One of the great preoccupations of my childhood was acquiring a pet. Now my parents were very straight-thinking people who believed that if you had an animal in the house, it had to serve a purpose. If your house was infested by mice (ours wasn’t) you bought a cat. If you lived in an isolated house in the country (which we didn’t) you bought a guard-dog. All other animals were a waste of time and money.

Yet despite all of the logical arguments that they could bring to bear, including the difficulty of looking after the pet when we were on holiday or the grief I would feel when said pet inevitably died, I still resolutely clung to my intention to acquire one sooner or later. It didn’t have to be furry and cute, it could be big and pug-ugly for all I cared, as long as it was living and I could feed it and preferably take it for walks.

Yes, I did think of this but I couldn't afford the fruit.

Clearly, if my parents were not going to buy me a pet, I would have to get one by some other means. As I recall, my first real attempt to do this was to catch tadpoles in the local river. On the principle of more is better, I collected hundreds, conveyed them home in a jam-jar and put them in a bucket in the back yard. I didn’t feed them as I had no idea what they ate, but I added a bit of pond weed and a few stones to make them feel at home. Naturally some of them died. I realised this had happened when they stopped wagging their tails and remained motionless for a few days.

To my delight, the surviving tadpoles actually turned into frogs. This was fascinating to watch. The little frogs were far more exciting than tadpoles, which frankly didn’t do a great deal except wriggle about a bit and then die. I looked forward to the day when I could give them names, teach them tricks and perhaps even take them for a walk.

Sadly, the frogs had other ideas. As soon as they had four legs they promptly high-tailed it out of the bucket and disappeared into the garden, never to be seen again.

Some of my tadpoles leaving the bucket.

The next potential pet, as I recall, was a fledgling sparrow that I found in the street. I took it home with me and put it in a cardboard box lined with cotton wool. Remembering where I had gone wrong with the tadpoles, and quite sure this time that the sparrow was not going to evolve into something else, I attempted to feed it on bread and milk and mashed-up worms. However, little did I know that I had happened on the Mahatma Ghandi of the sparrow world. Objecting to this oppression from another bipedal species, the sparrow promptly went on hunger strike. I’m not sure how much publicity this generated in the bird world but it soon became obvious that this was going to turn out badly. It did. However, I gave this admirable example of avian passive resistance a decent burial and marked the grave with a cross on which I wrote ‘Bird’. Looking back on it, the bird was probably not a Christian.

Mahatma Sparrow.

Apart from the natural world, there was another source of acquiring a pet. This was the local fairground. In those days, fairgrounds were a plentiful source of goldfish. Typically these could be won by tossing a certain number of ping-pong balls into goldfish bowls but this was a skill I never managed to master. Alternatively, you could also win a plastic bag containing a live goldfish at the shooting range. I soon became a crack shot with a .177 air-rifle. However, the trouble with being such a good shot was that you inevitably got into the higher prize-range. Instead of winning a goldfish in a plastic bag, I was winning tasteless porcelain knickknacks and life-size neon-blue fluffy bunnies. It took some further skill to negotiate the prize downwards to a goldfish in a plastic bag.

So I had a succession of goldfish who lived and died in a goldfish bowl on the dining-room window ledge. All of them appeared to have learned something from the sparrow since, to a man, well, a fish, they all adamantly refused to eat. I saved up my pocket money and bought them the best goldfish food that money could buy but it did no good. A week and they were floating upside down.

And sometimes they just told me to get lost.

This being, the nineteen-fifties when ‘animal rights’ meant ‘how would you like to be cooked?’, my next potential source of a pet was the local market. At the market was a ‘pet stall’ that appeared to specialise in half-dead rabbits, scrawny budgerigars and stacks of tortoises. When I put ‘stacks’, I meant that literally: they were stacked like pancakes. The bunnies and budgies were way out of my price-range so I settled for a tortoise.

Now I tried to make this tortoise as comfortable as possible. I kept it on a table in the garden shed and tried to tempt it with lettuce and anything else that I felt a tortoise might eat. However, the ghost of Mahatma Sparrow was still around. I would wave a bit of lettuce under the tortoise’s nose and it would just gaze at me disdainfully. I would attempt to seduce it with other vegetable titbits but the tortoise clearly regarded me as just another imperialist oppressor of third-world reptiles. I had another hunger strike on my hands.

