Further observations

1. Some parents are completely shit. When a toddler pool has two 2-year-olds, a 3-year old and two 4-year-olds in it, allowing your 7-8 year olds to rampage around on a 6 foot long, 3 foot high inflatable killer whale to the point where they ride over the top of a 2-year old and completely submerge him, while you sit on a sun lounger and smoke a cigarette is shit parenting.

2. Some parents are completely weird. Putting girls as young as two in a bikini is just weird. They don't have breasts. The bikini sits in a strange place and is utterly pointless. Let them run around naked, or just in swimming pants/trunks like the boys, or in an all-in-one, but stop treating them like tiny "sexy" adults. It's weird.

3. A surprising number of people don't seem to have got the message about sunburn. A horrifying number of children and adults are wandering around with awful sunburn.

4. Some parents are shit or weird and I'm not sure which. If your son (aged ~6) smacks his head on the side of the pool and then sits on the side sobbing and clutching his head, being the fourth adult to arrive on scene, despite being only a few feet away, and then shrugging and walking off is either shit or weird. Maybe your child is a little git, but if he's had a head injury, would some attention and sympathy really kill you?

5. Zeal in the use of bleach to clean bathrooms is commendable only up to the point where your guests' clothes get bleached (and thus ruined) whenever they actually use the bathroom. This was enough to banish my munchkin-like outer carapace and have me marching to reception, bleached clothes in hand...

6. LittleBear will not eat plain rice here, because "it tastes funny". Nor will he eat sweetcorn, or peas, for the same reasons. Nor can he be tempted by the idea of mixing them. When rice, peas and sweetcorn is one of the dishes on offer however, he will eat three helpings and not have room left for the chips that he also asked for. Though he'll still have room for three large slices of melon and a bowl of natural yoghurt. Go on. You explain my son's eating habits, because I can't.

7. Other people are even more insular than me, which is a situation I found impossible to imagine up to this point. Despite the fact that there is a beautiful, empty, sandy beach less than 300m from the front of the hotel, we have yet to have to share the beach with anyone other than a few couples emerging from the hotel that's actually built on the edge of the beach. Seriously, nobody is shifting beyond pool, bar, restaurant and hotel room.



Note pertaining to topics 2 and 3:
Obviously I am neither shit nor weird for dressing my son in a swimsuit that comes down to his knees and past his elbows, and slathering all remaining surfaces in factor 50 suncream. This is not paranoia, this is a lifetime of pale skin in action.