Wakey wakey, Sharm El Sheikhy.

“Do you remember booking a holiday last night?”

Those were the words that greeted me one Saturday morning as I crawled down the stairs, squinting in the daylight and on a desperate search for coffee. Yes, I was hungover. What had gone from a simple “Fancy the pub after work?” had ended up with me drinking my own weight in wine, staggering home and booking an all inclusive holiday to Egypt.

Not only that but I’d announced it online without telling anyone first. (If I could use emojis here, I would use the little monkey with his hands in front of his eyes.)

Intoxicated online shopping should be illegal. I remember reading something online about an app being designed to stop drunk people from sending any embarrassing texts. Well, there should be one to stop you from ordering things online after a few glasses of wine, too. Annoyingly, my spontaneous holiday booking isn’t the only time I’ve indulged in wine-induced-purchasing.

In my second year of university, I woke up to find my laptop half open and discarded on my bedroom floor. The sight that greeted me was my eBay homepage. I didn’t remember going on eBay before I went out last night? I’d thought. Then it hit me. I’d gone on eBay as I came home from the night out and later found myself the proud owner of some very extortionately priced solar powered fairy lights. In the shape of daisies. Very nice, very twee, but did I remember buying them? No. I also didn’t remember forking out thirty quid for them either. (I was a student. Thirty quid was the difference between eating well or spaghetti hoops on toast twice a day for the rest of the month.)

To be fair, they actually looked quite cool when they arrived but I lived in Ormskirk, for crying out loud. Ormskirk didn’t experience enough sunshine for these lights to ever work. They stayed with me for about a year and when I moved back to Warrington, they got binbagged.

There was also a memorable time when I turned twenty one and was overjoyed to be sent tickets to see Wicked in the West End. Until I saw my online bank statement and realised they were a present from drunk me to sober me. So generous. Still, it was a great night.

Back to my hungover Saturday. I lay on the sofa, wrapped myself in a blanket and began to piece the evening together. We hadn’t even been out out. It had just been the pub after work with some of the work gang. As it was, it was the time between my old car being written off and my new car being bought, meaning I wasn’t one of the designated drivers. I had taken this as the perfect excuse to get roaring drunk – as well as it being payday and the payday where we got paid our Christmas bonuses - and the rest, as they say, is history. I was eight hundred pounds lighter and was apparently going to Sharm El Sheikh just four months later.

“Have you even booked the time off work?” This was my mother speaking. The Voice Of Reason. Always one to keep my feet on the ground.

Ah. No. I hadn’t. Clearly, I hadn’t thought about anything other than the sunshine when I clicked confirm and pay. What if work couldn’t give me the time off?

Thankfully, I arrived in work on the Monday, rather sheepishly I’ll admit, and submitted a holiday request which came back hours later saying all was fine. Breathing a sigh of relief, I allowed myself to feel a little bit excited. I hadn’t been abroad since October 2013 so this was definitely a welcome break.

My next hurdle was one that I hadn’t given a huge amount of thought to until other people started to question me on it. You see, I’d booked the holiday for me and my mum. It hadn’t felt strange to me at all. I live with my mum. It’s just the two of us and we get on like a house on fire, thanks mostly to her fine cooking and her ability to drown out most of my moaning. In fact, she reckons the three things I say the most are:

1) "I'm so cold"

2) "I'm so tired"

3) (My mum’s personal favourite) “I can’t cope”. I must say this at least five times a day. If my computers running a bit slow, it starts raining, Coronation Street isn’t on, I’m aching from top to toe from a work out or we don’t have any biscuits in are all valid excuses for saying that you can’t cope.

I’d booked the holiday for my mum because she’d been a bit down after my dad had left and one of the things that had upset her the most was that she wouldn’t go on holidays abroad anymore (lol) so factor in the world’s crappiest six months that I’d had, it seemed like a logical solution. To other people, it was their idea of hell. “What will you do on holiday with your mum there?”, “If that was me and my mum, we’d have fallen out on the plane on the way there” and “What if you want to pull?” were some of the genuine questions people asked me.

I just laughed. It wouldn’t feel strange at all, surely, I’d thought. I mean, we live together after all. And we get on like two sisters. Whenever people come and stay, they always comment on our relationship. I remember once someone’s jaw dropping as they whispered, “I can’t believe you just said cunt in front of your mum!” Me and my mum looked at each other and roared with laughter. It’s always been like that. Perhaps it’s Youngest Child Syndrome. She’s been there and done that with my two older sisters so nothing I can say or do really shocks her. Or maybe she just gave up on me years ago and she’s just humoured me ever since.

