The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

8:40 am

Dear Diary. To quote the Vengaboys: Whoah! We're going to Ibiza.

But first I've got to get the bus to the airport.

Fucking bus. I bet the Vengaboys never took a bus to Ibiza. In fact, I bet the Vengaboys never took a bus anywhere.

Hang on. There was that one Vengaboys song about the Vengabus — "The Vengabus is coming, and everybody's jumping" — which implies the Vengaboys actually owned a bus, so never mind.

I reach the bus five minutes before it's due to depart. It's not the Vengabus but a normal bus, which is disappointing.

"One ticket to Barcelona airport, please," I say to the driver.

"That's twenty euro," says the driver, a bald middle-aged man wearing glasses.

I look in my wallet. There's only fifteen euro in there. Fuck. I'm five euro short.

"Can I pay by card?" I ask.

"No, it's cash only," says the driver.

Cash only? What kind of bus in this day and age is cash only?

Also: shit. If I can't get on this bus I might miss the plane.

"There's an ATM down there," says the bus driver, pointing back down the bus station.

"Thanks," I say. I leap off the bus and take off running to the ATM.

I find the ATM. It's right at the end of the bus station. I whip out my bank card and shove it into the machine. The machine thinks for a few moments and then tells me to enter my PIN. My hand is shaking. If I screw this up I'll miss the bus and plane and I won't get to go to Ibiza.

I enter my PIN correctly. Next, the machine presents me with two options: CREDIT ACCOUNT and SAVINGS CURRENT ACCOUNT. I don't know which one to choose. I don't have a savings account so I choose CREDIT ACCOUNT INSTEAD.

On the screen appears the words YOUR BANK HAS NOT AUTHORISED THIS TRANSACTION. The machine ejects my card.

My heart is beating fast now. A bead of sweat rolls down my forehead. It seems like an eternity ago when I was casually throwing out Vengaboys quips. But now the time for jokes is over. This is serious. The bus will be leaving any minute and if I can't get on the bus I'll probably miss the plane.

And don't think the bus driver will wait for me. Bus drivers here stick rigidly to the schedules. If a bus is supposed to leave at 8:30, then it will leave at 8:30, and not a minute later. The driver would happily leave me behind.

I put my card back into the machine. Enter my PIN again. Select CREDIT ACCOUNT again. But the same error appears on the screen: YOUR BANK HAS NOT AUTHORISED THIS TRANSACTION. The machine ejects my card again.

I'm shaking. I wipe sweat from my forehead. It's like trying to defuse a bomb.

So I try one more time. I insert my card back into the machine. I enter my PIN again. And this time, instead of selecting CREDIT ACCOUNT, I try SAVINGS CURRENT ACCOUNT instead.

This must be the correct option because the ATM thinks for a moment and then says THERE IS A FEE OF 2.50 FOR THIS TRANSACTION. DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE?

I jab YES as fast as I can.

Next, the ATM says DO YOU WANT A RECEIPT?

I jab NO.

Finally, the machine ejects my card along with a 20 euro note. I grab both and sprint back to the bus like Usain Bolt when he broke the Olympics 100-metre record.

Thankfully the bus is still there.

"Got it," I wheeze, holding up the twenty euro note to the bus driver.

I'm catching my breath when I climb aboard the bus. To my surprise, all the passengers are smiling at me. "Well done," says an old English man. They must have watched me running. I wonder if I should give them all high fives in celebration. But instead, I just take a seat and put my rucksack by my feet.

Moments later, the bus pulls out of the parking lot. We're on our way to Barcelona airport.

To quote the Vengaboys again: Whoah! We're going to Ibiza.

10:10 am

The bus stops at Barcelona bus station for a few minutes. Outside the window is another bus. This bus has a sign that says CARD PAYMENT ONLY.

So that bus only accepts card whereas my bus only accepts cash.

Jesus Christ. Life was easier back when we were bartering for goods using corn, sheep and chickens.

2 pm

The plane is landing. Out the window, there's Ibiza. The sea is the colour of sapphire and opal. Next to the sea are sandy yellow beaches. Beyond that are orange-brown fields and thousands of brown and white concrete buildings. And beyond everything are tree-covered hills that look like jungles.

