Sometimes when you cough or shout or find some way to distract snorers, it disturbs their sleep pattern and they will move to a new position and so clear their airwaves for a while, thereby providing a short respite of silence. I had learned this skill when I was a child. My father would fall asleep in front of the TV after a hard day at work, and he too had a real problem with loud snoring. A clap of the hands or a loud cough would disturb him and bring a little peace. It didn’t wake him, just stirred him enough. I had honed this trick to a fine art as a child. You had to be careful not to rouse the snorer completely from his slumber, for if you did wake him, and he thought the noise had come from the TV, he would just walk over and turn it off without any explanation and then return to his chair and resume sleeping and snoring. A fine balancing act indeed. Worse still, if my father thought it was his oldest son – me – taking the piss, he would belt me on the way past, just for good measure. So the stakes were high. As they were now.
As I lay there in my bed listening to Martin howling, I decided to test my skills on him. I coughed loudly. There was a moment’s silence. Was this success? A few grunt-like sounds and … all he did was change key from a deeper E flat to a louder A minor.
I tried again. And again. Martin simply changed tune and slumbered on regardless. It was intolerable. I put my fingers in my ears, but my hands got pins and needles. I put my head under the blankets, even under the pillow, but I had to resurface for fear of suffocating. I sang to myself; I stuffed toilet roll in my ears, all to no avail. Martin continued to snore more and more loudly. In the end I had no option but to wake him. I pushed him awake. ‘What?’ he said.
‘You’re snoring,’ I replied.
He turned around. Hooray, I had won. There was silence. I curled up into my favourite sleeping position and waited for Dr Sleep to welcome me into the house of dreams. Then Martin started again. Louder and louder. I woke him again as politely as I could two or three more times. Eventually I was shouting, ‘Shut the fuck up!’ I finally got to sleep about 6.30am. At 7am the alarm went off. Martin was up first, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. He pushed me awake and introduced himself.
‘Morning, mate, I’m Martin. Sorry about not coming for a drink with you last night, I was in a session with me mates all day in Manchester before I left. I was a bit tired. Might have one with you tonight, though. Cor, you look a bit tired, mate. Did you have a late night, then? By the way, I think I snore a bit, hope it doesn’t keep you awake.’ Then he disappeared into the bathroom to freshen up. Yes, I thought, I can confirm the snoring bit.
Over the next couple of weeks sleeping became a real problem for me. I devised new positions for Martin to lie in, in order to try to prevent the racket recurring. Fair enough he tried them all willingly. I think we had some success when he lay on his stomach with his legs tucked underneath his body. Unfortunately, this meant he didn’t sleep, but at least he didn’t snore either. Eventually I moved my mattress next to the balcony door. It didn’t stop him snoring, but it did reduce the volume. I really liked Martin once we had got through this difficulty. We eventually became good friends. That said, I know that I couldn’t have stayed in this room for more than two weeks with him. I think I would have died of exhaustion. Or he would have died of strangulation.
A couple of years before this excursion into the world of tour operating, I had tried my hand with another company, and they had taken us all off for a training course in Majorca. It was great fun, but I hadn’t taken the experience too seriously. I had looked at the letter saying, ‘Training course … Majorca’ and thought, Great, a holiday. I’d gone away to that course in a very relaxed mood. I remember packing lots of pairs of shorts and T-shirts. On arrival at the course venue, I was horrified to learn that ninety per cent of our time would be spent in an office environment, where you would be expected to wear ‘office dress’. Which, of course, meant shirt and tie. I spent most of my free time in the week washing and re-washing my one shirt and tie. Over and over again.
I decided before I set off with this new company that I wouldn’t make the same mistake again. So, plenty of smart office clothes were packed this time. On day one I dressed in my smart shirt, new trousers and sensible tie. Sod’s law meant that I was the only one who dressed that way. One of our first tasks was to answer a practical quiz that took us all out and about to parts of the island away from Playa den Bossa all the way to Ibiza town. A distance of about five miles. This would all be done walking in groups that had been organised that morning. The groups consisted of a couple of experienced reps and a collection of ‘greenies’, people like me. We set off to walk to Ibiza and answer the questions along the way. The theory was that the experienced members should have a good idea of the answers and help the newcomers along the way.
Good theory, I suppose, but not so good if your experienced rep, Cerise, is pursuing the affections of another rep in the group, Motorbike Mark. They only had eyes for each other. It soon became clear that Cerise knew all the answers. Periodically she would fill in a few of the questions and then hand them back to us newcomers who were all following her eagerly down the street. We would then copy what she had given us and wait for more. Our collective fear as the new kids on the block was that if we got all the questions wrong we would all be sent home for failing. This, it turned out, was highly unlikely, as I don’t believe that our papers were even looked at once they had been handed in. They all came back with the same comment, ‘A good effort, well done,’ written on them.
The day itself had been very hot and tiring. A heavy pair of brown Marks & Spencer corduroy trousers probably work very well in the winter months in England; they keep you very warm. On a mildly hot spring day in Ibiza, walking ten miles in the same trousers is, to put it mildly, very hot and sticky, and very uncomfortable. I had been a little self-conscious about wearing shorts for the first couple of weeks in Ibiza, because my legs were lily white. This turned out to be no problem at all. All the dye from my cords transferred on to my legs after the first three miles. Try as I might, this dye proved impossible to remove, without taking a layer of skin with it. Some of our group might have learned a lot from that first day in Ibiza, but I learned nothing, except how to walk to and from Ibiza town in a pair of heavy cords that have been made twice as heavy by being laden down with a liberal helping of sweat.
Rather unfortunately, I had also chosen that first day to give my new hobnailed boots their first airing. This too, for obvious reasons in retrospect, was a big mistake. They stood up rather well to their first test, but reaped a terrible revenge on me. From that day on, they stank beyond all comprehension. One whiff of them could paralyse your nostrils. As they were the only sensible pair of brown leather footwear I had, and that was the company uniform, they just got worse as the season got hotter and drier. I had to lock them away at night, or leave them outside my apartment. Needless to say I reverted to wearing a cooler pair of trousers for the remainder of the course.
The agenda for the two-week course looked quite busy in theory, but some of the times allotted for different sessions proved to be wildly inaccurate. As a result, there were times when our trainers didn’t know what to do with us. This left us all with a lot of free time to kill, which proved to be no problem to anybody. I had brought a lot of spending money with me to see me through the first month, and it didn’t take that much effort to plug into holiday mode quite quickly. I took many long and leisurely lunches with my new friends and got drunk. I also took every opportunity to do the same in the evenings.
Martin and I got on very well outside the bedroom, and we would have lunch with Liz and a girl called Beth whom I had met in Gatwick airport on the way out. We would spend our time either bitching about other members of the staff or recounting our past. You learn quite quickly who you like and don’t like, and who you want to spend time with, or not as the case may be. We passed many hours discussing our futures, where we would like to work on the island and how we would like to fare in our first six months in the job. We all preferred different areas of the island, but the powers that be, i.e. our trainers, were not going to tell any of us where we were heading just yet. At that time we had no comprehension of how big the island was or how we were going to get around; it was all so new.
Towards the end of the first two weeks, with D-day – the arrival of our first guests of the