Sunday Express

Lifelong love affair battling the buffet on a cheap break

As we all start thinking about fixing up our summer holidays, MICHAEL BOOKER can’t wait for his favourite package deal

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IT WAS the moment my inner skinflint saw the words “all-inclusive week-long holiday to the Costa Brava for £198 per person” that I knew I’d break my vow. It had been a solemn vow, one sworn to Mrs Booker after returning from our ill-fated family summer holiday to Majorca last year.

The vow? Never to go all-inclusive again. It had been born out of the agony and exhaustion of last year’s week-long “break” which had seen the seafood buffet night take silent but near deadly revenge on my wife and me – stealing two nights of Mediterran­ean luxury and replacing them with the fear that we’d never get out of the bathroom and see sunshine again.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing but I do wish I had Googled the question “Should you eat your body weight in shellfish from a buffet that has been standing at room temperatur­e for an hour in the summer?”

Had I done so then I would have realised that my confidence feasting on two platefuls of lobster, mussels and shrimp had been somewhat misplaced. And yet six months on, the painful memory of those fateful TWO nights holding my wife’s hair away from her face as we swapped places in the tight confines of the hotel bathroom, has faded.

Faded enough, it seems, for the lure of a cheap holiday where everything is bought and paid for in advance to make us risk it all again.

Many of you, no doubt, will be, like us, fending off the New Year gloom and Brexit brouhaha by poring over holiday offers on the internet – or, if you are as much of a Luddite as I am – a brochure.

And, like us, you’ll end up dismissing the idea of heading off somewhere spiritual and life-enhancing such as Machu Picchu, or wherever people go to find themselves these days, and instead take the easy option.

You see, there’s nothing I enjoy more than pitching up, suitcases in hand, at the reception desk of a southern European hotel at 10pm when it’s artificial­ly lit like the interrogat­ion room from a 1970s spy movie.

Then there’s the nagging fear when you hand over your passports that you’ll never see them again, followed by the feeling of being welcomed for a long stretch in Shawshank Prison when they line up the family one-by-one to strap on the allinclusi­ve bracelet.

Within hours the bracelet has become a deep annoyance given that it’s either too loose or too tight. Whatever the fit there’s nothing like the post-holiday stigma for all to see – the tan line that is the internatio­nal secret sign of greed and sloth.

The bracelet is like a magic amulet that wields great power, forcing staff to give you food and drink for free. But it’s always worth reminding yourself that the heady magic it possesses wears off as soon as you step back outside into the real world, where the shops and bars require you to flash the cash again.

If you forget, it can make for an embarrassi­ng moment trying to buy a can of Fanta lemon while gesticulat­ing wildly at your wristband in pidgin Greek.

The buffet restaurant is where most of the action is to be had at the all-inclusive hotel. I’ve had some of my most memorable holiday moments fighting it out in the queue with ravenous children and adults from across the world for a piece of steak, cooked in front of me by a bored-looking Greek student – someone who looks like he instantly regretted his choice of holiday job the moment he was handed the baggy chef’s whites and floppy hat.

After a few days of battling fellow guests over three meals a day I’m usually on nodding terms with my major mealtime foes, although a mutual respect for the amount we are able to shovel away usually develops too.

One year, in a hotel on the island of Kos, I met my match in the form of a middle-aged German woman who, incidental­ly, had one arm. She may have been foolishly underestim­ated by some diners as they tried to hog the hotplates but with typically cool teutonic resilience she was a buffet ninja, marshallin­g her two young children and their plates with astonishin­g expertise.

I stood sadly with my plate of bread rolls, watching a masterclas­s I knew I could never better. The other big thing I’d miss if we didn’t go all-inclusive is the entertainm­ent. After dinner, things start to hot up, usually on a stage close to the main bar, just after the horrors of the “mini disco”.

As a family we take up a table with a good view of the stage but not close enough to be bothered by any of the acts who seek audience participat­ion. I get the drinks in at the bar and cross my fingers that the local vodka (not the branded stuff that costs extra) won’t end up permanentl­y damaging my eyesight. Then we settle down for the show, put together enthusiast­ically by an eclectic bunch of drama students recruited from across the continent.

These overly-chirpy kids are usually the same ones you find bothering you to join in pool sports during the day while you try to ignore them by burying your head in a sun-wrinkled Dan Brown.

MOST treat these summer season shows as their last throw of the dice for stardom, with failure leaving Britain’s Got Talent as their final, nuclear option. Quality-wise these shows vary wildly from hotel to hotel although the slick ones are less memorable than the ramshackle production­s.

One that stays in the memory was also that year in Kos. The spectacle was provided by a group of Italian 18-year-olds whose shows usually descended into mining laughs from minor physical violence and what in the current #MeToo age would be deemed sexual harassment.

Worryingly, they went down a storm.

So, despite last year’s flirtation with “barf-board” – it’s like full-board but only with food poisoning for free – I will be taking up the all-inclusive option once again.

And if you come face-to-face with me over the buffet in a Mediterran­ean hotel this summer, don’t worry.

That look on my face isn’t a frown, it’s just the indigestio­n kicking in.

 ??  ?? MERRY BAND: Michael with his children James and Molly and all-inclusive wrist IDs
MERRY BAND: Michael with his children James and Molly and all-inclusive wrist IDs

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