooth movement and shake his dark hair dry so that the water droplets bounce off his taut six pack. That young man will not be English. The person with the snorkel inspecting the water inlet will be.
Sadly, there's one little kid you don't often see by the pool. He's the little red-haired one who got too much sun on the first day and is now in the local burns unit with a pipe up his nose. The jury is still out on whether sun is bad or good for you, and it would be useful to have a Reuters screen by the pool to keep you up to date on the very latest medical opinion on the matter so you could decide whether to put your sunlounger in the sun or the shade. Of course, you could leave the sunlounger altogether and go to the beach - Cyprus has some fantastic beaches, I'm told - but sand and sun lotion don't mix unless you're looking for a heavy-duty exfoliant. Beaches aren't any good for children either as they have to make their own entertainment - when you've destroyed worlds and built empires on your Gameboy, building a sandcastle seems a bit low impact. Similarly, you could leave your sunlounger and go and take in a bit of local history.
Cyprus packs in more history per square mile than just about anywhere else on the planet but, let's face it, Roman villas are what Romans lounged in, sunloungers are what we lounge in. There will be time to look at ruins when we are old and suddenly become interested in looking at things that make us feel relatively young. But for now, turning our skin into a version of the local leather (which oddly is a traditional speciality in every tourist resort) is the top priority. The old chestnut about the Germans grabbing the sunloungers with their towels is no longer true. In fact, there won't be any Germans in your hotel because their travel agents already booked a better hotel down the road before our travel agents did. Other than the language of their paperbacks, it's tricky to spot other nationalities around the pool.
However, all becomes clear at breakfast. The British will be making themselves at home with eggs, bacon, sausages, beans and toast; the French will be nibbling their croissants and jam; the Scandinavians will be grazing on their fruit and muesli; and the Russians will be tucking into their eggs, bacon, sausages, beans, toast, croissants, jam, fruit and muesli. Breakfast is taken and then basting begins with all-over lotion rubbing. Steady cooking goes on throughout the morning as yesterday's papers are digested. Late morning means it's time for aqua aerobics where all the women move to the middle of the pool and thrash about for half-an-hour like pilot whales herded into a secluded bay for the traditional Eskimo cull.
Towards midday, the smell of hot flesh starts to contain a hint of charcoal as the barbecue is lit. Lunch is eaten and the basting continues into the afternoon. 'It's getting a bit chilly' is the signal for people to retire to their rooms, feel the cool marble on their feet, put after-sun on their burnt bodies and have a quick peek at the answers in the Mammoth Book of Puzzles. Then it's time to change into party frocks and savour local culture down at the Sherwood Forest pub. All in all, 48 hours on a sunlounger is a pretty intense way of relaxing and, after two days of it, you feel as though you've been there for a week. Which stands to reason really because, as with cooking in general, when you really want to get the flavour of something, there nothing better than a quick flash frying.
The practicals
Flights from Stansted to Carcassonne with Ryanair cost £172, including tax. Don't pack these:
1. Local history books 2. Any slim books 3. Mobile phones 4. Distress flares 5. Iron rations
Do pack these: 1. Big fat paperback 2. Another big fat paperback 3. Pre-sun lotion 4. Sun lotion 5. After-sun lotion
