Package tour hell on fantasy island

I'VE JUST COME back from holiday in Greece. It was a complete disaster. Even more of a disaster, funnily enough, than last year's holiday in Devon, which was my first as a father of uncontainable toddlers and also - by an unfortunate coincidence - my first spent in a cottage perched on the very edge of a precipitous cliff.

Low points of my Grecian sojourn? Perhaps the moment when my two-year- old son, surrounded by frowning Germans in the hotel's large outdoor jacuzzi, called out: "Dad, I've done a wee!" (You could see the frowns of the Germans deepen as they got to grips with the translation, but I suspect that the childish colloquialism with which he concluded his sentence may, crucially, have evaded them).

One especially ghastly event recurred every morning at 11.30am in the pool just outside our room; namely, "Wattar jeem weez Roberto and Carla". Water gym, in other words - an activity involving aerobic exercises and various watery games, conducted to a soundtrack of amplified shouts of "Okaaay!" and disco-fied love songs all terrible enough to have been major European hits. It was like a combination of international It's a Knockout and The Eurovision Song Contest, but without the intellectual rigour of either.

The people who supervised the "wattar jeem" and various other entertainments around the hotel were a group of hard-Karaoke-ing, young bronzed Italians with incredible teeth, who motorcycled naked except for shorts and flip- flops (and, of course, mobile phones) and took no greater precautions in the midday sun than maybe an occasional swig of mineral water. Just to rub it in, they sometimes wore shirts emblazoned with the word "Animation" and were at the heart of a group of physically perfect people who made my holiday a particular misery just by being their gorgeous selves.

When one of the Animation blokes fancied a swim he'd simply stand up, walk into the sea and swim (scything through the waves with a vigorous crawl). If I wanted a swim, I would apply my stay-white, factor 30 sun- cream from head to foot, lose the top of the bottle, find it again, walk towards the sea, tread on a sharp stone, fall over, etc. The fact that I, and the Animation boys, were surrounded at all times by topless women who were at least theoretically beautiful, made the discrepancy in our performances all the more galling.

Three days into the holiday I was in a permanent rage, and the sun became my enemy, for it was on the side of the Animation boys and their carefree, sportif acolytes. In movies, the seven stone weakling usually emerges as heroic, and I kept wishing for some event that would allow me to demonstrate to the topless women some of my own specialities: a suspension of the regular water polo tourneys, perhaps, in favour of an article-writing competition. I also longed for driving, cold rain, which compliments my character very well.

Of course, deep down, I was thinking, "Well, at least I am cleverer than these beach bums." But my wife who, as my mood worsened, showed signs of wanting to defect to the side of my unconscious rivals, pointed out that they could all speak several languages. "Whereas you," she went on mercilessly, "can only speak one."

Then, towards the end of my holiday, I read about those English football fans rioting in the South of France and a revelation occurred to me. I didn't approve, but I knew why they did it, and felt the twinges of a certain, shameful empathy. They were uglier, less graceful and less stylish than Johnny Foreigner, and they didn't like it one bit.