Читать книгу Confessions of a Holiday Rep - My Hideous and Hilarious Stories of Sun, Sea, Sand and Sex - Cy Flood - Страница 9

TO MANY PEOPLE, the word Ibiza means complete hedonism: parties, raves, drugs, sex and wild, wild nights that never end. Throw in lots of sex with crazed women, or men, depending what your taste is, and that is pretty much the standard view of the island held by most people under the age of thirty. The reason for this misconception is, of course, San Antonio. San Antonio, as most people are aware, is Ibiza’s wild party capital, which really has heaploads of the above in abundance. The media love to do their bit to enforce this view of Ibiza. You don’t tend to see too many DVDs for sale that portray the gentle side of the beautiful island, its breathtaking views of the Med, its calming waters, its balmy afternoons with the sun gently falling into the sea, its magical atmosphere simply made for lovers. No, you are more likely to encounter DVDs or CDs of Ibiza uncut, unleashed, unbridled, undressed, untamed or unfurled – unruly interpretations of this little jewel in the Balearic crown. It is portrayed as being simply the wildest place on earth, and for many it lives up to this reputation. Back in my early days as a rep, I wanted to be part of this wild side, this magnificent concoction of madness.

So, as you can imagine, my heart was heavy as I made my way to the quietest part of the island, miles from the action. No, more than that: I was pissed off, well and truly pissed off. It took me a few weeks to realise that the widely held view of Ibiza as a party venue and nothing else was just a little inaccurate. To judge Ibiza by what goes on solely in San An would be the equivalent of watching film of the Brixton riots in the early Eighties and then, from that brief glance at one of England’s inner cities, deciding that the whole place was the same. It would be unfair and inaccurate. Ibiza is beautiful. But it took me, the original philistine, a few months to appreciate that. I wanted to be in San An, and here I was on my way to the end of the world. What shitty luck. I resigned myself to my fate and decided to give it my best shot, for a couple of weeks at least. If I got to feeling really depressed, I could always return to the world of sandpaper.

* * *

To be successful in this job, or at least to get the customer satisfaction results that the company craved to keep us ahead of the game, you had to make the guests like you. It wasn’t the answer to everything, but it sure helped. If they liked you, they bought from you and so you earned commission. If they liked you, they smiled at you and talked to you; it made your life much more pleasant. If they liked you, they gave you good marks on the questionnaires. And, I suppose, you had a much better chance of shagging them as well.

All guests were asked to fill in questionnaires at the end of their holidays. Questionnaires that asked how good you were, how nice their hotel was and how attentive you were to their needs. Many guests never realised how important these forms were, but the reps waited with baited breath to get their monthly results from these things. So it helped if the guests liked you. When the guests started to like you, they asked you questions, and these questions came up again and again. So what’s it really like to do your job? What have you done with the weather? was another favourite. What do you do in the winter? Can you speak the language? Do you miss your home and family? Do you get fed up with all the sunshine? The list went on and on, and you tended to have stock answers that you could rattle off. The trick was to sound like you had never heard these questions before, and that the people asking you were the first ever to do so. It could be tiresome, but when these questions started to come up, you knew you were on to a good thing. The relationship was starting.

The problem is that, over six months, they came up again and again. If it rained, you heard, ‘What have you done with the weather?’ at least fifty times a day. I know of one rep who told a guest to fuck off when asked this question for the umpteenth time in a day. The guest looked at him aghast, and said, ‘I don’t believe you just said that to me.’ The rep looked back at the guest and replied, ‘Neither will my boss. Now fuck off before I get really angry.’ True story this one – the rep was leaving the next day, and he really didn’t care any more, but what a way to go.

I think that a lot of our guests would love to have done the job that we do, but never had the courage to give it all up and take a chance. I believe that reps live the life that some can only dream about, and I remember that when I was on holiday with the lads years before and the first seeds of curiosity were being sown in my head about this job, I too was wondering what it was really like. Now, after all the training and travelling, I was about to find out.

From the moment I was informed that I would be going to San Miguel to work, I had misgivings about the place. The experienced reps didn’t really have a good word to say about it. It was the furthest away from the action in San Antonio that you could get, and most of the reps wanted to work as near to that place as possible, so the mere thought of working in San Miguel sent fear into their hearts. When you worked in these groups and were relying on them for information, you tended to listen to what they said, and so I too dreaded the thought of working in this place so far away. I had resigned myself to making the most of it, though, and as our bus trundled along the road that cuts through the middle of the island towards San Miguel, I tried to put all thoughts of being isolated and remote far from my mind.

