Well, as I start to type this I've been back from holiday for a couple of weeks, and the usual post-holiday blues kicked in the moment we touched english terra firma. Still, you’d think it would have been eased slightly by the continuing heat wave here in the UK and the fact that I don’t have an office to run back to.

But you’d be wrong. In fact it was actually a bit disheartening. Because, having spent several days burning my buns (and several other sensitive areas of anatomy) on a crowded, airless beach with preening Spanish teenagers, rambunctious self-congratulatory Germans and screaming English kiddies, I returned tired but quietly smug with a (in my eyes) well deserved tan – only to find that the rest of the country are sporting the same hue after a couple of scorchingly hot weekends. Dammit, I had to spend a few hundred quid to get mine!

Still, small compensation was the incredibly cheap booze we managed to struggle back with. OK, so we had to buy another piece of hand luggage to add to the annually growing collection in order to do so. But as I proudly stroke my 10 bottles of vintage year, grand reserve rioja, I can convince myself that the twisted arm and back muscles were well worth the embarrassment of clanking through customs and trying to look as if we were actually within official weight restrictions.

But quality plonk is my one of my holiday weaknesses, the one souvenir (apart from shoes) that I cannot pass up. It’s a relatively modern phenomenon, this bulk buying of quality wine abroad. Ten years ago you wouldn’t have caught a British tourist wasting their energy buying wine. Undrinkable banana liquors and sickly sweet pina colada mix, well ok. But why bother with wine from foreign countries when Tesco did Liebfraumilch and Blue Nun at a very reasonable £1.99? My, how times have changed.

Scanning the rest of the departing holidaymakers waiting to board at Gate 49, Palma airport (because females are generally observant creatures and because, ok, I’m a nosey cow) I couldn’t help but reminisce and compare today’s tourist to those I remember as a kid from the late seventies onwards. And another difference struck me quite forcefully and I wondered whether anyone else out there in the blogging community had noticed too.

What the hell’s happened to the plastic donkeys??

Now anyone over the age of twenty will recall this peculiarly eighties phenomenon, the sight of fluorescent “fun-fur” clad effigies varying in height from 15 inches to the size of a small child, wrapped in shiny clear plastic and either being carried in the arms of a sweating family member or juddering, legs in air, slowly and forlornly around an otherwise empty luggage conveyer belt. God only knows what the average tourist was thinking when they bartered furiously over a 50 peseta difference with a wiley spanish market trader. Did they ever stop for a minute to consider why anyone would want these horrible monstrosities taking up valuable space in the living room? Did they really think that Uncle Frank, Cousin Hilda or Janice next door would be overjoyed at becoming the lucky recipient of such a holiday souvenir? What on earth did they think they would do with it once they’d received it? Prop open doors with it? Dry socks over it’s back? Stick wheels on it and use as a novelty hostess trolley?

And why were these things produced anyway? Were they really meant to represent typical Spanish lifestyle, with their purple and green fur and facial expressions like they’d been prodded in the privates with a sharp stick? I think it was the locals’ way of having a laugh at the tourist industry’s expense. You can just imagine the conversation. “Manuel, I have thees factory full of orange funny fur left over from the shaggy pile carpets we make for the hotel bedrooms back in ’73 and I am having thees brilliant idea. The Briteesh love animals, hokay? And zey are coming here on holiday and zey are complaining about how we keel our bulls, hokay? So how about it, we make up some donkey shapes, stick on the shaggy pile and flog to thees 'locos'? They weel be lapping it up!”

Anyone with a better explanation (or complaint about the outrageous literary pretence at a spanish accent), please feel free to contact me.

However, whatever the explanation for their explosion onto the eighties holiday scene, holidaymakers eventually seemed to get wise to the scam – or perhaps the Spanish rug making industry ran out of shagpile, who knows? But like all great “fads”, examples stopped appearing at airports and began popping up at car boot sales and charity shops, along with all the other “classic” souvenirs. Hands up any one over 25 who owned a pair of wooden castanets? Or a plastic flamenco dancer in stiff polyester dress and nylon “lace” mantilla? Or a plastic bull covered in black-flock with a couple of red and yellow pipe cleaners sticking out of its back? Or (god help me), a straw sombrero in migraine-inducing colours and a 4-foot diameter brim decorated with something that looked similar to mothballs?

Maybe, like our newly discovered interest in quality food and drink, the British taste for souvenirs have, as a result of cheaper and more accessible travel and the growing trend for “DIY designer decoration” stepped up a few notches. But I will always harbour a soft spot for the plastic donkeys. And maybe in a few years time they’ll turn up on “Bargain Hunt” and David Dickenson will crumple up his perma-tanned face, turn to the audience and cackle, “I don’t know about you folks, but I think we have a right bobby dazzler here!”