Wish You Were Here by Mike Gayle

on one of the main roads in the resort as every other frontage was a hotel, car-hire shop or takeaway food emporium. Scattered along the pavements were various groups of young Brits chatting to each other, sipping water or simply posing. Occasionally a delivery truck laden with bottled water or the odd hire car went by but the main source of noise pollution (other than the constant club DJ mix albums being pumped out of speakers located inside every shop) was from the roar of chunky-wheeled quad bikes being driven by lads like the ones at our hotel.
    â€˜From scooters to quad bikes,’ said Tom as two guys riding pillion passed by flicking the ‘v’s to their friends. ‘Do you remember the scooters we hired last time we were here?’
    â€˜I still bear the scars from when I skidded off mine racing you and Charlie,’ laughed Tom.
    â€˜Maybe we should hire one of these each for a bit of a laugh?’ said Andy, enviously eyeing up a quad bike parked up in front of our hotel.
    The last thing I wanted to do was let Andy talk me into hiring a quad bike so that we could relive our youth. My days of taking part in pointlessly reckless activities were long behind me. Now I no longer had a live-in girlfriend to look after me should the need arise I needed to be careful.
    As we headed along the road towards the beach with the general aim of finding somewhere reasonably nice and cheap to have breakfast we played holiday resort bingo. Clothes shops selling T-shirts bearing comedic gems like ‘I’m with stupid’? Tick. ‘Authentic’ Greek restaurants advertising ‘English-style roast dinners with all the trimmings’? Tick. Grocery stores selling copies of the Sun , the Star and the Daily Mirror ? Tick. Bars with ridiculously traditional English pub names like ‘The Royal Oak’? Tick and bingo! Every cliché, everywhere, and they were all repeated on a constant loop along every single inch of the road. It was like a reproduction Blackpool but with better weather. It was a simulated Skegness without the North Sea. It was Little England in the sunshine.

    We ate breakfast at Stars and Bars, an American-themed bar and diner with a British slant. The whole of the outdoor terrace had been empty when we’d sat down but the bar’s owners had compensated for this by attempting to import a ‘happening’ ambience into the bar via three large TV screens positioned above our heads, showing various MTV channels. Their attempts were hampered by the fact that the sound had been turned down on all three screens.
    Half distracted by the soundless MTV screen, we had barely glanced at the menus by the time our waiter arrived to take our order. Andy and I ordered lager (because it was cold and large) and then followed up with the ‘Killer’ English breakfast (bacon, eggs, sausages, tomatoes, mushrooms, hash browns, toast, tea and jam). Though Andy and I spoke to the waiter in English, for some reason Tom made the whole process more complicated by pulling out his Rough Guide book and earnestly murmuring a few sentences in Greek. At first we assumed that Tom’s pronunciation was so awful that the waiter had failed to understand a single word he’d said but it turned out that Kevin wasn’t Greek at all. He was actually from Bloxwich near Wolverhampton and was spending the summer in Crete helping out in his uncle’s bar to earn some money before going to university. It was all Andy and I could do to stop ourselves from spluttering with laughter as Tom sighed and mumbled: ‘I’ll have what they’re having.’

    Susie
    Following on from our late breakfast we ventured to a grocery store to buy bottled water and a couple of day-old English tabloid newspapers and continued on our journey towards the beach. At various junctures along the way, one of us would point out a landmark that we recalled from our last visit. Tom indicated Kato’s, a small