Club 18-30<\/a> a little too refined.\u201d None of us were in our 20s. In fact, we had all recently turned 16 \u2013 I in particular looked as if I was barely on nodding terms with puberty. Still, the travel agent didn\u2019t seem fussed as she took our cash, so off we flew.<\/p>\nBANG! BANG! BANG BANG BANG!!! It was painfully early on our first morning in Ibiza and someone was pounding on mine and Wes\u2019s hotel room door.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou did this didn\u2019t you!\u201d Marc and Gav were both screaming. \u201cDon\u2019t lie to us! It was you!\u201d<\/p>\n
We didn\u2019t have a clue what they were on about. They dragged us into their room: oh God. The smell had me retching. It turned out that, overnight, some absolute grotter had broken into their room and pooed in their sink. Even today, the slightest whiff of Lynx Africa \u2013 deployed by my friends in industrial quantities to try to cover things up \u2013 takes me back there. The hotel would have nothing to do with it. \u201cClean it up, clean it up!\u201d they yelled. And so Marc and Gav were forced to do exactly that.<\/p>\n
Unwanted bodily matter swiftly became a theme. On day two, the girls in the room above us decided it would be amusing to \u201cbreak the ice\u201d in a unique way \u2013 lobbing their used sanitary products down on to our balcony.<\/p>\n
There was no escape. I\u2019d assumed we\u2019d be able to do our own thing on this holiday, but the club reps quickly press-ganged everyone into signing up for their militarily strict \u201cparty\u201d schedule. This cost a fortune and consisted of little else but constant drinking and the frequent opportunity to expose one\u2019s genitals to the general public. Yet my mates were giddily keen to go along with it \u2013 and so I did, too.<\/p>\n
Constant drinking \u2026 Jonze and friends in Ibiza. Photograph: Courtesy of Tim Jonze<\/p>\n
It was a terrible decision. Every morning we were forced out of bed at the crack of dawn and whisked off to some grim pool or beach location to start downing lager and play \u201cgames\u201d. This might involve, say, a random guy being called forward to stand on a diving board while pissed women tried yanking down his shorts with their teeth. I formulated an emergency plan: if I was singled out to participate I would turn and just run.<\/p>\n
Time passed torturously slowly. On day four, I vividly remember passing a tourist shop and seeing a postcard featuring some wildly transgressive character wearing a red PVC devil outfit and breathing fire. The caption read: \u201cIf you\u2019re tired of Ibiza, you\u2019re tired of life.\u201d Oh God, I thought, that\u2019s me. I\u2019m 16 years old and I\u2019m tired of life. I felt like a total failure.<\/p>\n
What I wish I\u2019d known then is that one day I would be back in Ibiza, dancing on podiums and partying on the beach until dawn after Manumission and Space and all the rest of it. I wasn\u2019t tired of life at all, I was just a terrified kid making terrible life choices, relieved to be boarding a plane and getting the hell out of there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018First the bad news,\u201d yelled our lairy Irish club rep as the coach drove us from Ibiza airport…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":681813,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-681812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=681812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/681813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=681812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=681812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=681812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}