But Tortoise did not have the moral resolve of Mahatma Sparrow. I arrived one morning, lettuce in hand, to find an empty box. In the night, Tortoise had scaled its walls, shinned down the leg of the table and probably waited until I opened the door before making a quick escape to the garden and freedom.

No! Don't jump!

It was many years until I next tried my luck with pets. I was a student then and, quite frankly, having a pet was the last thing on my mind. I was also a poor student so it was even laster on my mind than it would normally have been. Unfortunately, one day I happened to pass a pet shop and lingered in front of the window. Bad move. There was the cutest, the most delightful hamster I had ever seen. It was love at first sight, and, as it turned out, pretty cheap love at that. Mind you, although the hamster was cheap, the cage, the wheel, the food and the instruction book called ‘Enjoy your hamster’ added up to quite a few pounds. But I gave him – or her (I never did quite find out what sex it was) – a name: very originally, Hammy.

Hammy ate! He ate enough for three hamsters and actually got incredibly fat. So fat, that the wheel became more or less useless and I considered taking it back to the shop to swap for the guinea pig version. Unlike Tortoise, who refused to say a word, Hammy would utter delightful squeaks and even bite me occasionally to show his affection.

And then, one day, I returned from college to find the cage empty. Somehow, Hammy had found the combination to the lock, abseiled down from his table and hitch-hiked across the bedroom. He had to be there somewhere though. I had learned my lessons with Tortoise and was quite sure that he hadn’t sneaked out of the room when I opened the door.

Don't play all innocent with me, chum!

So I started searching. I looked behind all of the large cardboard boxes in which I kept my books. These were large, heavy boxes containing the very best of English literature.

I might have heard a brief squeak but, to this day, I can’t be sure of that. What I did find, under one of the boxes that I pulled out, was a flat hamster. From fat to flat in a few seconds.

The memory of Hammy lived on with me for many years. Mostly because his instruction book got mixed up with the cookery books. Anyone idly browsing through them would find, between ‘100 best chicken recipes’ and ‘The Art of French Cuisine’, a slim volume entitled ‘Enjoy your hamster’.

I have never had a pet since then.

Once, there was no such thing as tourism. True, Alexander the Great did take a large number of Greeks on the hippie trail to India and almost back while Napoleon took an even larger number of Frenchmen on an extended package tour of Europe, but this was not tourism as we know it. Firstly, they were rather heavily armed and had a somewhat less than friendly attitude to the local population and secondly they were not so much interested in looking at the local monuments as they were in demolishing them or occasionally dismantling them completely and taking them home.

Alexander realizes the coach is leaving without him.

On the other hand, there are certainly a large number of modern-day tourists who might have felt quite at home in Alexander or Napoleon’s armies. These are the people who regard the local population as foreigners. You know the one’s I mean. They are the people who complain that Italy would be great if it weren’t for the Italians. Or that Spain is wasted on the Spanish. They complain about the food, the plumbing, the heat, the cold, the beer, etc.

Let’s get one thing straight: if you visit another country, YOU are the foreigner. The people who live there are locals.

A group of foreigners cunningly disguised as a seventies rock band.

The French recognise this completely – they have the largest number of foreign tourists of any country in the world and make little or no attempt to communicate with them at all.

Tourism was more or less invented by the British, who are also responsible for the weekend, but that’s another story. In the eighteenth century, the Grand Tour became de rigeur for every lady or gentleman. In spite of its name the Grand Tour was not exactly grand by modern standards, confining itself mostly to France, Switzerland and Italy. Its purpose was largely to acquaint the English nobility with European manners and culture. Whether they actually acquired any is a moot point.

A group of English aristocrats imbibing manners and culture.

Because the Grand Tour was so enormously popular – even threatening to filter down to the lower classes – it soon became obvious that there was a large gap in the market for anyone who could successfully put together an itinerary. And provide boat, rail, and stagecoach tickets, approved accommodation with water closets, tasty meals, telescopes and guaranteed help from locals who would not rip you off. Enter Thomas Cook.