2:30 pm

Joe and Quirina pick me up from the airport.

Joe's my friend from school. He's the one who's invited me on this trip. He got rich from cryptocurrencies back during the boom and now he's a multi-millionaire. He seems to spend his time DJing in clubs and taking drugs.

Quirina is Joe's friend. I met her last year on the first Ibiza trip. She's a sensible woman in her 30s. She used to be a massage therapist but now I have no idea what she does for a job.

How two completely differente people like Joe and Quirina cross paths and become friends, I don't know.

Joe smiles and puts his arm around me. Last year he was bald but now he has a full head of hair thanks to a hair transplant.

Quirina gives me a hug.

"So how was your flight?" asks Quirina.

"I almost missed the bus," I say. "I was really close to missing it and I had to run for it like Usain Bolt."

"Oh," says Quirina. "Was it an important bus?"

"Well yeah, because if I missed that bus I could have missed my flight."

"Oh. Well, at least you're here now."

"Listen, Paul," says Joe, turning to me. "Before we drive to the villa, we've got an important task to do."

Uh-oh. I wonder what kind of task is it. Knowing Joe, it's probably drugs. I imagine we'll be meeting up with the Colombian cartel at a disused warehouse to buy a huge packet of cocaine. Something will go wrong and we'll have to make a quick getaway in our jeep while the Colombians spray us with bullets from their Uzis. I'll be in lying flat in the back seat, clutching my hat as bullets whizz around me, making quips like "This is supposed to be a holiday?" and "I never saw this in the brochure".

"What kind of task is it? I ask. "Is it drugs?"

"What? No." Joe laughs. "We've got to stop at a supermarket and get food for the week."

So we stop at a supermarket. Joe fills an entire trolley with beer, rum, vodka, whisky, and wine. Quirina fills a trolley with hummus, salad, eggs, oats, fruit, bread, and avocados. Between them both, Joe and Quirina have got everything covered.

Walking around the aisles is a woman wearing just a t-shirt, flip-flops, and bikini bottoms. She's walking around the shop with no skirt or trousers on. You can see all her legs. I'm shocked.

Then there's another woman walking around with a skirt on but from the waist up she's only wearing a bikini top. Walking around supermarkets in your swimsuit must be normal in Ibiza.

Joe pays for all the booze and food. Then we put everything into the boot and get back in the jeep.

On the drive to the villa, I ask Joe if he's still rich.

"So here's the thing," he says. "I stake my crypto assets, which earns me interest. Last year I was making like 5,000 pounds alone every day on the interest. So the entire time we were here in Ibiza last year, I was spending money but I was making more money from my crypto. So I could pay for things like a VIP table at clubs and a charter yacht and wake up the next day and have more money than the day before. I was spending at a sub-replenishment rate."

"Oh right. So what's happened since then?"

"Well since then my crypto assets have down in value, and now I'm having to sell them off to continue living my current lifestyle. I'm still incredibly rich beyond your wildest imaginings but I have to be a bit more cautious this year about spending money. So there'll be no high-class escorts or cocaine mountains."

"So you didn't bring any drugs this year?" I ask.

"Oh yeah, sure. I've got ecstasy, MDMA, acid."

"What? But how did you bring them here? I thought you flew on a British Airlines flight?"

"Mate, flying with drugs is easy."

"Is it?"

"So you know how when you pack your suitcase for a flight? And you usually bring a couple of bottles of pills with you? A bottle of vitamin C supplements, a bottle of prescription medication, things like that? Well, you just tip all that stuff out and put the drugs in the bottles instead. And then when you go through the airport, the airport staff think you're just flying with vitamin C. Whereas in reality, it could be anything. Ecstacy pills, for example."

Huh.

"But what if they search your luggage?" I ask.

"Anyone who searches your luggage just finds random pills, mate. Everyone has pills in their luggage but no one ever asks about them."

So there you go. It's that easy to smuggle drugs across borders.

3:30 pm

We get to the villa. As we unload the food and alcohol from the jeep, I ask, "Where's everyone else?"

