Dateline: Spain, Friday. What on earth are we doing? Or, what are we doing on earth? Whats it all about, friends?

This column is just concluding 10 hard days and nights of research on the sun-soaked Costa Brava among a people who have confident answers to the above questions.

"Get tanned by day," replied 93 per cent.

"Get tanked by night," ticked 10 per cent. This figure may have been influenced by some failing to focus adequately on my survey.

Also, somebody spiked my sangria to further skew the statistics.

Suffice to say, I karaoke-ed twice all over the audience, a thing I normally reserve for Sunday morning and then only with choirs of others.

Ninety-five per cent saw the purpose of life as having a Costa apartment with vistas del mar, and now Spain has more properties than people, most of them empty for 48 weeks of the year.

As a break, I read Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life'.

He reckons we're here to get friendly with God and enjoy him here and for eternity, and he backs it up with a thousand bits of the Bible This is real life, he insists in his two-million bestseller.

Rick really needs to get out more.

All but a tiny per cent of my survey even hinted at this purpose.

Now, 90-odd percent of the human race couldn't have got it so badly wrong.

Well, I mean, could they?