‘The pilot’s voice, eerily calm, announced: this is an emergency’

We were an hour into the flight from Gatwick to Malaga when it happened. Turbulence of the kind that makes the seatbelt signs flash, overhead lockers judder, cabin crew strap in, and passengers exchange grimaces. There were five of us – my sister and I plus three girlfriends, bound for a week on the Costa Tropicale. We had waxed our bikini lines but we had not prepared for this.

What happened first? The feeling of dropping out of the sky as though we were aboard a stone rather than a plane? The pilot’s voice, eerily calm, announcing: “This is an emergency, this is an …” before cutting out? The oxygen masks dropping, a moment as horrifying as you always imagined it would be? Or rather tried not to imagine, ever, especially while cruising at 30,000ft.

We were told something about “engine failure” and a return to Gatwick to make an emergency landing. I became convinced my oxygen mask wasn’t working and spent what I deemed to be my last precious minutes on earth arsing around with the instructions. My sister grabbed a flight attendant patrolling the aisles with an enormous canister of oxygen, sucked hard on it, then asked her if we were going to die. (She refused to answer but I saw the fear in her eyes.) Another attendant was doling out what I thought were shots of tequila in a fabulously Bette Davis-ish screw-you to death and the tyranny of the overpriced minibar. It turned out they were very tiny glasses of water. I watched an elderly couple hold hands across the aisle. I thought my legs were going to explode.

Fifteen minutes later we were back at Gatwick, met by a welcome committee of paramedics and “special buses”. We were whisked off to a dystopian airport hotel to recuperate, collect tokens for complimentary tea or coffee, and witness the unravelling of our fellow passengers. So this was the life we had feared losing … God, it was crap (and beautiful). That night we flew out to Malaga as planned, defiant and terrified. My legs still felt like they were exploding and for years afterwards I would walk on to a plane and they would erupt all over again. But we were determined to have our holiday. And you know what? It was wonderful.

Chitra Ramaswamy

‘The staff took it in turns to punch me in the back’

The brief for our honeymoon was simple: there had to be sunshine, there had to be good food and – knowing that I’m the kind of guy who will begrudgingly surrender a day on the beach if there’s even the slightest opportunity to take a nine-hour hike to photograph something old on a hill – there had to be absolutely nothing else to do.

Well, at least I nailed the third point. In the remote part of Lombok I’d whisked my new bride to, there was certainly nothing to do for miles around. This becomes less of a boon when every day is washed out with tropical rainstorms, and the place you’re staying at does a line in reheated food so creatively inedible it deserved its own Michelin star. Sitting cooped up in our room eating crisps and drinking overpriced imported lager from the only shop around, we certainly laughed about it. For a few days. But with over a week still to go I realised I had to take drastic action to save a holiday that was currently most notable for the fact we spotted a decapitated lizard on the beach.

Thankfully, I’d heard about a cool little beachside barbecue 40 minutes or so away that cooked “the best fish on the island”, and so off we went. It was a hit! Right until the point I got a large fishbone lodged in my throat and could no longer swallow. The staff took it in turns to punch me in the back, then, increasingly panic-stricken, forced me to perform a series of increasingly degrading tasks in front of horrified onlookers – swallow this chunk of banana whole! Now try this massive ball of rice! – while I gagged and retched. Eventually the bar’s owner bundled us both into his car and we headed to A&E, where different doctors stuck things down my throat and my wife watched Indonesia’s version of Pop Idol in the adjacent room. She found it all very amusing, which was just as well because she must have also realised she had just signed up for a lifetime of this sort of thing.

Tim Jonze

‘My brother had one bite of his lunch and was sick on the table’

I had not been on holiday with my family for years at this point and have not since, though enough time has passed for me to possibly be tempted again – providing it does not involve a static caravan in Benidorm.

My mum had made friends with a woman who owned said static caravan in Benidorm, and had offered her the use of it for a week. We are a spaced-out family, so I was around 21, my sister would have been 11, and my brother was two. My dad had broken his arm and stayed at home, so my mum asked if I fancied going, to keep her company and help out with the kids.

The first sign of trouble came in McDonald’s, when the staff implied that they would prefer it if my brother did not frequent the establishment again. He was a rowdy toddler. We went to a cafe down the road that served English food from an English menu for English people who wanted sunshine but not Spanish food in Spain. He had one bite of his lunch and was sick all over the table. We trundled back to the caravan for a change of clothes. My sister started to complain that she felt unwell, then projectile-vomited all over her bed. In the middle of the night, my mum joined in the fun and started throwing up too.