Considering the fact that I grew up in such a loud busy house with an even louder busier family, I did wonder if it would feel weird being just the two of us but we love it. She likes house renovation programmes like Sixty Minute Makeover and Location, Location, Location and I’m a self confessed soap addict and can’t go a day without Corrie or Hollyoaks but we meet in the middle with original British dramas. A kidnap, a murder mystery, a family drama – we bloody love it. Not in real life, obviously. Just on TV. All in all, I felt pretty confident that everything would be fine.

Of course, in the lead up to a holiday, every woman starts to panic about her size. The mirrors in store changing rooms are unkind, making your bum look ten times bigger than it really is. As it turned out, the day before we flew, I was competing in the Great Manchester Run so I decided to focus on my training in the hope that this would also let me lose a few pounds. Only that was easier said than done.

Time started ticking much quicker than I would have liked. Before we knew it, it was February. Then March. Then April. April is such a hard month for me to diet as it’s my birthday month but this year, it was also Easter as well. Four days off work for the Easter bank holiday weekend eating nothing but chocolate eggs means you’re a little wobblier than you might like. Then a week of birthday celebrations: cake, wine, cake, wine, more wine, more cake, glass of wine anyone? My old insecurities came back and I started panicking.

The Voice Of Reason tried to make me see logically. The last time I’d been abroad, swanning around in a bikini, I was almost four stone heavier and my bikini was a size sixteen. Yes, but I’m still fat. Your BMI is fine. You’re a healthy weight for your size. My arse is the size of Japan. Don’t be ridiculous. You’re wearing size ten jeans. Pack it in. But but but – I could’ve gone on and on and on.

The strange thing is I’m actually really enjoying exercising. Yes. You read that correctly. If you flick back to 2013’s blogs, I’m fairly certain you’ll stumble across an entry which boldly declares how you’ll never find me in the gym. Ah, bless.

Compulsory exercise aside, I’ve never been one for working out before. In fact, I still don’t love it. Sometimes I really have to drag myself out of bed or off the couch and practically force myself to work out. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I leap into action, knowing I’ve gained a few pounds and wanting to do something about it. And sometimes I spend all day in work typing away thinking of that night’s aerobics or yoga class and I instantly perk up.

It’s at this point I should probably explain my Four Pound Slide theory. My weight fluctuates easily. That’s not a theory. It’s a fact. If I spend two weeks lounging around the house in my scruffs, steadily eating my way through a large pile of Easter eggs and drinking wine every single night, then I gain weight at the drop of a hat. It’s more obvious to me, of course, seeing as I see myself naked every day and maybe to some people, they’re either too polite or too unobservant to realise – but I know. And it’s always four pounds that I gain. Even if it’s just one long lazy weekend of no exercise and a few meals out, I gain four pounds.

Thankfully, it also goes the other way. If I need to lose weight for an occasion – a wedding, a night out, a party – I only have to spend a short time eating healthily and exercising. Within days, and I mean days, I’ve dropped four pounds. Never more. Never less. My ideal weight is ten stone. I feel happiest and healthiest at ten stone. The reality is I’m usually ten stone four. Have been for months. When the Four Pound Slide occurs, I either drop to my ideal weight or I balloon to over half a stone more than my ideal weight. It’s a pickle. But I’ve learnt to live with it. 

By the time it got to the night before the holiday, however, I couldn’t have cared less. After the Great Manchester Run, I treated me and my sister who had also competed in the run to a McDonalds. We got the train back to Warrington, nipped into the shop and bought two chocolate bars each. I got home, my mum made me a massive tea and I fell asleep at eight o’clock from sheer exhaustion and an adrenaline crash. I woke up the following morning, weighed myself and discovered I was ten stone six. Ah well.

The hotel we stayed at was called the Xperience St George Homestay and it was perfect. This was my third stay in Egypt and I’d stayed in lovely hotels before but this was something else. Until you stay somewhere like Sharm, you don’t always realise how dependent you are on your hotel. Unlike holidays to Spain or Greece, you are literally in the middle of nowhere and if you have a crappy hotel, you’ll likely have a crappy holiday. Don’t get me wrong, you can get a short taxi ride out to restaurants or shops but they are few and far between. It’s quite sad really when you see the real Sharm El Sheikh without any of the tourism. It’s just a lot of burnt out buildings and desert.