"They went to go bum each other in the hills surrounding Ibiza," Joe says. "It's a perfect dogging area. Quirina goes dogging up there all the time. Don't you Quirina?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about," says Quirina.

A few minutes later, a second jeep pulls up, throwing up clouds of dust with its wheels. Out step three people. Two men and one woman.

I recognise the woman. It's Antonina. I met her last year. She's a sardonic Russian woman.

"Hi, I'm James," says one of the guys in a high-pitched voice. He smiles nervously. He puts out his hand for me to shake it.

"Hi," I say and shake his hand.

"I'm Leo," says the other guy, in a deeper voice. From his accent, he sounds like he's from London. He has a black goatee.

I find out more about Leo and James. James analyses customer feedback data from supermarkets for a job. He says nowadays he just feeds all the data into ChatGPT and gets a report. When I ask James about drugs, he gives a nervous smile and says, "I'm not really a drug person."

"What? Why?" I ask.

"Well, I've never done drugs before."

"Oh," I say.

Okay then, James. More for me then.

By the way, he's sipping from a bottle of beer, so he has done drugs before. It's just that the drug is alcohol.

Leo owns a sports management company, whatever that is. But he's trying to get away from that to become a famous YouTuber.

Then, and I don't how or why, Leo starts telling everyone about his criminal dad.

"Yeah, so my dad used to steal from casinos," he says casually. But he's not smiling; he's talking as if this as though it's a painful childhood memory. "His main one was roulette. He and a couple of other guys would go into a casino and all stand in different places around the table. One of the guys was a distractor, and it was his job to distract the roulette dealer. And-"

"What, by jumping around and going, 'Hey, look at me, over here?'" says Joe, laughing.

"No, by just, you know, talking to the dealer. But my dad had a different job. He had really fast hands, so what he'd do is, he'd wait for the ball to land on the winning number and then he'd place a bunch of chips on that number. It's called top hatting. They were all pretty good at it, my dad and the guys he worked with. They were all in a gang. They made thousands."

"Thousands?" I say. "Not millions?"

"Nah, well these were just small casinos. Ones on beach piers and things like that."

"Oh right."

"But then in 2005, there were new gambling laws that made it harder to cheat at casinos. So before, the casinos were working separately, but after 2005 they were all working together. So my dad and his gang, they had to go abroad to keep making money. At one point he got arrested in Switzerland for swapping cards with other players during a poker game.

"Then he went back to England but he got arrested in 2010. He was trying to top hat at a casino in London. But he got caught, and they gave him a 12 months suspended prison sentence. He's also banned from entering any casino in the country.

"Plus now he's addicted to gambling. All that gambling he did to make money, it made him addicted to gambling. So now he can't stop gambling. So whatever little money he gets, he just gambles it away. It's sad really."

Jesus Christ. This stuff is gold. It could be in a film. Or on a blog.

And as if that's not enough, Leo mentions he has a friend who was on Hollyoaks.

"So Adam was my mate, right? Adam Woodward. And he got on Hollyoaks. And from then on he never spoke to me. It was like fame had gone to his head. He was on the cover of a gay magazine once, I remember that. And then when Hollyoaks finished he couldn't get another acting job because he'd been typecast as the guy from Hollyoaks."

None of my friends are famous actors on Hollyoaks.

Hang on. We have the idea for the film: a dad who steals from casinos. We have an actor: Adam Woodward. Get Stephen Spielberg to direct. We can call the film Papa's Payday or Daddy's Big Score

5 pm

Another person arrives. It's Kai, a Chinese guy I know from school. I haven't seen him for eighteen years. Annoyingly, unlike me, Kai is successful, rich, and handsome. He works on Wall Street as an investment broker. It's true. He really does work on Wall Street.

An interesting thing about Kai is he has an identical twin.

"What does your twin do?" I ask him.

"He's a surgeon."

So one twin is a Wall Street banker and the other twin is a surgeon. And my other friend from school, Joe, is a multi-millionaire from cryptocurrencies. And Leo is friends with an actor from Hollyoaks. And here I am writing stuff on the internet for no money.

10:30 pm

We're going out. We're all crammed into a taxi. The taxi driver is driving us to Ibiza town where we'll eat dinner and go to a club.

