Holiday to Tenerife: Part 1: Terminal Velocity

It’s been approximately 6 years since I travelled abroad from my home country England, the last place being Chicago at the tender age of 21. Now at 27 I have grown vast amounts and am ready to embark on what some might describe as the thinking mans holiday.

Tenerife has not so much a stigma as a stark warning for all revellers of culture and dignity. If you’re into TOWIE this is for you if you’re into Gaudi you just stepped into the Fort Boyard of Chavdom or simply just Chavmagedon. The more unnatural hue of brown you are able to tone yourself with before embarking the more at home you will seem.

I’m really only going to visit a friend and booked the flight only last night. We have yet to leave the ground yet and are waiting in the Gatwick Airport terminal.

My first impressions of the terminal, a mall stuck in some kind of alternative dimension, segregated from the modern world by a boarding pass. Chanel stores fill the stale glossed atmosphere with a pungent sense of excess, bringing thoughts of what one might imagine air travel has lost since the 1950s. If the place smells glamorous maybe everyone won’t notice that’s it’s a netherworld of commodity, a prison of purchase.

When you have a few thousand people trapped in a space with their holiday money why not pretend to them that they are getting a huge VAT discount in order to milk a few quids from them that they will otherwise waste on a foreign entity. I guess the reason they take all of your liquids away as you get checked in like a pig on slaughtered day is so that they can sell you it back at a more glamorous faux-exclusive price.

Even Wetherspoons is sans value, the last bastion of fairness, probably. Anyway although it sounds it I am actually excited to fly and sink into some beaches. I hope my 3G doesn’t sting me.

See you in Tenerife.