The morning of Viernes Veinticuatro , such as is was, treated me much, much more kindly than really I had any right to expect. I was up in the second floor ‘flat’, at peace and all alone in a comfy double bed – ‘alone’, chiefly, because Isla del Hombre had felt, the previous eve, for reasons known only to himself, that the large oval sunbed outside in the garden had been the ideal place to rest his weary night-time head.

One by one our battalion began to emerge: Yelmar, in famously terrible shape, appalled us all by stripping down to his kegs and detonating himself into the pool; fair Z-Unidad and the lovely La Mejor Novia del Mundo (MNM) followed suit, infinitely more gracefully, taking up positions A1 atop the two avian inflatables which Plata had not already destroyed in his rage.

[Said avian inflatables, it must be noted, from the very moment they were plucked from the shelves of [Insert low-cost commercial fashion/accessories chain here], were dead swans/flamingos/toucans floating. Accordingly they took their violent deaths with a poignant magnanimity.]

This pleasant scene of aquatic calm was not to last, however, for Isla del H., ever the romantic, had recently allowed himself to be ‘up-sold’ a handful of tickets to a ‘booze cruise’ by a blonde vision of sketchiness of indeterminate income:

“She says it’ll be great!” he rejoiced.

“Yes…did she say this before or after you’d handed over cash monies unto half your kingdom?”

“Both! I think I love her, Tommy!”

“Hmm…”

As it transpired, the trio with the lowest brain-to-body ratios – that is to say, The Three Supermarketeers from the day before: Plata, Yelmar and myself – ended up being co-opted into this venture…but only after steeling ourselves with various late morning cocktails of eye-watering ferocity.

The remaining half-dozen (El Pájaro, MNM, Un Mono Ártico Gay (MAG), Z-Unidad, El Peor Novio del Mundo (PNM) and El Águila) opted for the far more ‘adulty’ choice of taking the bus into Ibiza Old Town for spot of gentle sightseeing and a nice seafood lunch.

“But that sounds fabulous!” I wailed, as the six of them wandered from the villa down towards the highway and awaiting bus stop. “I fancy a nice seafood lunch! I fancy a spot of gentle sightseeing!”

“Hey…’ey now…looook at me,” growled Isla del Hombre, fixing me with a mildly crazed and bloodshot stare and planting upon his head a smart white cap with a black peak and golden trim. “I am the cap-tain now!”

“Where did you pull that captain’s hat from, old boy?”

“Ne-ver you mind, I am the capt-”

“It’s awfully smart.”

“I AM THE CAP-TAIN NOW!”

“Fine…but will you let me wear it on the boat?”

“…”

“?”

“No.”

*

Our taxi at last arrived and the four of us jumped in, our shorts short and our t-shirts slung over our shoulders like Cristiano Ronaldo five milliseconds after any given final whistle. We all looked as gods – save Yelmar, who, as always, looked just horrible with his shirt off.

As we turned onto the main Ibizan autobahn, we noticed to our great delight that our compatriots still languished by the roadside, glaring at the posted timetables and quarrelling loudly. As one, we each wound down our windows, and the joyous cry of “BUS WANKERS!!” echoed across Ibiza’s roadways and villas and sun-parched hills.

The Captain’s beloved – the aforementioned ‘sketchy-ass’ blonde beauty – had told him that our ‘party boat’ could be boarded at 1pm from the jetty near ‘The Albatross Bar’, right at the very end of the Playa d’en Bossa. Once in situ, however, I must confess that my quiet reservations grew from ‘myriad’ to ‘absolutely bloody legion’.

“Bllagghk” quoth the maiden fair, squatting by the steps of The Albatross, being violently ill.

I am not sure how seven and a half gallons of vomit could hasten forth from a six gallon girl, but there, my friends, did you have it.

Isla del Hombre hopped over the bituminous river of sick without fear or a backwards glance, much like, one imagines, noble Caesar once forded the Rubicon:

“Better load up on the water now, boys,” declared our captain (oh our captain). “As on the boat the booze’ll be flowing and it’ll all be free!”

“Aye, but which boat, mate?” enquired Plata, looking all around, the midday sun shining brightly off his cropped and argent locks.

This was a fair question, for ‘party boat’ after barely seaworthy ‘party boat’ was swinging by the quay, depositing/acquiring unruly crowds of increasingly insalubrious revellers, seemingly without rhyme or reason.

“Hmm…I think it’s…that queue.” Isla del H. pointed at a line of what can only really be described as ‘Euro-trash’ a little way from the bar. “Yeah, that’s our gang there.”

“Ye gods…” muttered Yelmar.

“Put a shirt on, Yelmar, you’ve made that poor girl throw up.”

