One that springs to mind was a gentleman by the name of John. What a character he was. John came on holiday with his wife and from the moment he arrived he started complaining. He claimed that he had chosen to come to San Miguel purely for the standard of the tennis. I should keep you in the picture and explain that Club San Miguel is very pleasant but it’s no Wimbledon or Flushing Meadows. It has two tennis courts: one is in a very poor state of repair – i.e. the astro turf is ripped and worn – the other is a little better, and it has floodlights if you want to play after dark. Both nets sag like an aged stripper’s bra, and they can look quite sad. I can’t see Tim Henman looking at this venue as a training camp for the winter. Unsurprisingly perhaps, when John saw the courts he began to complain. He then started to moan about the standard of entertainment, which he said was ‘juvenile’. He also griped that the rooms were tiny and uncomfortable, and he hated the food.
All in all, it looked a pretty hopeless situation but, bursting with a new recruit’s enthusiasm, I decided not to be outdone by John. I have played a bit of tennis in my time – especially if Wimbledon was on the telly at home, me and my mates would get out our old racquets, climb the school fence and play until it got dark. It didn’t put me in John’s league, but it gave me the idea for a plan. I suggested that he might try coaching – coaching me. This seemed like a good idea, and so every morning I rose from my bed at 7am for a coaching session. This involved him standing stone-still at one end of the court with a bucketful of balls, which he proceeded to hit to all corners of the court, with me chasing after them, a racquet in my hand. Occasionally I would make contact with a ball and, depending on how pissed off he was, he might shout, ‘Well done.’ This would last for an hour every morning, with me sweating profusely and then collapsing in the bar and buying him a drink to thank him for the session. The same performance would then be repeated at 3pm in the heat of the sun, with me sweating even more.
John wore a permanent scowl. I don’t think it left his face for the whole two-week duration of his holiday. We even changed the situation of his room to just above the tennis court, so his wife could sit and watch John send me scampering around the court twice daily. Occasionally she would shout the odd word of encouragement to John, telling him to hit the ball harder because I was slowing down. What a bloody performance. I don’t think it made my tennis any better, but I certainly got a lot fitter and I began to lose weight. It also had the effect of making me chase anything yellow that flew past my line of vision quickly. For weeks I could be walking along, talking to a friend, and then suddenly set off in hot pursuit of a vividly coloured passing butterfly.
John, though, was not content with mere coaching. He wanted a partner – his wife was apparently far too submissive to give him a game. Then I had a brainwave. It turned out that Mark, our Dutch god and part-time wind-surfing instructor, who was predictably brilliant at everything, was willing to take John on. John had apparently been causing havoc at the wind-surfing school by complaining about the facilities there as well, so Mark saw this as an opportunity to get some revenge. John insisted that Mark play him in the evening, i.e. only after Mark had finished work. With Mark exhausted and John fresh from a mid-afternoon coaching session, the game began. It was a ferocious game that went on over three separate nights. John eventually scowled his way to victory. Still he remained unhappy with everything and everyone.
We held a weekly tennis tournament for all-comers and, against our better judgement, we let John enter. Predictably, he won. I decided to present him with the prize for winning the tournament and gathered all the entertainers, even managing to get Anna to come away from her water-skiing activities one evening so we could have a grand prize-giving ceremony to try to cheer up John and his miserable wife. We would present him with a free trip on the glass-bottom boat and a free bottle of champagne. The music was played and the ceremony began. ‘The finest tennis player ever seen in San Miguel, and a good bloke [yuk] to boot, put your hands together for … John!’ We waited for John to come and collect his prize. And we waited some more. No John. He had chosen to snub us. Eventually he came to our duty desk the next morning to collect his prize. He opened the envelope and looked at the contents. We waited for a smile or maybe even a thank you. He scowled at us and said, ‘Pity it’s not a flight home.’ At this point I had to agree with him. The good thing about these kind of people is that you only have them for a couple of weeks, and then they are gone. When the day came for John and his wife to depart we all turned out to wave them off. I think we all wanted to say good riddance and give an appropriate hand sign that would involve a swift upward thrust of the middle finger of the left hand and would have ideally connected with John’s left nostril. However, we are professionals and we contented ourselves with a smile and a wave. ‘Goodbye, John, keep in touch.’ As I said before, most of the people are nice and you are happy to help them enjoy their holidays, but do you get the odd dickhead. At least they make for good gossip.
Now, one of the reasons I came to this place was to bonk as many girls as I could, and I was certainly looking forward to a few ladies falling at my feet. After all, I had been told by some of the youth reps that your uniform, and particularly your badge, was a key to more than meets the eye. As well as being your mark of identification, it was widely known that a uniform was – to put it bluntly – a fanny magnet. But after a month in San Miguel with one night a week at the bar crawl in San An, which usually ended up in a hospital or a police station, I was beginning to wonder whether my uniform had lost its magnetism. I hadn’t even had a sniff of a chance. I was beginning to think I was hopelessly unattractive after all and that my sister, who had told me this as I left our house to go to a disco years earlier (‘You won’t pull anything, you ugly bastard’), was right after all. Fanny had come down to check on us at least once a week and she had a chat with me and asked if I got out much. The long hours at work were obviously taking their toll – either that or my muscular right wrist must have alerted her to my predicament. She said I should meet up with some of the people I had been friendly with at the training course a few weeks earlier, and I thought why not, why not indeed? I called up Beth, one of the girls I had shared lunch with many times during our training course. She was a sweet girl and I liked her, so I thought what the hell. I made a date and took her to dinner in Ibiza town.
I put on my best brown trousers, my hobnailed boots and a beige shirt, and set off to town to meet my date. I had a vague memory of how she looked from the training course, but it was fading fast. I wasn’t prepared for the way she looked when she walked into the bar we had arranged to meet at, ten minutes late. Beth was tall, about five-nine, which made her the same height as me (so I have to say tall). She had brown shoulder-length hair and lovely unblemished skin that was just beginning to tan slightly; she was slim and dressed in a stylish but sensible blue summer dress that made her look stunning and sexy. In a nutshell, she was beautiful and, I thought, way out of my league. We sat in the restaurant and tried to get to know each other. Beth, it turned out, had a boyfriend in America. I had no chance – that was made quite clear very early on, but I thought I wouldn’t let it put me off.
I liked Beth a lot, and I ended up having a wonderful evening with her. It came to an end all too soon and we found ourselves heading out of Ibiza town in the little hire car I had managed to procure for the evening. I was driving as slowly as I could out of the town when Beth’s spirit of adventure came to the fore, and she suggested we take a detour on to a rocky little cliff top that gave us a truly romantic view of the old town by night, with all its shimmering lights climbing out of the water up to the cathedral at the top of the Dalt Villa. That’s when I decided to make a move. As we sat there in the moonlight inside the car, I reached over, took Beth’s hand and gazed into her eyes. I touched her face, and ran my finger along her nose and slowly down to her lips, and I kissed her. It was a magical moment. This is what I came here for, I thought to myself, now things are starting to look up.
Beth decided that she wanted to leave the car and walk to the edge of the cliff to get a closer view of the surroundings. She gestured for me to join her for a romantic stroll in the moonlight. There was, however, no way I could leave the car, owing to the fact that I had a stonking great hard-on that refused to subside. I wasn’t about to allow my overactive manhood