I look out the window. It's nighttime. The view's nice. The sky and the forested hills are dark but there are pinpricks of lights from houses and street lamps.

"Guys, look out the window," I say. "It's really nice."

As I say this, the taxi goes through a forest, obscuring the view. Now it's just pitch black out the window.

"I can't see anything," says Quirina.

Then I notice the view out the back window. It's a dark street lit by glowing street lamps.

"Out the back window, it's really nice too," I say.

"Paul, are you tripping?" asks Kai.

"Well, technically I'm on a trip to Ibiza, so in that sense, yes, I am tripping," I say.

"But are you on drugs?"

"No."

Not yet, anyway. Hee hee hee.

11:10 pm

We're walking to a restaurant. On the street, a little black boy, naked save for a pair of red underpants, is playing with his dog. It's almost midnight so shouldn't he be in bed? Maybe this is normal for Ibiza. Maybe kids play outside all night in their underwear.

11:20 pm

We go for dinner on this wonderful street in Ibiza's old town. It's a narrow cobblestone street with fairy lights strung overhead and enormous palm trees towering overhead. There's a surreal, magical quality to it. It feels like a dream. Every building is a restaurant and the street is packed with chairs and tables. I look up and there's a woman hanging out her laundry on her balcony. Pants, knickers, bras: she's hanging it all up above people eating dinner.

We get a table at one of the restaurants. We all sit down. We order several plates of food and four giant jugs of sangria.

I ask Joe if I can have some drugs.

"Not yet," he says. "It'd kick in while we're still eating. You want it to kick in when we reach the club."

The food comes. It's tapas. Fish and olives and stuff.

Kai's sitting next to me. He's using WhatsApp on his phone. When I ask him who he's texting, he says, "A drug dealer. He's going to hook me up with cocaine."

Halfway through the dinner, Joe gives me an ecstasy pill, which I swallow. Joe also gives a pill to Kai. Then Joe necks two ecstasy pills himself.

Then Kai goes off to buy 160 euros worth of cocaine from a local drug dealer. He comes back ten minutes later, alert, happy and talkative. "I stopped in the toilets first to try it," he says, while wiping his nose. "But the score was really weird. He was like, follow me up these stairs, and I was like, why, and he was like, there's cops behind us, and I looked behind me and there were these two cop cars. So I followed him up the stairs and we did the deal there. It was really weird. Yeah so how's your night going Antonina? Are you having a good time?"

Antonina does cocaine next: she disappears to the toilets for ten minutes and when she comes back she's alert and happy.

Now it's my turn. Antonina passes me the bag of cocaine under the table. I clutch the bag of cocaine - which is actually a really tiny bag, there's probably only about two grams in there - and head to the toilets in the restaurant. Once I'm alone in the toilet cubicle, I open the little ziplock bag of cocaine, tip some cocaine out on top of the toilet tank, and snort the cocaine using a five euro note. A few seconds later the cocaine hits me. Everything becomes more vivid and real.

I know you're judging me for taking drugs but keep in mind I'm a dad of two kids and I don't take drugs in normal life. At least let me live a little, if just for one night a year.

I go back to the table. No one else wants cocaine so I hand to bag back to Kai.

We pay for the restaurant bill and leave. And as we're all walking away from the restaurant, I suddenly feel amazing.

"JESUS CHRIST," I say, bounding in the air like Superman. "I feel A-MAZ-ING!"

"Yeah, that's the molly kicking in," says Kai.

I don't know what molly is but I assume he means ecstasy.

"This is GREAT!" I say. "I feel REALLY GOOD!"

It's true: I feel incredible.

"Yes, as I just said, that's the molly," says Kai.

The quiet guy called James is watching me out of the corner of his eye. He looks scared.

"Is this making you want to try drugs, James?" asks Joe dryly.

James shakes his head emphatically. He looks scared, probably due to my extreme reaction to the cocaine and ecstasy. I've probably put him off drugs for life now. Oh well. More drugs for me then.

Antonina's walking next to me. "Do you mind if I hold your hand?" I ask her.