“Seriously guys, it’ll be great!” our captain assured us, as we took our places at the rear of the snaking line. “My lass said that there’s a full open bar, a bit of food, some jet-ski rides, two floors with two DJs, erotic drinking games…”

“WHAT?!” Plata, Yelmar and I cried in unison.

It is worth highlighting at this juncture – and being a modern, Guardian-reading fella I take no pleasure in so doing – that the most noteworthy thing about the clientele of this particular ‘booze cruise’ was that, while the gentlemen were all exceedingly well put together (with the obvious exception of Yelmar, who has the body of a melted wheelie-bin) the ladies were, well, I mean to say…

“Erotic drinking games? With them? They all look like tight-head props!” posited Plata, perhaps unkindly but not inaccurately.

“I have a girlfriend,” noted Yelmar, crossing his slender arms.

“Ah yes, me too,” said Plata, relief and colour washing back into his previously ashen countenance.

“I…I…” I grasped vainly for a similarly ironclad excuse.

“Heyy, are yous larrds from Englarrnd?” asked a group of nearby Ulsterwoman, each one the size of a mid-range family hatchback.

“Noheoh, I thinks theys from Oooreland toos,” suggested another.

“No es así, todos somos de Zaragoza, pero gracias por preguntar,” rattled off Yelmar in note perfect Spanish.

Disappointed, they trudged away, up and across the (buckling) gangway and onto our wretched boat yonder. Only then, when they were safely out of earshot, did we speak again.

“Yelmar, I never knew you spoke Spanish!” said Plata, notably impressed.

“I don’t. I think I might’ve been speaking in tongues.”

“Quakers can’t speak in tongues,” I pointed out. “That’s strictly a Church of England thing.”

“Then fucked if I know – let’s get onboard and get ourselves a drink, lads…”

*

And drink we did. Once out onto clear blue water, the music kicked into gear and the bar opened up wide. It being Ibiza, the jobbing DJs aboard were really rather sensational, and the rums and the vodkas were nowhere near as ghastly as one might have expected.

Slowly but surely, with the sun shining and the music playing; with the salt spray spraying and the ocean breeze a-breezing; and with great company (in our immediate circle at least) and with never-ending, complimentary rounds – everything eventually combined to usher my foolish reservations away. By the time we dropped anchor by a tree-covered little spit of an island, I was, it pains me to say it, actually having quite a lot of fun.

Better still, the collective will of the people (well, the collective will of those people with Y-chromosomes in any case) manifest itself on the itinerary and the ‘erotic games’ were summarily cancelled. This gave more time for jet-ski rides, which made for great viewing – the pilot thrashing his craft about like it was a rented mule, throwing his charges into the Mediterranean surf with a rare, sadistic glee.

“I’m getting on,” announced Plata, laying down his hundred and twenty-first gin. “That pendejo won’t buck me off.”

“Think you may have missed the boat there, lad…”

“AHAHAHAHA!!!” roared all within earshot. Goodness me, but I’m hilarious.

“Thank you, thank you, you’re all too kind. But yes,” I continued. “The fella over there said that that blonde chica getting on now is going to be the last rider.”

“Then I’ll get on with her.”

“Er…not sure she…oh, fine, he’s off.”

As it happened, “er…not sure she…” didn’t cover the half of it. But Plata, most unlike the poor cat i’ th’ adage, was never one to let ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’. His will, as we have seen, can oftimes be as iron, and soon enough the last ride of the day sped away with a silver-headed Englishman very much amongst its final number.

“She really doesn’t want him on there with her does she?” remarked Yelmar.

“Nah, she ain’t happy,” agreed Isla del Hombre. “Look she won’t even let him hold onto her…”

“He’s making a good fist of it though,” I noted. “He…wow…oh…well, I guess that solves that problem, then…”

Plata, having no intention of tumbling from his rapid, scarlet and aquaplaning stallion, and not being afforded any real purchase upon his hostile fellow passenger, decided that his only recourse was to lob said hostile fellow passenger bodily into the sea and affix himself firmly to the pilot himself.

Following this act of twenty-first century chivalry, the bronzed jet-ski fellow, try as he might, simply could not shake off our liquored-up limpet from South London. Thus, a short while later, our sterling friend returned in triumph.

“Well played, Plat…”

“Run,” he suggested, ripping off his lifejacket. “He’s going back round to get her.”

“Er…

“She ain’t happy.”

“That’s what I said!” laughed Isla del H.

“Run, you idiots!”

“But I’m the capt-”

“Fly, you fools!”

We dashed across to the bow of the boat and hustled up the narrow stairs to the top deck, where morons lounged on the most over-priced ‘beds’ this side of Saturn’s sixty-two moons.

“I reckon we’re safe up here.”

“Well then, cheers!” announced Isla, producing a half-full bottle of cava and four plastic flutes.

