Lanzaroti 1.

On my way back from Romania I camped in a field behind a petrol station with only a dog on a chain and my motorcycle for company. In many ways I was at peace there more than where I am now, the Lanzaroti Princess Hotel, half board late booking discount. Here I sit staring full face into the four star luxuries that are the comforts of that slow run down to death, the pre-planned perfection that is the route to my own obsolescence. Sun, bird song, palms and cactus set in a concoction of concrete. Who would have thought there were enough seventy-year-old couples left to populate heaven’s waiting room; where every morsel of desire is catered for in the slow walk from breakfast to evening meal and bed. The Lanzaroti Princess is much like TV’s Hotel Babylon except that its guest are actually still ancient Babylonians. Set in a pile of earth’s excrement in the Atlantic famed for white paint and black and red gravel its perimeter must be about a mile. There has though been many subtle pleasures on our first day. The woman with Huntingdons attempting to self-serve herself jelly from the buffet, a sort of over enthusiastic salsa dancing couple micro fumbling. The buffet, in the centre of an aircraft hanger of gentile basking seals had an overall depressing feel, a sort of lifeless, ersatz opulence where life, so extremely provided for, became little more than heedless belly stuffing of free, as much as you can eat, food. If chi is life force then chi was absent. Then there was this morning’s welcome meeting. A blue chicken of a woman in Thomas Cook national dress gave us a chicken’s eye view of the island. Her Joyce Grenfill delivery was correct to the merest inflection, the upturn curlicues of enthusiasm and downs of concern. She mentions the free ‘Blanket Trips’ on Tuesdays and Wednesdays on which one is lulled into blissful stupor and then assailed with the blanket deal to end all blanket deals. Don’t sign anything! The small print will tell you, should you read it as I had to on our last visit, that to undo your ill-conceived purchase you will need to deliver a hand written note to a back street address in Bulgaria indicating your change of mind three days before you leave, thus dedicating the rest of your holiday to the task.