Eight Reasons to Suspect Your Chosen Holiday Destination is Middle Class.

1)  Every second child playing Wholesome Outdoor Games on the beach is called Saskia, Lolly, Sophia, Algie, or Fred.

2) Red shorts, red trousers.  Everywhere.

3)  It appears to be a legal requirement to have a dog, to the extent that you begin to wonder if there is a check-point at the edge of town refusing entry to those families who turn up without them. (You personally don't own a dog, but congratulate yourself for having taken the precaution of borrowing one for the duration of your holiday.  Although - picking up pooh.  Do people really do this ALL the time?).

4) Said dog must be either a Jack Russell, Border Terrier, Labrador (any colour acceptable), Golden Retriever, or a Springer or Cocker Spaniel.  (Your borrowed dog is a Labrador / Cocker Spaniel cross.  So THAT's a relief).

5)  The dog's name must be Saskia, Lolly, Sophia, Algie or Fred.

6)  You walk into a shop looking for a friend who has wandered off and ask the sales assistant if she's seen her.  The conversation goes as follows:

Me: 'Is my friend in the changing rooms?  She's wearing a blue & white striped top.'

Sales Assistant - without missing a beat: 'You mean, like everyone else in town at the moment?'

7)  The narrow streets of the town are clogged with people, children, and dogs, and things get somewhat fraught when a random parent calls out to their child (using, of course, a name from the prescribed list) and assorted toddlers and dogs strain at the leash to see who is summoning them, tripping up their red-trousered matelot-top wearing parents' and / or owners as they do so.

8)  The same narrow streets are regularly jammed by traffic in the middle of the day, not by holiday makers hopelessly circumnavigating the town in their shiny 4x4's hunting for the El Dorado of an available parking space (they do at least keep moving, even if it is at snail's pace), but by Waitrose and Ocado vans driven by dead-eyed men and women trying to deliver halloumi and couscous to the hungry masses.


Please Note:

No, I'm not telling you where this is.  I'm far too busy shaking the sand out of my deck shoes, sorting whites from coloureds (red shorts have a tendency to run when washed with blue & white striped tops), and hunting through the cupboards for some couscous to serve with a delicious grilled halloumi salad for dinner tonight.

Bikini summer - against all expectations

What does it take to get a mid-40's woman back in a bikini for the first time in 10-plus years?

News flash; it is not, as one might think, losing a stone since last summer. I tried that; it turned out that losing weight through controlled eating is one thing, but toning up your bod is something else entirely. As I looked at myself in the mirror, it became clear that a bikini-fit body (in my humble opinion) requires exercise as well as turning down that danish pastry, dammit. (Or surgery I suppose, but I don't have access to Ms Moore's contacts or funds, sadly). Who knew?

Well, I did, actually; it's just that I buried my head in the sand and hoped that this inconvenient truth didn't apply to me. Turned out, it did (even Moscow's most flattering mirror, a pulled-in tummy and squinting at my reflection couldn't hide that fact), so pre-holiday, I sadly put my bikini away in the cupboard yet again and packed my safe and trusty one-piece instead.

And yet, here I am, on holiday, sporting a bikini.

It turns out that it's not the body in the bikini that is important; it is the country that the body is in. And Croatia, where we're currently soaking up the sun for a few days, is utterly - UTTERLY - the land of the 2-piece. To the extent that if a reasonably modest woman turns up on the beach in her 'shape-wear' one-piece she will look like a freak.

Add to that the fact there are plenty of other people on the beach who seem far less concerned about body issues than I do (even though they might have reason to be more so), and that in fact it's actually too hot for a one piece, and my only course of action was to retire to the beach-side market to source an emergency bikini. I managed that - it's amazing what desperation will do for a person's body image - and bravely wore it onto the beach whilst hoping to high heaven that a) I wouldn't scare the - metaphorical - horses and b) that it wouldn't fall apart the moment I hit the water with Boys #1 and #2 (not, for any new readers here, a euphamism for certain parts of my anatomy but simply the way I refer to my sons on this blog. Although, now I think about it...).

And you know what? Nobody noticed, or cared. There was no horrified intake of breath from the entire beach, no blasting of whistles as the body-police raced out with tent-sized kaftans to cover my embarrassment, no clicking of cameras to document the event. There was, in fact, far less interest than there would have been if I had put on the one-piece from John Lewis which I had originally intended to wear.

Mind you, whether said bikini will ever see the light of day anywhere else is doubtful, unless I can bring myself to do those sit-ups and abdominal crunches before next holiday. And the chances of that are so slim that I suspect I should just dump it at the airport as we leave...