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I went down to visit an old friend who manages a swish new watersports resort on the Turkish coast. A way of going to a sunny part of England, while pretending to go to Turkey. A camp for fun. Bugger local colour, the people who do these holidays are desperate and they have children. They want some corner of a foreign field that is forever England, and never mind the culture. Get on a plane full of English people for a few hours, then a night coach dash through the outskirts of some crumbling soviet style cities, into the deserted countryside and at midnight you arrive. Theoretically.

The plane was 3 hours late so we arrived in the middle of the night. I say ‘we’ because Ms Mia insisted that if I was going to the Mediterranean and I didn’t take her, there’d be trouble. Mad Ms M doesn’t do planes (we’re going to crash), coaches (we’re going to crash), or watersports (we’re going to drown and wearing sports clothing is stupid), so she came just to have a good moan. She’d thrashed her writing arm writing commercial copy  and wanted to sit by the pool and nurse herself back to what she imagines good health. Or so she said.

The room was tastefully done up in the style of an ancient Greek motel, if they’d had motels. Above our twin beds – one of the things about going on holiday with an ex – was a faux fresco fragment of Greek lovers from the classic age, all willowy limbs and diaphanous textiles. The sliding balcony door was framed in Doric columns of distressed beige, as were the beds. Even the marble floor was beige. But I bet we had better plumbing than half of Turkey.

We woke to that Mediterranean sky that reminds your interior designer of Farrow and Ball’s Cook’s Blue, and the sea a shade of Arsenic (number 214). After a wake up roll up on the balcony we went off to breakfast and that’s where the trouble started. The Turkish kitchen staff had gone mental. Unless you’ve survived since ancient Rome, or you’ve been a diplomat at one of those state bashes, you’ve never seen this much food in one place. Seconds. Thirds. Eat till you burst. Every meal, every day, was as much as you could ever conceive of eating and you left the dining terrace in a rolling stagger. Package holiday heaven.

Our fellow holiday makers were clad in the collective hallucination of English leisure: Quicksilver, Animal, Fat Face, O’Neill, Billabong…The logos of magical thinking: If we all just keep it up, we’ll live in a country with a climate  and we won’t work in Swindon, we’ll live on the beach in Australia and be tan and thin. No you won’t. As soon as they’d killed themselves with calories and covered each other in spf50, it was off to the beach and sailing. Ahhh, a laser dinghy on the morning bay. Light wind and clear water – more like a massage than sailing. The beach staff, all lovely young things, Turk and Brit, were so helpful you wanted to take them home. M got a beach lounger at the far end of the beach and worried about her tan in isolation. And that’s what we did. I sailed and she smoked and seethed on the beach. We ate and ate, and read and read and sailed and sailed.

We thought about blending in, but it was uphill. M kept muttering that these weren’t our people and I kept thinking that we didn’t have any people because that would imply some link to humanity. We looked wrong. There was some kind of barrier. Every time I got to talking to some nice couple from Richmond or Manchester I ended up making a mistake. I’d bring up the imminent collapse of civilization, or peak oil and they’ve got little children so they’re not thrilled to hear from some old loony that it’s all over and that Leicestershire will look like the Ukraine in 10 years. Or that was M’s explanation anyway. I thought it might be that she didn’t have that yummy mummy hair and the top shop beach wear with the gold trim and sequins. And then I found out from Simon, 11, that the kids called her the shouting wife and that explained it.

After a few days we both got the creeps. It was like being in that TV show from the 60s, the Prisoner, you kept expecting to see Patrick McGoohan and a big white balloon. Food arrived. As soon as you’d finished a plate it was whisked away by a smiling young Turkish person. You had fun on the beach. You couldn’t leave. You couldn’t leave because all the surrounding area is Turkish military and they have no sense of humour. At 4 in the afternoon there was a dinghy race, every day, which was always won by the same kid from Ireland. We only found out later he was a world class racer and we’d all been wasting our time. We did yoga. We did pilates. We did something with big balls, let me rephrase that, we did an exercise class where you sat on a big plastic ball and did sit ups till you cried. We ate again. In the evenings we sat in the beach bar and drank beer. People read big novels. Children annoyed their parents. It seemed timeless but in a terrifying way. I felt I knew how cows felt: domesticated and passive. Just a big domesticated mammal in a fun prison.

They made us go to into town on one day. We mountain biked. Not just any mountain bikes. All brand new Gary Fishers for Crissakes. A bit OTT for a 20 minute ride but hey, this is funtown. A fishing harbour teeming with feral cats and old men drinking tea from tiny glasses and smoking. We wandered the back streets and looked in the shops. This place had been a fishing harbour since Agamemnon was making trouble. Old stone lanes and alleys. It had that kind of marginal poverty you see in places on the fringes of the West. Not bad, but not great. All the wrong logos. Personality cult pictures of Ataturk everywhere. We ate terrible fish and chips and three strands of dead lettuce imitating a salad. I had to have a secret conversation in broken Turkish with the owner after pretending I was on my way to the toilet. M can’t stand the sight of fish with heads, so I had to ask them to filet the fish for us, but without letting her know or she would have been embarrassed. I was trying to explain phobias in a language I don’t speak. He was mystified, but did his best. It wasn’t much of an escape. All the people from the camp were at the same restaurant because it was the day we had to go to town and it was the only good one. We finished and biked home, defeated.

At last, Saturday, going home. You can only do this for a while. We sat around waiting for the coach. By now the kids were fed up, mums were ridiculous colours, and everyone  had gained 15 pounds. M had managed to burn her bum the colour of sunset in a last minute attempt to look like a Bedouin, so she couldn’t sit down properly. I’d windsurfed till my arms didn’t work anymore. Time to go. We piled on the coach and drove through towns made up entirely of pastel tower blocks stuck out in the dry hills. Who builds this stuff? Who lives there? Sort of bad Islamic science fiction dystopia sprouting endless satellite dishes. No trees. No water. No thanks.

We arrived at the airport and there was a security check before you entered the terminal. I thought that was a bit cheeky, I mean this is a Muslim country. I wanted to mention to the armed guard that I thought it was a bit rich, given that they were the ones blowing up our airports, not the other way round, but M talked me out of it. Same time next year?