“Where on earth did you pull that from, Master del Hombre?”

“Those girls over there gave it to us.”

“Which girls..? Oh mate…oh no…oh lawd help me, no! What have you done?”

Reclining magisterially on their (reinforced) four-poster, looking for all the world like an all-beluga whale production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, lay our Northern Irish friends.

They beckoned us over with hungry fingers.

Trudging like the condemned to the gallows, we heeded their silent summons.

*

“Mate, I’ve been to Ibiza before, this is definitely the right way.”

“Yes, you said that two miles ago. Let’s ask someone.”

“No need, no need!”

Plata was adamant, but we’d had, by this stage, quite enough.

“Ah, finally, a taxi!”

“Mate, it’s just around the corner, I swear…”

“Hola there, chico, could you take us to Ushuaïa, por favor?”

“Ushuaïa? Qué? So why yous walking that way for?”

“Damn it all, Plata!”

A significantly lengthy taxi ride later (in, it scarcely needs to be said, very much the opposite direction to that which we’d just been walking) we arrived at the colossal, shining white edifice of Ushuaïa Ibiza Beach Hotel. The grand, rectangular court of his huge guesthouse contained one of the most famed ‘day clubs’ on the island, you see – and it was here that we would be meeting the rest of our companions; it was here that the day’s ‘partying’ would begin in earnest.

“I like your tattoos,” I lied. It is always best to keep the gatekeepers sweet.

“Thank you! Yes, ‘Mansfield’, this is your name here, you can go on in.”

“They’re on your head and face and everything!” I added, perhaps unnecessarily.

“Yes…yes they are…right, well in you go.”

And in we went, stumbling only slightly as we danced up to the nearest watering hole. Forgetting that we were no longer in the land of the free (bars), we were all promptly bankrupted to the tune of four rum and cokes.

“Well this is alright, eh?” Yelmar announced, swinging his noodle arms around. “That pool’s huge, and look at the stage! I reckon we must be a bit early, there’s not so big a crowd about…”

“It’s because you’ve scared them all off, mate.”

“Seriously, Yelmar, I will pay you to put your shirt back on…”

“Hello guys!” cried El Águila, who announced his timely arrival by punting my 20€ rum and c. off the floor and thirty, forty yards away, into a group of surly looking Italians.

“Ah.”

MAG then hobbled by, seemingly limping. “Sorry, can’t stop just yet guys, something’s seemingly gotten stuck in my shoe, really painful – need to go sort it out…”

“Er…okay…”

“Maaans-FIELD!” PNM had arrived, and he instantly struck one as a fella who’d had quite enough ‘adulting’ for one day and who was now, to coin a phrase, ‘bang up for a rager’. “You don’t have a drink! Why the [expletive deleted] doesn’t this beautiful [ruder expletive deleted] have a drink?! It’s his bloody birthday in a few hours!”

I glared at El Águila who, to his credit, looked as sheepish as a bird of his vintage can look. I then glanced over his guilty shoulder. “Er…what the hell is that?”

A huge procession of dancers and partially painted actors, all yelling and screeching; all dressed unspeakably strangely, broke into the massing scrum on the dance-floor, forcing their way through the crowds, screaming this and that about a ‘fallen society’ or some such rot. Glitter cannons and smoke machines began to belch forth all over the gaff, and red lights began a-flashing with abandon, turning the late day’s sun into a weird and troubling dusk. Fridays at Ushuaïa were themed ‘Dystopia’ – and apparently the powers that be had decided that things needed to get a mite more dystopian.

Soon after this sea change much silliness began. A half-naked Plata, spotting near the stage some very oddly garbed dancers with golden colanders on their heads, decided to join their troupe, with mixed success; MAG was back and back with a vengeance, his sore foot now a thing of the past and with a grinning Z-Unidad on his arm – the pair bustling around telling anyone who would listen that “This is a banger…no wait, this is a banger!” El Águila, his rum-based sins now very much forgiven, was suddenly in possession of a brand new outfit of sparkles and glitter and rainbows; and Yelmar, still shirtless (worse luck) had stolen a gargantuan ‘U’ sign from somewhere or other and was holding it proudly aloft, shouting “You…no…You!” to astonished passersby.

All of this nonsense was soundtracked by DJ Koze, the first of two ‘Grade A’ headliners that evening. If I’d thought that the music up until this point had been ‘good’ – be it at Privilege or back on the booze cruise – I had, as they say, ‘ain’t heard nuthin’ yet’. This was the good stuff. This was the real deal.

It was all, in short, going very well indeed.

*

Just as the Rt. Hon. Koze Esq. shuffled off to rapturous applause and his place on the stage was taken by Luciano – another music maker who truly ‘knew his trade’ – my general feeling of boozy, bass-y contentment left me, and unpleasant unpleasantness manifest itself deep in the pit of my incomparably toned stomach.