I did not get sick and have googled “norovirus immunity” to death since. They were all unwell, but in a tiny caravan in a hot country heaving with three people and a sick bug, I knew who was really suffering. Like I said, we haven’t been away together since.

Rebecca Nicholson

‘Estonian hospitals aren’t necessarily that much fun’

It’s hard to overstate how differently my wife and I reacted to the news of her pregnancy. Sensibly, all she wanted to do was relax and conserve her energy. I, meanwhile, just saw a huge list of stuff we wouldn’t be able to do once the baby was born. So I dragged her to Glastonbury – essentially a boiling hellscape of faeces and mouldy food – at the very height of her morning sickness.

And then there was our honeymoon, which arrived just as her centre of gravity went haywire, in an Estonian city that is approximately 95% cobbles. Every day, against her will, I’d make her explore the place for miles, until she inevitably tripped and fell so hard that we thought she had broken her ankle. This taught me several valuable lessons. It taught me that Estonian hospitals aren’t necessarily that much fun. It taught me that Estonian cab drivers are the most helpful in the world, until the moment they realise that your wife actually isn’t in the final throes of labour. Most importantly, it taught me to be a little more sensitive to the needs of others. And that, as honeymoon mementos go, you really can’t beat a photo of your pregnant wife grimacing in a wheelchair.

Stuart Heritage

‘At check-in I was told I was too late – far too late’

The worst things always happen on the last day. I was once so late for a flight from New York back to London that I was obliged to sacrifice myself for the sake of my family. I dropped them off at check-in with their tickets, and then drove off to return the hire car. At least my wife would make it to the wedding at which she was to be maid of honour. Twenty minutes later, on the monorail back to the terminal, I decided to have a stab at getting on the flight.

At check-in I was told I was too late – far too late. I’m not a formidable negotiator, but I can summon up a certain passive-aggressive wheedling for emergencies. It’s not attractive, but on this occasion it was effective. Calls were placed, rules bent on my behalf. Eventually I was issued with a standby boarding pass and told to run. I forced myself to the front of the queue at security, apologetic, mortified but grimly determined. Then I ran some more.

After reaching the gate breathless and soaked in sweat, I had to open negotiations all over again. Boarding was complete, said the woman at the desk; they were shutting the doors. I’d come too far to give up; I explained my situation, making it sound as heart-rending as possible. Lying, mostly. They relented. As I set off triumphantly down the tunnel, something occurred to me. I went back. “Can I just check that my family is on the plane?” I said.

“The passenger list is classified,” said the woman. She didn’t seem that interested in waiting while I weighed my options.

At that moment I heard something I’d never heard before: my own name coming over the airport’s PA system. I was being paged.

I found my family on the main concourse. They had never even got close.

Tim Dowling

‘I was put into the back of an ancient Peugeot with a pig’

When I die, you will find “Delphine” engraved on my heart. And not in the good way.

She was the girl I stayed with for a week 20-odd years ago during our sixth form exchange trip to bloody, bloody France. The rest of my class was whisked away to Parisian townhouses. I, for some reason – administrative error, karma, malevolent headteacher/God – was put into the back of an ancient Peugeot with a pig (I seem to recall him smoking, but Dame Memory may be playing me false) and driven out to the tiny village of Merdeville, just beyond Rage et Desespoir. There I spent a week in a farmhouse with 17-year-old Delphine et her famille, on a farm with nary a lightly-muscled farmhand who, having sampled all the local vaginas, might therefore have gallantly taken it upon himself to relieve a sexually-unappealing schoolgirl of her virginity.

I stared in silence at the mournful Gallic face of my exchange partner as she lay bonelessly round the house apparently able to stave off an impending existential crise only by sneering and eating pig lips at me.

We went to school each day in a boneshaking bus that took 14 hours to get there and 14 hours to get back. I understood not one word of what went on in between. All Delphine’s friends were also existentially crise-ing so they weren’t much help or entertainment either. In the evenings Delphine would sigh and eat more pig lips and I would vow to burn my passport as soon as I got home. Her mother would offer me coffee, cigarettes and pig lips. I drank the coffee, ate the cigarettes and declined the pig lips. “Je pense que ils might give you cancer, merci.”

Jamais again, I swore. Jamais again.

Lucy Mangan