Chill, it's not unusual to feel totally out of it on holiday

So many things could go wrong in your time away from home - passports could get lost, the airline could bungle up your luggage, you could meet your dreaded neighbours...

Okay, so it is vacation time and you are enjoying going through the brochures all splashed with colour and great deals but watch it, it is fraught with dangers and obstacles and it is never what you expected it to be. In the brochures, families cheerfully skip and romp to the aircraft and get the best seats, the best rooms, the courteous service and no asterisks (***) in their itinerary. Life is truly a mini umbrella in a pink-coloured frosted glass.
In real life, it doesn't work that way. Here is my 2017 version of how nothing changes for some of us.
Your wife and you will argue about 'I told you to switch off the mains and you didn't cancel the paper, and did you at least switch the electricity off?' Super start.
Check your papers. Dozens of people discover the distinct pleasure of having an expired visa on one of the kids' passports or a passport that keeled over date-wise and now what? Amazing how we never check passport expiry dates. And are blocked from taking off.
While waiting for your flight (the only one that is showing delayed on the electronic display board, don't make friends with others and leave your luggage in their care which is one of the stupidest things you can do because airports are famous for theft. Heathrow is not so fondly called Thiefrow and many of us are foolish enough to tell our life stories to strangers. Just because you are going to the same destination does not make them trustworthy.
Before you board the flight (finally) one boarding card will mysteriously disappear (mandatory) and there will be a lot of desperate hunting as hand baggage is tossed all over the place and you guys make a spectacle of yourself.
Speaking of handbags, that surly attendant will find yours is overweight and it will be taken away and that will in turn, sour your mood.
The trouble with holidays is that you meet people on aircraft who give you their cards. You want to read a book and they want to talk. They want to meet you again on the ground and let's get together one day purely on the strength of some desk clerk who put their seat number next to yours. This is not destiny, this is intrusion.
There will be no car as promised at the airport. Nothing is lonelier than not being received at an alien airport. And standing there looking fatuous as you braille through the long line of hotel reps holding placards.
The hotel with a view will prove that you should never book a place that starts with Hotel as in Hotel Minerva or Grand or Seaview because the only seaview you will get is by leaning dangerously outside the balcony and seeing a sliver of ocean about eight miles out.
The room will smell damp and mouldy and the plumbing will suck.
The waiter will see you stealing bread, butter and tubs of jam from the 'breakfast included' and the children will be told to stuff themselves because this is lunch and you know that all the staff knows you
know they know you are a cheap little cut-rate tourist.
One of the kids will fall ill the morning you have to go on the safari/jamboree/adventure/tour and the fever will rise to 102° and doctors will be called and by the time the tour returns the kid will be back to normal and full of beans (which you will not) and there will be no refund on the price of the special tour... or the water won't agree with you. Delhi belly is nothing in comparison.
The one day that you have to visit a famous museum, site, shop, place of tourist interest, it will be closed. Murphy's law having a blast.
The credit card machine will reject your card in a foreign country where you don't know the language, anyone and are short of cash and will have to put things you bought back on the shelf. or it will just swallow the card up, pardon monsieur.
The passport will get lost or misplaced and you won't be able to recall the four-digit number of the room safe.
You will try to show off and ski down a slope or climb a rock or jump in the rapids and almost kill yourself. Rest of the vacation in plaster.
Then you get to this hotel and you meet people from the home town. Five thousand miles and, would you believe it, that ghastly crew from down the road are homing in to you. Shrieks of synthetic joy, fancy meeting you here, what a small world. So you spend the rest of the hard-earned-looked-forward to-so-eagerly awaited vacation tagging along with each other. You avoid them at home and now you are having breakfast together in Rome.
You will receive a disturbing phone call from your secretary or colleague to tell you that office politics is on a roll and the grapevine is indicating that you might be in an uh oh position. Incredibly, this always happens when you are on vacation and guarantees to take the fun out of the relaxation because now you have to worry about who is stabbing you in the back and why is the night of the long knives happening only when you take a break.
The neighbours or friends or colleagues back home will call you to tell you that some funny goings-on have been noticed at your residence and the houseboy/housemaid could be up to something and there seems to be a leak in the waterpipe or the front gate. Looks like it has been broken into... gee, thanks guys, just what we need when we are 5000 miles away.
Finally we get home, tired, broke, cheesed off and lie through our teeth: it was super!
letters@khaleejtimes.com
Bikram is a former editor of KT. Everyday humour is his forte