No one has ever satisfactorily explained to me why, but the job of a tour rep was particularly attractive to women and gay men and my course reflected this. My pal for the week was Andy, an affable sort, who had had a career carved out at a big high street retailer. He was the same age as me, and had joined the company for most of the same reasons as I had. On the first night at the bar, he let it be known he wanted to be a rep so as to turn himself into a shag monster. We hit it off immediately.
The girls on the course outnumbered the boys. There was Liz, of course, who made instant friends with another Welsh wench called Julie. Both were of the same build – short and wide – with masses of wild blonde hair, giant chests and an obsession with willies. Standing together at the bar, from behind they resembled the back row of a rugby scrum. They developed the tiresome habit of kissing you, hugging you and grabbing you at the slightest pretence. Their intentions were blatant, but Andy and I – the two budding sex machines – wimpishly turned them down with, ‘Nah, not my type.’
Michelle, another of the girls in our group, was a no-nonsense Mancunian, and was destined to be a rep from the day she was born. She bore a startling resemblance to the Simply Red singer Mick Hucknall and was duly dubbed Mick. It came as no surprise that she sailed through the course and went on to shine.
The other girl I recall on that course was Karen, who was about as out of place as a rep as a camel in a garage. She was from somewhere in the Home Counties and had a cut-glass accent and a way of putting people down that made you feel you were something nasty stuck to her shoe. I’d figured that she’d doubtless do well in up-market resorts. The company thought otherwise and sent her to Ibiza, to get a bit of experience of the other side of life.
The only other bloke of record from that time was Quentin. He shared a room with Andy and shared his thoughts with us chaps on the kind of men he fancied. After one heavy night at the bar, Andy returned to their room, to be confronted by a fretting Quentin.
‘Where’ve you been all night? I’ve been worried sick,’ he trilled. Andy pushed past him and crashed on his bed. He awoke the next morning to find himself in the bed with his pyjamas on and Quentin at his bedside with a welcome cup of tea. Andy was strangely quiet for a couple of days afterwards, and drank noticeably less.
Quentin never made the grade. But the rest of us did. There we were, the class of ’92, ready for an exciting future, serving the travelling British public. I was gripped by a tinge of sadness and much foreboding as we rookie reps stood in the drizzle and said our farewells. And Liz tried to stick her tongue down my throat for the last time.
I WAS AT the front of the crowd, leading it through the streets of San Antonio towards the next bar. This was the first pub crawl of the year, but we had still managed to get about eight hundred people booked up, and we were now marching them towards the third bar of the night. The atmosphere was electric; they all seemed to be chanting in unison some song about travelling: ‘Here we go, here we go, here we go!’ Everything was good-natured and fun. I had to pinch myself to be absolutely sure that I was really doing this. Just a few short weeks ago I had been selling sandpaper to boring old carpenters. Here I was today leading a large group of British youth on a bar crawl in Ibiza. I knew where I preferred to be, and it wasn’t sniffing sawdust. I jumped along with the crowd, feeling tipsy – not only because of the free drinks I had just helped myself to in the last bar, but because of the fantastic atmosphere. The free drinks bit was a real godsend. I was learning fast that the name badge with the company logo pinned to your left breast was more than just a name tag. It could be a bloody credit card. A credit card that came without any bills dropping to remind you of your sins. Brilliant! I’ve really landed on my feet here, I thought to myself.
Bar crawls were a very common sight in Ibiza when I worked there. Ours was mainly a family company, but we seemed to have a lot of youth arriving at the start of the season, so we had no trouble getting our own crawl up and running. The companies who specialised in the youth market had eyed our arrivals with envy; they would not be happy with our crawls starting before their own. Rumour had it that day that the competitors were going to combine their guests so as not to lose face and get their own bar crawl on the street that night as well. This kind of collaboration between competitors was apparently unheard of before, so we didn’t take it too seriously and set off earlier in the evening without checking with the bar owners whether anyone else was going to be in, and if so at what time. This all seemed a distant irritation as we led the group around the corner on to the sea-front in San Antonio town.
My mate Chris grabbed my arm and I tried to push him away. I was having such fun. This repping stuff was truly wonderful. Chris grabbed my arm again, this time more forcefully. I looked at him; he was staring straight ahead. I followed his gaze. There before us, fifty yards away, were one gang of youth reps with the other boys, and about five hundred of their youths all drunk, singing and full of beans. No problem, I thought to myself, we can just walk around them. Chris, however, being a veteran of two years’ service in this business already, had quickly realised this could be trouble. Any youth rep worth his salt knows that when Brits get together in groups, violence is never far away. It’s one of the reasons that bar owners are always reluctant to let groups of lads into bars unless they are firmly under control. What looks like good fun one minute can quickly turn nasty. Our group of lads had begun to notice the group of British lads in front of them with their own reps and they started to chant: ‘Who the fuckin’ hell are you? Who the fuckin’ hell are you?’ Quite a good question under the circumstances. What we really needed now was a group of Germans to walk past, so the entire group could unite in their antipathy for the German nation. Where are the bloody Germans when you need them?
We realised we were going to have to act fast if we were going to avert a potentially nasty situation. A bottle came sailing through the air in the direction of the other group. It smashed somewhere in the crowd. Then, all at once, both groups broke ranks and started to race towards each other. Within minutes there was skin and hair flying in all directions. I suddenly began to think that selling sand-paper was not such a bad proposition after all.
Chris grabbed me by the arm and taught me the first lesson for every rep in crowd control. Self-preservation. We ran like hell to the safety of a nearby bar; the doorman quickly ushered us in and shut the door behind us. Within minutes the police had arrived in force. They seemed to be enjoying the baton practice this opportunity afforded them. Arrests were few; bruised ribs were plentiful. Within half an hour ambulances had arrived and the paramedics were quickly sorting the drunk from the injured.
We emerged from the bar to find several of our colleagues had done exactly the same thing that we’d done, in other nearby establishments. Now our work would really begin. ‘Pick an ambulance,’ shouted Chris. ‘We’ll have to go with the gits to hospital now, just to make sure they’re all right.’
I took his advice without question, as he had already saved my bacon once that night. I jumped into an ambulance with a young bloke who had managed to cut his head open, either on a bottle or from a fall. Either way, he looked pretty miserable as he sat meekly on the seat of the ambulance. His girlfriend, very obviously the worse for alcohol, was lying on the floor in front of him, laughing. At least she had had the wherewithal to notice me climb into the ambulance and sit opposite her stricken boyfriend. She opened her eyes as the ambulance doors slammed shut and we began our twenty-minute journey to the hospital in Ibiza town. ‘Cy!’ she screamed as she hauled herself up and tried to sit beside me. She looked at me blankly. ‘My mate fancies you,’ she gibbered, ‘but I think you are an ugly bastard.’ Then she slumped down with her head resting in my lap and fell asleep. Good start to the season, really. If I had known it was going to be like this, I’d have joined years ago.
* * *
One thing that inspired confidence in me that I had made the