Koze finished at 11pm…Luciano took us to midnight…into the next day…into my birthday…

I wasn’t ready, I simply was not. I couldn’t be thirty, I’d accomplished literally nothing to date!

I staggered away from my group, losing myself deep in the pestilentially young and nubile crowd. ‘Where was my wife and family?’ I lamented. ‘What if I died here? Who’d be my role model, now that my role models were PNM and MAG, who’d just popped down an alley with some…’

“Hey there, ese, yous looks like yous going Paul Simon loco, homes!”

I turned around and saw a diminutive Spaniard with a large, black moustache and an oversized guitar tucked under his arm.

“Why do you sound and look like a Mexican supporting character in a Michael Bay movie?”

“Because yous really got no idea how to convey Spanish people on the page, homes.”

“Ah.”

“And also I think you’re like, closeted-ly racist, ese.”

“Ha – and sometimes it ain’t even that ‘closeted’, my friend. Well, thank you for breaking the fourth wall, now if you wouldn’t mind slinging your hook and fuc-”

“You need one of these, gringo,” he interrupted, holding out his palm and showing me a small and curious tablet.

I picked it up and held it aloft, examining it closely in the blinking lights of the stage. It was heavier in the hand than I had expected, luminous orange in colour, and very obviously cloud-shaped.

“That’s a soundcloud, bro – that will set you riiiiight, man.”

“Da fuq is a soundcloud?”

“It’s a one-way ticket to your dreams, ese!”

“Get copyright permission for this, did you?”

“Man, yous talking ‘copyrights’ now? Yous turning thirty in a few minutes, Mans-field, yous got bigger problems!”

“True…wait, how’d you know my name? And how do you know that I’m turning-”

But he had disappeared – vanished into the lights and the music and the heaving crowd.

The world began to wax and wane, revolving in front of my eyes like spilled paints on a swiftly spinning canvas. My skin felt strangely alive; it fizzed and crackled in the cooling night air. Various friends appeared in front of me, their lips moving but their yelled communiqués lost in the mounting squall. Still the soundcloud sat heavy in my hand, throbbing gently in time with Luciano’s incomparable beat.

Suddenly, I was seven feet higher than I strictly should have been, thrown upon the shoulders of mighty Yelmar, high above the cheering crowd.

This I did not like; it was too much, I needed help, any help, any assistance, any salvation.

I looked at the tablet. The tablet looked back at me; into me, into the very core of my being. My hand moved slowly towards my grimacing face…

“Don’t do it, mate.” George Michael was there, his lion’s mane magnificent, his beautiful Anglo-Hellenic face split into a gentle, supportive, beatific smile.

“I…I know I shouldn’t. But…but I’m so tempted, George.”

“Remember this,” he tapped at his shining white top, CHOOSE LIFE emblazoned upon it, “and know that I love you.”

“Thank…thank you George. I will, I will.”

And without further ado I heaved the so-called ‘soundcloud’ up into the inky black of the midnight sky. It glowed and hummed as it rose, clearly furious with this turn of events. No real problem though. Soon it would return to earth, to the crowd, and to another weak and worried soul it could readily consume…

Before the tablet reached its apex, however, a large gull swooped down and devoured it mid-air.

This couldn’t end well.

“Get me down Yelmar!” I shouted.

“What?”

“Down! Now!”

One flap, two flaps, three flaps, then ‘Boom’, the seagull exploded in a vast orange conflagration which illuminated the furthest reaches of the club. One or two charred, glowing feathers fluttered down. The rest, instantly incinerated.

The crowd screamed, then ‘oooh-ed’, then cheered as one, clearly assuming this to be an elaborate accompaniment to Luciano’s majestic set.

“Did not know they were going to do that…but that animatronic white dove clearly represented the peaceful future we were promised,” suggested one of the colander-wearing dancers who stood close by. “That it exploded in a horrible ball of flame is obviously emblematic of the neoliberal dystopia in which we all dwell…”

“Bollocks,” I countered.

“Qué?”

“Bollocks: firstly that wasn’t a dove and it wasn’t anima-whatsit, it just an idiot seagull, and an idiot seagull that couldn’t handle its pills at that. Secondly…”

“Er, whatever asshole, I work here, I think I would know…”

“Well then sling your hook, love, and…”

The clock struck twelve. Luciano brought proceedings to a spectacular climax, with strobe-lights and canons exploding into life and vast showers of confetti covering all and sundry. Friends and bosom companions descended upon me from all directions, arms outstretched, their smiles wide.

“…and fuck off!” I finished, as a mass group hug began in the middle of the Ushuaïa dance-floor.

I was thirty now. I was far too old for that kind of horseshite.