She laughs and takes my hand. I don't know how many years it's been since I've held a girl's hand. A girl other than my girlfriend's, I mean. Kai takes Antonina's other hand and we skip gaily down the street while holding hands like Dorothy, the Tin-Man and the Scarecrow skipping down the yellow brick road. If I had to guess why, it's because we've taken cocaine and ecstasy.

Midnight

We're in the line for a club called Pacha. I'm standing next to my old schoolfriend Kai when he leans into me and say, "So I heard you got bullied at school. Something about Michael Cotton?"

"Oh," I say. "Yeah, I suppose I did get bullied. It was mainly this one kid called Michael Cotton, yeah. There was a rumour going the school that was my dad was clown, and - my dad wasn't a clown by the way, he was like an entertainer? It was something he did for extra money because we were quite poor at the time. He did balloon modelling at events and stuff like that. Anyway, Michael Cotton used to pretend to honk his nose at me as if he was wearing a clown's nose. Like in lessons, he'd make honking noises at me while squeezing his nose."

This is the part where Ken's supposed to laugh.

But he doesn't laugh.

"I can imagine that must have been triggering for you," he says.

Why isn't he laughing.

"I was bullied at Vesey too," he says, his face darkening. "For me, it was my race. The other kids would make fun of me because I was Chinese."

Wait: I thought I was the only one who was bullied.

"I didn't know that," I say finally.

"Yeah, I'd get called 'chink' and kids would pull the corners of their eyes into slits at me. I had to pretend it didn't hurt me. That school is a tough place, man. Lots of people got bullied there. That Michael Cotton kid though, he had no right to do that to you. Even if he was just a kid, no one has the right to hurt anyone else."

This is new to me. I always thought I deserved the bullying. I always thought it was my fault the bullies picked on me, through my behaviour and actions.

"You're right," I say, with sudden realisation. "Michael Cotton didn't have a right to do that to me."

"You know, Michael Cotton probably had some issues of his own," adds Kai. "Maybe his dad beat him up or something. Maybe that's why he bullied you. He took his anger out on you."

"Yeah," I say, thoughtfully. "Maybe he did."

Then Kai smiles. "Now you just have to forgive him. Michael Cotton, I mean."

Yeah, I don't know about that.

Hang on. The line's moving. We're going in.

1 AM

We're inside a club called Pacha. It's the same club we went to last year. Last year Joe paid hundreds of euros for a VIP table. But this year we're down on the dancefloor with the rest of the plebs, scum and poor people.

"DO YOU THINK WE'LL GET A VIP TABLE?" I shout to Joe. I have to shout because the music is so loud. The music really is loud. I can feel my eardrums vibrating.

"MAYBE," he shouts back. He takes a sip of his Corona beer. "WE'LL SEE HOW PACKED THIS PLACE GETS. IF IT'S REALLY HEAVING, I'LL GET A VIP TABLE."

I look around at everyone else to see what kind of night they're all having. Joe is cooly sipping on a beer and watching the scene with a bored expression. Quirina is dancing half-heartedly as if she's pretending to have a good time. James is clutching a beer and making an attempt at dancing which appears to be like a robot being given orders to dance. Antonina and Leo are looking bored.

So no one in our group seems to be having a good time. What the hell? You'd think we'd all be rocking out and dancing crazy. I guess it's because we're all in our thirties instead of our twenties. We're all too old for this.

All the DJ is playing is trance and techno. In fact, I think the only kind of music they play on the entire island of Ibiza is trance and techno. All other genres of music must be confiscated on the way into the airport.

I tell you what though: if the DJ played some good music like the Spice Girls or Hanson, I'd be dancing like a teenager again. I'd be leaping through the air and spinning around. Just play MMMBop and I'll have the time of my life. I'm not kidding. I really like MMMBop. It's on my Spotify playlist of my favourite songs. Mmm bop, ba duba dop, Ba du bop, ba duba dop, yeah, yeah. Or the DJ could even play Vengaboys. The song about Ibiza or the song about the Vengabus, either one would do. Come on DJ, sort it out.

In fact, they should let me be the DJ because I'd do a much better job than the actual DJ. I'd just play 90s song all night. That's all anyone anywhere wants to listen to, surely.