Strangely enough, as different to the huge contingents of yobs and lager louts who have been the bread and butter of many a package deal company ever since, Thomas Cook was a teetotaller and later became a Baptist minister.

Thomas Cook in fancy dress.

So much for history. Now let’s get to the present.
Given the fact that most people feel in sore need of a holiday after so many months of work, why is it that a significant number of them leave their brains at home when they do go on holiday? I mean, they remember the toothbrush and the fifty changes of underwear so why is the grey matter overlooked? Why do they wander around a charming village in Crete/the Dordogne/the Algarve/ you-name-it like total zombies with staring eyes and mouths wide open? Haven’t they ever seen a house before? Or a baker’s? Or a motorbike?

And when I say ‘wander’, I really mean amble, like a collection of oxen with haemorrhoids. Generally, the only way to pass a group of peregrinating tourists is to barge through them with a snow-plough, which is not an easy vehicle to find in Turkey in the summer.

Tourists attending a line-dancing class, Bodrum, 2008.

If any further proof were needed that the majority of tourists are brain-dead – on a temporary basis at least – there is the souvenir shop. Now, first of all, can anyone tell me the point of souvenirs? Yep, you’re right, there isn’t one. Souvenir is one of the most frequently used foreign words – in this case French – used by people who don’t speak a foreign language. It means a remembrance. Something that will recall the place that you visited. So what is the point of buying a souvenir for someone at home? They haven’t been to the place where you went on holiday. They have nothing to remember. So buying them a plastic gondola or a gold-painted miniature of the Eiffel Tower is unlikely to cut any ice with them. But of course it’s a well-meant gift and they can hardly throw it away, so it will join the rubber sphinx, the day-glow Golden Gate Bridge and the rather vulgar Bulgarian celluloid goat to collect dust at the back of a cupboard.

Ye Olde Greeke cheap tat shop.

And that’s not forgetting the nature of the souvenirs themselves. Why do people persist in buying such revolting tat? What are you possibly going to do with a plastic replica of the Venus de Milo at 1/32nd scale? Apart from inflicting it on a friend or family member, that is. Will you assign this monstrosity a place of honour in your home? Will you place it in an IKEA presentation cabinet against a black velvet background and spotlight it with a halogen light? Of course you won’t. When you get it home, you’ll look at it fondly, remember where you bought it and then it will join the rubber sphinx, the day-glow Golden Gate Bridge and the rather vulgar Bulgarian celluloid goat to collect dust at the back of a cupboard.

The infamous Bulgarian celluloid goat (detail).

Then we come to eating habits. For me, and for many others, sampling the local cuisine is an essential part of going somewhere on holiday. However, anyone who has had the misfortune to spend a few days in Playa del Ingles on the island of Gran Canaria (and this place is by no means the only one) will look in vain for a restaurant where they serve Spanish food. I’m not saying that such a place does not exist, but it’s certainly well-hidden. Playa del Ingles abounds in English pubs, German snack bars and Dutch pancake houses. Naturally none of these provide food of the same quality as you will find in England, Germany or Holland but the tourists flock to them nonetheless. And why? Because they don’t want to eat Spanish food. Similarly, they don’t want to speak Spanish. In fact, if they can spend a holiday in Playa del Ingles without having to encounter a single native Spaniard, so much the better.

Sample the best regional delicacies.

Because meeting ‘foreigners’ always means complications. Why struggle to discuss the weather with someone you barely understand when you can chat about roof repairs and double-glazing with a garage mechanic from Watford?

Drinking, on the other hand, is something that transcends all frontiers. It is also the main occupation of the average tourist. To see the amount of alcohol that is downed in one evening in a typical holiday resort, you would think that Northern Europe was in the grip of Prohibition. Naturally, thanks to the European Union, drinks are more or less the same price in Birmingham as they are in Benidorm – perhaps even a bit cheaper - but that won’t stop a tourist from drinking as much as he can. Unfortunately, the effects of the alcohol will have worn off by the next day. It is not possible to spread them out over the following year.

Sample the best of local beers.

Actually there is one good thing about the sort of tourist that I’ve been writing about: for a few weeks of the year we are spared their presence at home.