By (the LitBot in) Evelyn Waugh (mode)

Punch Magazine

May 2025

One does not embark upon a SunnyEscapes package tour to Ibiza in search of enlightenment, any more than one visits a slaughterhouse to admire the upholstery. Yet, having endured this seven-day ordeal, priced at a suspiciously modest £299 (all-inclusive, naturally, save for dignity), I find myself less in need of a holiday from the holiday than a permanent sabbatical from the human race. The brochure promised “sun, sea, and unforgettable nights”; it delivered, with the precision of a guillotine, a vision of civilisation’s twilight, where British youth, drunk on liberty and lager, perform a grotesque pantomime of hedonism under a Mediterranean sun.

Ibiza, once a speck of pastoral charm, has become a Gomorrah-by-the-sea, its beaches defiled by the detritus of “lads’ holidays” and its nights a cacophony of electronic thumps that make a pneumatic drill seem melodious. SunnyEscapes, a firm with the entrepreneurial flair of a seaside huckster, markets this as “Young & Lively,” a euphemism for a week-long bacchanal where the chief virtues are volume and vomiting. Their clientele, culled from the hinterlands of Birmingham and Basildon, arrive with the zeal of pilgrims, only to worship at the altar of £2 shots and foam parties. A TripAdvisor reviewer, one “GazLad92,” boasts of “smashing it in San An” with “barely a wink of sleep”—a feat, he assures us, involving “buckets of sangria” and “lads legging it from bouncers.” One shudders to imagine Gaz’s definition of repose.

The tour begins with a flight on what SunnyEscapes calls a “budget carrier,” a term implying less a mode of transport than a test of endurance. Crammed into seats designed for malnourished sparrows, one is serenaded by a stag party chanting obscenities to the tune of “Sweet Caroline.” The in-flight meal, a soggy triangle of despair, is mercifully inedible, sparing one the indigestion that awaits on shore. Arrival at the Hotel Sol y Squalor—a concrete wart on San Antonio’s coastline—reveals rooms where the air conditioning wheezes like a consumptive poet and the minibar contains only a warm can of Fanta and a moral void. The pool, advertised as “Olympic-sized,” is a tepid soup of sunscreen and regret, where bronzed youths perform mating rituals that would embarrass a baboon.

By day, the beach is a battlefield of beer cans and bravado. A Daily Mail exposé from 2024 details the “Ibiza Excess,” where British tourists, liberated from the shackles of decorum, engage in “public fornication” and “urination marathons” along the Paseo Marítimo. One witness, a local barman, laments the “English who think the street is their toilet.” No stranger to the barbarities of abroad, I find this less a holiday than an anthropological study in decline. The young men, tattooed with tribal motifs and existential ennui, brawl over imagined slights, while their female counterparts, clad in outfits that defy both gravity and taste, shriek encouragements. A lass named “ChardonnayBabe” on Instagram, whose review I chanced upon, declares Ibiza “pure vibes,” her evidence a selfie amid a pile of discarded Red Bull cans, her eyes glazed with the vacancy of a goldfish.

The nights, oh, the nights! SunnyEscapes’ “Club Crawl” promises entry to Ibiza’s famed superclubs—Pacha, Amnesia, and the like—where one is herded like cattle through strobe-lit catacombs. The music, a relentless assault of bass, induces a trance that is less spiritual than catatonic. Here, the faithful consume “fishbowls” of neon liquor, a concoction so vile it could strip paint from a battleship. A Guardian report notes the island’s hospitals treat dozens nightly for “alcohol poisoning and fight-related injuries,” a statistic SunnyEscapes omits from its glossy pamphlets. I observed one lad, his Union Jack shorts a tattered flag of surrender, collapse into a hedge, muttering, “Best night ever.” His comrade, equally insensible, immortalised the moment on TikTok, captioned “#IbizaMadness.” Madness, indeed.

What is the purpose of this frenzy? In my book Labels, I remarked that travel exposes the “restless and moody” soul; in Ibiza, that soul is not merely restless but extinct. These revels are not joyous but desperate, a collective howl against the emptiness of a godless age. The Conservative in me recoils at the abandonment of restraint; the Catholic despairs at the absence of meaning. These youths, with their piercings and their playlists, are not rebels but automatons, chasing oblivion in a neon-lit nothingness. Their laughter is hollow, their excess a parody of vitality. As I watched a girl in a bikini top weep over a spilled cocktail, I recalled Eliot’s “hollow men,” their gestures futile against the abyss.

SunnyEscapes, with its promise of “unforgettable nights,” delivers only amnesia—chemical, cultural, spiritual. The island’s beauty, its cliffs and coves, is mocked by this carnival of crassness. I do not begrudge the young their pleasures, but pleasure without purpose is perdition. Perhaps the fault lies not with SunnyEscapes but with a civilisation that mistakes debauchery for delight. I returned to England not refreshed but revolted, yearning not for another getaway but for a hermitage, where the only excess is silence and the only revelry is prayer. Let the human race, in its infinite folly, continue its dance of decay; I shall sit it out, with a cigar and a scowl, until the music stops.

Evelyn Waugh’s latest book, A Curmudgeon’s Compendium, is forthcoming from Duckworth.

 

Note: This piece of writing is a fictional/parodic homage to the writer cited. It is not authored by the actual author or their estate. No affiliation is implied.