Then I notice Antonina pointing at me and laughing. She shouts something to Joe, something like, "HE LOOKS REALLY SAD." This is confirmed when she mimes rubbing a tear from her eye. She laughs at me again.

I'm surprised. I had no idea I look sad.

If I had to guess why I'm sad it's because the music's crap and the cocaine's worn off.

The only person missing from our group is Kai, my Chinese friend from school. I look around for him. Then I see him, coming from the toilets and rubbing his nose.

"DID YOU DO ANY MORE COCAINE?" I shout to him.

"WHAT?" he shouts back.

"DID YOU DO ANY MORE COCAINE?"

"YOU WANT MORE COCAINE?" he shouts.

He's misheard me. But I nod anyway. I'll have some cocaine.

Kai slips me the bag of cocaine. I go to the toilets. But there's a problem: there's already someone inside the toilet cubicle. So while I wait outside the cubicle, I check my reflection in the mirror. I look completely normal except my pupils are now blasted to the size of houses due to the ecstasy I took earlier.

Eventually the toilet cubicle door opens and out comes not one, not two, but three people, all looking shifty and rubbing their noses. They were all either taking cocaine or they were watching each other take a poo.

I step into the privacy of the toilet cubicle and lock the door. Then I get out the bag of cocaine from my pocket. But I can't get the bag open. The bag's too small. I'm fiddling around with the bag for what seems like ages, trying unsuccessfully to open it, when suddenly there's a knock on the door.

In a comedy film about Ibiza, the sudden knock on the door would make me drop the bag of cocaine in the toilet. I would then have to fish the bag out with my fingers while touching poo, condoms and other disgusting substances, while the person bangs on the door harder and demands to enter. By the time I'd salvaged the cocaine, the cocaine would be ruined and my friends would socially exclude me for the rest of the night.

But luckily, life's not a film and so I don't drop the bag of cocaine in the toilet. Instead, I shout, "ALMOST FINISHED!" just as I finally manage to open the bag. I tip some cocaine out onto the toilet lid and snort it with a banknote.

On the way back to the dancefloor I encounter a strange door. There's a sign saying KNOCK FOR SERVICE and below the sign is an old-fashioned door knocker. This is in a club in Ibiza, I remind you.

Out of curiosity, I bang the knocker. A moment later, the door opens. Inside is a small red room containing three women sitting around tables and wearing exotic dancer outfits. All three women look at me with confused expressions.

I don't know why they're confused. They're the ones who put the sign up about knocking for service. If anything, I should be the confused one.

"Sorry," I say. I turn and leave.

I don't know what that room was. And perhaps I never will. Is it the room the dancers go to when they're on their break? Weird.

When I get back to the dancefloor, my friends have gone. They've disappeared. This is slightly worrying because I'm alone in a club in the middle of Ibiza with a class-A drug in my pocket.

Then I see Kai. He's dancing in the middle of the dancefloor. Phew, that's a relief. I push my way through the crowd to get to Kai only to discover that it's not Kai but just some guy wearing a similar t-shirt.

Then I see Joe. It's definitely Joe. I'm 100% certain it's Joe. So I push my way through the crowd of dancers to reach him. But then he turns and it's not Joe, it's someone else again.

This could go on all night: me approaching strangers who look uncannily like my friends, only to keep realising at the last second that I've got the wrong person. So I check my phone. There's a message from Antonina saying she's outside in the smoking area. So I push my way through the crowds again and make my way outside. And there everyone is, smoking.

I bum a cigarette from Leo. I smoke it for a while and then remember cigarettes taste disgusting so I throw the cigarette on the floor.

Later we go back to dance some more. Joe pushes two pills into the palm of my hand and shouts, "SWALLOW THESE." I look down. The pills are green and shaped like teddy bears. I swallow them without question.

"WHAT ARE THEY?" I shout.

"2C-B," shouts Joe.

"WHAT'S THAT?"

"IT'S A PSYCHEDELIC DRUG, IT'LL GIVE YOU HALLUCINATIONS."

