Maspalomas

When you book the cheapest all-inclusive holiday ever at the very, very last minute you don't really expect luxurious accommodation, fluffy white bath towels and the best upper sets as fellow holiday-makers. And sure enough, we didn't get any of that in Gran Canaria. But we did get sun. And we did get a perfectly acceptable apartment, a nice pool, edible food, lashings of alcohol on tap and the dunes of Maspalomas. So as I lay on a sunbed reading David Foster Wallace's Consider The Lobster, thinking that many of the characters around me sounded a lot like people I had seen in Eastenders (there were even two Frank Butchers) — and feeling not a little superior (mostly because of my reading matter rather than any innate class) — I came upon this passage on vulgarity:

But of course we should keep in mind that vulgar has many dictionary definitions and that only a couple of these have to do with lewdness and bad taste [DFW is writing about the porn industry]. At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over.

So , there you have it — I am proud to have been a vulgar tourist and here is my vulgar slideshow.


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