Who's The Daddy: The sun dappled beaches feels hundreds of miles away

After a long, dark, wet, cold, miserable winter that lasted around three years (and counting), the warm, sweet air and golden sunshine of the Canary Islands in April feels like a performance-enhancing drug.

Food tastes better, drinks hit the spot and after you catch the heady scent of sun cream on your wife’s neck for the first time in forever, you almost forget what it feels like to be cold. Almost, but not quite.

The thing that’s weird, is when it’s time to go, and you’re sitting in the hotel lobby with your suitcases packed around you as carefree fellow guests who still have time on the clock sashay past in their swimming gear, it suddenly feels like you only got there five minutes ago. So where did all that time go?

Well here’s where me and the boss’ went during kid-free, sun-drenched week in Fuerteventura, as ours lead their own lives now - although daughter #2 was back in town to get some paid work in over Easter, hold the fort and mind her howling lunatic of a childhood cat, Mr Robbie.

Up around 9ish to eat breakfast that had been bought, cooked and handed to us literally on a plate by hotel staff, walk a couple of miles in the warm morning rays along the most perfect beach you’ve ever seen where we’d spend an afternoon tickled by the sun and the sound of breaking waves, get back to spend an hour in the hotel spa (included in the price, I’m not made of money), dinner, drinks in the fresh air outside bars in town and then do it all again the next day.

About that beach though. I’d been warned about naked sunbathing in Fuerteventura and, yep, it’s a thing. It’s quite a shock when you see your first middle-aged man strolling towards you in the nip, and you think to yourself, “Is that a, is it? Oh, so it is.”

But after a few minutes they’re about as exotic as a shed door - only these people are often a deeper shade of reddy-brown than a recently retired gardener’s shed, who suddenly has an awful lot of time on his hands and an awfully big bucket of Ronseal that needs using up. I saw one woman apply sun cream to her back with an actual roller. First time for everything!

Ladies and gentlemen who aren’t quite as young or as slender as they used to be letting it literally all hang out, sometimes hand in hand along the slightly less crowded end of a busy beach at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, before gambolling into the turquoise sea together. That’s the thing about holidays, and what makes a good one so great, absolutely nobody gives a hoot.

It did make a nice change out there to see a sea that’s the colour kids draw in pictures, instead of one (ours) that’s got loads of human excrement floating in it, dumped there by private water companies who’ve been getting away with murder for years.

Anyway, the weather. Because despite what people might say about foreign culture and all that, the main reason 99 per cent of Northern Europeans visit Southern Europe is to get some sun on our backs. While we were in Fuerteventura it rained one morning for five minutes. That’s it. Oh, and it was a bit cloudy on our last afternoon.

Since our return it has done nothing but ploot it doon, reminding us exactly why we smashed open our piggy banks, booked our reactive sighthound Walter in with the dog sitter and sat on a four-hour flight to get some daylight into our eyes.

I’ll tell you what though, on a wet Tuesday morning in North West England, as the rain hits the windows like it’s been sprayed out the back of a gritter along the M6 on a freezing January night, the pristine, sun dappled beaches of Corralejo feel around 1,800 miles away.

To read more Who’s The Daddy click here