Blaise Tapp: Club 18-30 - best week of my young life

Some men act upon adverts, which show once bald ex-cricketers boasting about how they got their hair back, while others take the more cliched path of buying a sports car they can’t really afford and some attempt to rediscover their youth in the arms of a younger woman.

All that is all very 1990s, if you ask me, and I adopt a far less expensive tactic when confronting the march of Old Father Time, which involves me becoming increasingly more grumpy the older I get.

One thing guaranteed to get me into a full-blown Victor Meldrew rant is bright young things presuming that I am yet another rotund, receding, over-tired, out-of-touch 40-something who has never experienced a day’s fun in his life.

While they’d be right about most of the above – I can’t hide from what I see both in the mirror and the bathroom scales – I do resent being pigeonholed as an old fart and only the other day one, otherwise charming, youngster, seemed amazed that I had heard of Dua Lipa.

Before you ask, a Dua Lipa is not the latest in a line of continental hybrid cars but is currently the brightest star in British pop music.

This is something that every dad of an eight-year-old girl simply has to know.

I also take serious issue with the insinuation that because I now make my sandwiches before I go to bed there can be no way that I have ever experienced a good time. At the risk of sounding like my parents’ generation, who even today tediously bang on about the sixties being so great, I hit my teenage years at the right time and am grateful for the fun I had in cheap nightclubs across the land.

But I am also very proud of the fact that I am one of the hundreds of thousands of mums and dads of today who experienced the organised chaos of a Club 18-30 holiday. Last week it was announced that, after this summer, the most infamous holiday brand of them all will be no more.

Company bosses said they were left with little choice because their would-be customers in 2018 have different tastes from their counterparts of 25 years ago. It was perhaps the saddest thing I heard all week.

My 18-30 experience was no different from most people’s: a blurred memory of a week which involved far too much cheap booze, little sleep and lots of laughs.

The main motivation for booking the holiday to Faliraki, which, after Kabul, is the place I would least like to visit nowadays, was that back in 1995 it was dirt cheap.

Even though our hotel room resembled a communist-era prison cell and the fact that all of our ‘dinner money’ went on Greek lager and industrial strength spirits, those seven days will always looked back on with the fondest of memories.

Yes, 18-30 had a pretty awful reputation but it was the Millwall of package holidays, it did not care.

There were lots of drunken pranks, mass bar crawls and also quite a lot of flesh, although when I was there it wasn’t as debauched as some might have you believe.

In short, it was the best week of my young life back then and I am only sorry that the teenagers of today have decided it is not for them.