Half an hour later and I'm dancing with my eyes closed. The dancefloor has disappeared. Everyone has disappeared. All I see is white. All I hear is the music. Then I start seeing things. I see complicated fractal patterns. I see spirals of mirrors. This is nice.

At the end of the night Kai and I go to the toilet for "one last bump" which means snorting cocaine again. But when we get to the toilets, there's a massive turd floating in the toilet. The water in the toilet is dirty brown and reaches up to the brim. And the turd is covered with dirty toilet paper.

So Kai snorts cocaine right there, next to the urinals. He doesn't try to keep it private. There are people standing next to him taking a piss. There's even a toilet attendant standing around.

He hands me the bag of cocaine. And I snort some right there.

"Geez, Pietrzak, couldn't you have been less obvious?" says Kai.

4:30 am

We leave the club. As we walk out, I see three paramedics crouching around a teenage girl sitting in a chair. She has her head down. She's holding her head with her hands as if she's in the midst of despair. In a book, she would represent the bad side of drugs, the side where you take too much and have a bad drip or an overdose.

Outside the club, an animated French man comes up to us. "Je t'aime," he says to each of us in turn. "Je t'aime, Je t'aime!" Then he addresses the whole group and says, "Je vous aime tous." In a book he would represent the lighter side of drugs, the side where you feel a universal love for complete strangers.

"He says he loves us," I say.

"Yeah, we got that," says Joe dryly.

Then he offers to give Antonina a piggyback ride. Antonina doesn't want a piggyback ride.

We try to take a group photo outside the club but the French guy keeps trying to get in the photo. Quirina insists he has to leave.

"I don't want to ruin whatever trip he's on, but I just want a photo with just my friends," she says.

I'm touched she thinks of me as a friend.

In the end, a bouncer pushes the French guy out of the way and Quirina gets her photo.

And then in the taxi queue, an angry Spanish man starts shouting at us. "¡ESTAIS EN EL LUGAR EQUIVOCADO!" he shouts furiously. "¡LA COLA DE TAXI EMPIEZA POR ALLÍ!" I can understand Spanish because I live in Spain. He's saying he's we're standing in the wrong place and that the taxi queue starts further down the street.

But it turns out he's completely wrong. There isn't even a taxi queue. And he doesn't even work for the taxi companies. He's just a random man. We jump into taxis and the taxis drive us away.

6:30 am

When we get home, I go to bed. And as soon as my head hits the pillow, I hear a rooster shriek "COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!" outside my bedroom window.

As I lie there, trying to sleep, I hear "COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!" again. Then again. And again. And again, every five minutes. The bloody rooster won't shut up. Every five minutes, more or less, it lets out a piercing and pointless shriek of "COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!" while I lie there in bed, miserable and sleep-deprived.

The rooster doesn't stop. It's cock-a-doodle-dooed over a hundred times now. Surely that's enough? But no. It's "COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!" this and "COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!" that. Its piercing shriek is coming right through my bedroom window and into my sleep-deprived brain. Aren't roosters supposed to just crow once, when the sun comes up? That's how it works in films and on TV. The rooster crows at the break of dawn and then shuts up. I guess this rooster isn't like the roosters on films or TV. This one is a more talkative rooster.

I wonder if anyone else is awake. I get out of bed and wander around the villa. The villa is empty. The door to one of the bedrooms is open and there's no one in the bedroom. Weird. I wonder where everyone is. (I later discover they're in the other villa.)

I go outside. The sky is starting to lighten. Slowly, imperceptibly, the colour of the sky is changing from black to blue. I keep waiting for the sun to appear over the horizon but it never does. Then I realise I'm looking the wrong way. The sunrise was behind me. I missed it.

I sit outside on a step in my underpants and with a blanket wrapped around my shoulders, looking like a heroin junkie going through withdrawal. As I'm sitting there with this blanket around my shoulders, I turn my head and for a moment the blanket looks like a person standing over my shoulder, and I jump out of fright. Then I realise it's just my blanket.

Then the morning chorus starts. Dozens of birds start singing away. The sky is light blue. It's properly morning now.

This must be the proper Ibiza experience: sitting on a step in your underpants having slept zero hours because of drugs while listening to morning birdsong.