We loved it and it was a Brucey Bonus for us when our flight home was delayed and eventually cancelled, meaning we got an extra night and two extra days in the sunshine. Our hotel staff couldn’t have been more helpful, letting us stay on without a second’s thought and not taking a penny from us, even when they gave us another all inclusive wristband for as much food and drinks as we wanted for free. Bless them.

And for everyone who’s asked me what it was like being on holiday with my mum when I’m a fully grown adult, what can I say? It was brilliant. The first morning there, my alarm went off and I chivvied my mum out of bed with a desperate plea of “It’s nearly half past eight. All the sun loungers have gone!” Only it wasn’t and they hadn’t. There’d been some confusion regarding the time as Egypt had cancelled their summertime, meaning the clocks didn’t go forward at the end of April as they normally did. But we were still an hour ahead of England. My phone went forward two hours, only I didn’t realise, so I changed it by an hour ahead. Meaning on our first day in Egypt, we got up and sat by the pool at five thirty in the morning. Glorious sunshine. Breakfast wasn’t open. We were shattered and completely baffled by what was happening. Needless to say, the words "I'm so tired" and "I can't cope" were muttered more than once that day.

We had a lovely time with as many cocktails as we could manage (cue my mum cringing with, “Do I really have to ask the waiter for a Sex on the Beach?”) and a full body massage each in the spa, which caused hours of laughter as we were smeared with what felt like porridge oats on our sunburnt skin but what was actually dried cocoa. It’s good for exfoliating. Apparently. We were then left in a dark room wrapped tightly in towels with a face mask each on. We were there for a long time. So long that my mum, hysterically laughing, stage whispered "Do you think they've forgotten about us? Should we call for help?"

We kept getting disapproving looks from the salon workers as we were howling with laughter for so many reasons: a) the porridge oats were everywhere and I mean everywhere, meaning we were dying to scratch but our arms were strapped down by the towels, b) we’d been in the Jacuzzi and my mum couldn’t sit still but kept floating off because of the overpowering bubbles ("Sit still, relax, feel the water working your body", "I can't, I can't sit still!") and c) during my massage, the woman kept hitting me. Literally pummelling my skin like I’d insulted her upbringing. I’d suspected this might happen as I’d had a full body massage the last time I was in Egypt and I felt I’d been abused then as well.

Another particularly memorable moment was my mum encouraging me to swim in the pool so she could take some photos of me. I got out, lay down on the sun lounger and she was very pleased with herself as she announced, smugly: “I’ve taken some really good photos of you there. You looked great, really tanned.” Yes. The photos were great. But they weren’t of me. Oh no. I had thirty photos of my mum’s chin. Old people and iPhones…

The whole holiday was just one giggle after another, especially when an airport security man was chatting to my mum and asking all about her. She was firing back her answers like she was giving evidence.

“What’s your name then?”

“Angela Chriscoli, sir. C-H-R-I-S-C-O-L-I”

“Where have you been staying?”

“Sharm El Sheikh, sir.”

“Did you have a nice time?”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

It was only when I was crying laughing and managed to choke out “you do realise he was flirting with you?” that we howled at what he must’ve thought. She thought she was being targeted for questions as a threat to the airport and he looked increasingly amused as she barked her answers out to him whilst flashing her passport in his face.

I won’t bore you to tears with all the photos I’ve taken – apologies to anyone who has me on Instagram! I know it was bordering on ridiculous! – but I’ll put up a couple so anyone who is thinking of going away can have a good mooch at the hotel we stayed at because it really was lovely and I have every intention of returning there, maybe with the compensation we’re getting for the flight delay!

So, there we are. I’ve come back a little browner, a lot happier and needless to say, four pounds heavier than when I went. Ah well.

P.S.

While we were away, we couldn’t help but stare at the people who were taking full advantage of the all inclusive food and drinks. From the red faced Scottish man who demanded rum and coke at nine o’clock in the morning to the entire family who went back and got three or four plates of chips every day for their lunch, it just opened our eyes to typical Brits abroad behaviour.

Whilst we were more than content with salad, humus and pitta breads and of course, experimenting with unknown food, some people just couldn’t wander out of their comfort zones.

Before we’d gone away, we’d decided to do the £5 challenge where you live on £1 a day for food for five days to raise awareness about the ever increasing need for local food banks. After eating like kings for nine days, we're more determined than ever to do it. As a family who regularly donate to Warrington’s food banks (there’s a collection point at Tesco on Winwick Road. Just pop a box of cereal and a loaf of bread in there next time you’re in) we’re going to go for it and I’ll stick it up on here so keep your eyes peeled.

Until next time xx