I am no good at face yoga

or relaxing on my holiday

We are, it turns out, utterly incapable of enjoying a sybaritic lifestyle in the sun while being waited on hand and foot. As an indolent woman who embraces inactivity, this information has surprised me greatly. I always assumed that I would be a natural at lounging. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We lasted approximately one day at being all inclusive holiday makers with nothing to do and not a care in the world. Actually, one morning would be more accurate. If going on a luxury holiday was an exam, we would have failed spectacularly and left in shame and a hail of mortar boards.

On the first night, Jason read out the list of activities we could take part in. We decided against the early start the next morning to do ‘Face Yoga.’ If it hadn’t been an early start, I would definitely have gone for a look. I imagine a lot of women in leotards, gurning away to some kind of soothing, whale music. The brochure said that one lesson would show immediate results if you were looking to banish dark circles. My face is one, huge, dark circle, like a well of despair. I like the idea of banishing it, but I’m not sure one hour of chewing the cud is really going to cut it. I don’t trust anything I haven’t seen Adrienne do and she has never once mentioned Face Yoga.

There were lots of free activities, most of which were centred around yoga. There was very little traditional, tie yourself up like a pretzel and try not to fart or fall asleep yoga. There was a lot of new, whizzy type yoga. You could even do yogalates, which I presume is a combination of yoga and pilates, and not yoga and chocolate, sadly. All of these classes take place outside on a raised platform by the pool, so you can provide free entertainment for the other guests as you flail around, sweating and wobbling and wishing you’d just taken advantage of the free gin instead.

The other activities involved things you might do on a cruise, like shuffleboard and ping pong. One, lithe young woman in a branded t-shirt bounded towards me and said in a relentlessly cheerful voice: ‘Would you like to play a game?’ It gave me a horrible window into being in a pensioner whilst simultaneously flashing me back to my time in infant school. ‘No!’ I snarled and stamped off, leaving the poor woman confused and upset.

We tried relaxing round the pool. There are four pools here, as well as an actual beach. The problems here were numerous. Jason gets too hot after about thirty seconds and needs to seek shade or get in the water. Then he gets too cold. I only like to swim outside when I am the temperature of molten iron. Until that point I like to sit and read my book, which I can’t do very comfortably outside because sweat, flies, other people, annoying husbands, the need to wee constantly because I’ve drunk litres of water so I don’t desiccate, etc.

The main issue for us, however, has been the piped music which plays through the resort for 18 hours a day. In the last few days I have developed a vehement loathing for Greek folk music, Greek soft rock and faux Balearic chill out beats which sound almost like tunes you know, but not enough that anyone is going to do you for infringement of copyright. You can’t even scratch your arse without someone accompanying you with a strum of their electric bouzouki, and it is making me quite squirrelly.

We spent the first morning, rotating round the grounds in ever more frantic pursuit of something that would make us feel relaxed, other than lying in a darkened hotel room with a towel over our heads in case anyone tried to play any music at us. After lunch, Jason said: ‘I need to get out of here,’ in the desperate tones of a broken man, so we headed for the exit.

We are staying in a small town called Kolympia. I say town, it’s a village with the lights turned up. Its population consists of thousands of transient English and German tourists, seven hundred cats and either twenty, old moustachioed men wearing puffa jackets in 27 degree heat, or one moustachioed man who really gets around a lot. He does have a Vespa, so that points to it being just the one.

The main road has four sports bars, an abandoned amusement park that is genuinely creepy and forty seven shops that all sell flip flops, olive oil and clothing that you think is remarkable while you’re on holiday and immediately give to a charity shop once you get home and realise you can’t wear a fringed, mini poncho with dolphins leaping across your tits on Poplar High Street without any aggro. After an hour we had been in every shop and took to the back roads in desperation.

Eventually we stumbled on the harbour, which is teeny weeny and has a matching, teeny weeny church. There were a lot of men, mending their boats, poring over their engines and chatting animatedly in Greek, probably about the two, sweaty idiots who had just arrived. We staggered up to the church, where I said a prayer that went something along the lines of: ‘Please make me better at being on holiday, kthxbailoveyou Amen.’

We loved the harbour. It was the realest place we had been all day. There was no music. Nobody wanted to play with us. Nobody invited us to a new experience a new form of exercise. It was terrific. There was a sandy beach curving away from the working part of the harbour and we were so delighted with it, we went for a paddle, like real people on holiday do.

We passed a hut which seemed to be made of a lot of old doors and bits of mattress. It was wedged in a crevice in the rocks. On the front wall of the hut, the owner had proudly nailed the picture of the naked man and woman standing on the wings of a swan that you used to be able to buy from Boots in the Seventies, for reasons I don’t understand, given that it was and is a chemist’s. As soon as I saw the picture I felt reassured that I could do this holiday. My prayers had been answered.