I go back to bed and close my eyes but instead of falling asleep, I have weird and vivid images in my imagination.

So I get out of bed again. As I'm wandering around the empty villa, Quirina walks in. She's the first person I've seen this morning. She's still wearing her dress and sandals from last night.

"Hey," I say.

"Morning," she says. She walks straight past me and goes to her room.

Guess she didn't want a conversation then.

There's a self-help book on the dining room table called Reinventing Your Life. I guess it's Antonina's as she's probably the most unstable one out of all of us.

Jesus Christ, I hate self-help books. The idea that you're so weak and fragile that you need a book to help you with your life.

But because there's nothing else to do, I pick up the book and turn to the contents page. Each chapter is about a different psychological issue: abandonment, mistrust, abuse, emotional deprivation, social exclusion, dependence, and entitlement. I turn to the chapter about social exclusion because I don't really have any friends outside of this Ibiza group and it'd be nice to learn how to connect with people.

Ten minutes later, and I'm sobbing like a child because I've just read the most sad and beautiful thing I've ever read. Here it is:

Social exclusion is a cold, lonely feeling. Do not leave your inner child in that cold place. [...] I bring myself in to where my childhood self is standing and I tell him that he is not alone anymore. I am here.

I cry at the kitchen table for a good twenty minutes after reading that. I don't know what that tells you. Probably that I had a bad childhood.

As I read more of the book, I have a revelation about what my fundamental problem is as a human being: I'm not a nice person. I don't care about other people. That's probably why other people don't like me either. Because I don't care about them.

I also realise that the bullying at school made me an uncaring person. I had to beoame hard and uncaring to make the bullies leave me alone. And it's followed me into my adult life. I'm still callous today.

Then, in my head, two words pop up: BE KIND. I decide that from this day on, I'll be kinder to people. If this were the Christopher Nolan movie Inception, then the words BE KIND would be written on a scrap of paper and locked in a safe in the deepest level of my subconscious, forever affecting my every action from now on, like the spinning top that convinces Mal that her reality is just a dream she needs to wake up from. BE KIND is my new motto. It's how I'm going to live life from now on. If I were a robot, then a scientist in a white lab coat would be ejecting the floppy disk that says EVIL from a drive in my chest and inserting a new floppy disk that says GOOD instead, making my red glowing murderous eyes cool to a soft green.

I'll be kind from now on.

That is, until the effects of these drugs wear off and I go back to being a heartless bastard.

In my head, I make a new list of rules for living life. The list so far is:

1. BE KIND
2. BE HONEST
3. BE INDEPENDENT

I might think of more things later. Then again, maybe I won't. Maybe I won't be bothered.

11 am

Jesus Christ, it's now 11 am. I haven't slept all night.

And there's still no one around. No one except Quirina and she's asleep in her bed.

I check WhatsApp and see that my friend Joe just sent a new message:

I've asked if we can move cycling to Tuesday. Awaiting reply.

So Joe's awake. I guess he's in his bedroom.

I sit there for fifteen minutes before it occurs to me that I could ask him for benzodiazepine. Benzodiazepine is a prescription drug used to treat insomnia. It can also help you sleep when you've taken drugs. I know Joe probably has some with him because he brought some last year. And if I took a benzo now I could get some sleep. So I quickly send Joe a message:

Could I get a benzo from you

To help me sleep

But he doesn't read my message. The grey ticks next to my messages never turn blue. He must have gone to bed.

Noon

Now I'm reading a different book. I've just read that 250,000 people died in a tsunami in Southeast Asia in 2004. I knew about the tsunami but I never cared. But now it makes me sad, to imagine all those people drowning. Policemen, firemen, children, old people on walking sticks. It's so sad I start crying again.

Leo walks around the corner.

"I'm just going to the shop," he says. "I'm going to buy water. Want anything?"

I quickly wipe the tears from my eyes.

"Oh, uh, no thanks," I say.

He looks at me strangely. Doubtless, he can see I've been crying.

"Alright, well I'll be back soon," he says, and jumps in the jeep and drives away.

I don't normally cry but this morning I'm crying non-stop. I later realise in retrospect it's the comedown of the ecstasy I took the night before.