The town of San Miguel is first visible by its church, which you can see from miles away. The steeple rises into the sky from a cluster of buildings around the base that seem to be pulling it back down to earth. When we eventually arrived in the town, there was little sign of life. What had been an empty, barren road suddenly became punctuated by a few ramshackle houses. Then, some fifty yards on, there were a few units that could have been shops, but were boarded up. One café seemed open, judging by the presence of a few old men who glanced up from nursing tiny cups as we rolled by. It really did seem very quiet. No sign of a disco or a lively bar, nothing remotely British at all. I know this would be heaven to the dedicated seeker of all things Spanish but, as I viewed these streets for the first time, I felt depressed. There were six of us on this journey to San Miguel and judging from the silence I think that all my fellow travellers felt the same.

All of us were heading here for the first time. We were going to meet Anna, the one living person who wanted to come back for a second year to the resort, when we arrived. Just when you thought that it couldn’t get any worse than this, surely, we slowed down and took a sharp right-hand turn down a dirt track. The coach slowed almost to walking pace as the driver negotiated the steep decline that led us down to Puerto San Miguel. The Port of San Miguel. Our home for the next six months. The track seemed to get a lot narrower and more treacherous as we headed down to the port. I felt like I was going to the end of the world, on the Costa del miles away, as we descended further. The thought occurred to me that if I felt like this, what were the guests going to feel like when they rolled down this same hill on the way to their two-week dream holiday? Eventually, after what seemed like an eternity descending into the abyss, the road became tarmac again, and opened out into a breathtaking vista of a small bay surrounded by high cliffs and crowned by a beautiful golden sandy beach. It really was quite pleasing to the eye. The treacherous journey down here did nothing to prepare you for this sight.

The three hotels that made the resort were almost carved into the rocks around the bay, and quite spoiled a magnificent view. The coach stopped outside the Hotel San Miguel, the biggest one of the three and the one nearest the beach, and Anna was there to greet us. This was her home; she loved this place. Anna was in her mid-thirties, about five foot five inches tall, with straight, shoulder-length blonde hair. She was quite pretty, but her features were hard. Her cheekbones seemed as if they had been chiselled out of the very mountains of the place she had made her home for the last two years. She did not smile once during our greeting and smoked continuously.

It soon became clear why Anna had chosen to come back here for another season. She was going out with the man who owned the water-ski school, and he was her reason for being here. She welcomed us … I hesitate to say warmly, but we got a handshake at least. The coach pulled away and we were left with our cases outside the Hotel San Miguel, feeling a little forlorn and cast adrift. Guests would not be arriving for at least another three days, and so the resort was deathly quiet. It seemed that we were the only ones here, at the end of the earth. Our apartment would not be ready for a couple of days and so as a temporary measure we were to be billeted in one of the hotels in the resort.

A twist of fate had seen these rooms allocated in the Hotel Galleon. The Galleon was right at the top of the mountain. I shuddered at the memory of hauling my suitcases around for the last couple of weeks, and looked upwards to the heavens towards the hotel. Mercifully there was a lift – albeit a service lift that smelled badly of dirty sheets and musty towels, but it was a small price to pay for the relief from lugging my cases. I dragged the offending hulks into the lift and pressed the button for the Galleon. The ascent was slow and the smell almost overpowering.

Eventually I reached the summit and the door opened. There before me were two giants. One male and one female. ‘Hello!’ they bellowed in unison.

‘Hi, I’m Cy, the new rep,’ I squeaked in reply. I hadn’t quite got used to saying that yet and now, for the first time out loud to strangers, it sounded very unreal. They smiled back at me with rows of perfect gleaming white teeth.

‘We know, and we know where you are staying. We are the entertainers; we will help you with your cases.’

With that, they each picked up one of my cases as if they weighed no more than feathers, and disappeared off down the corridor that lay before me.

I was shocked at the forwardness of these two monsters, but pleasantly surprised and delighted with the help in moving my dreadfully heavy load. I scampered after them, following them along a corridor that seemed to go on forever to some ridiculously numbered room – something like 45678. How many bloody rooms were in this hotel, I wondered. The couple reached the room and deposited my cases outside the door. I quickly checked my luggage and confirmed that it was indeed still abnormally heavy, and I had not been mistaken all along.

The pair stood before me, smiling. I must have looked puzzled and amazed at the same time. They registered my confusion and decided to introduce themselves. The girl was called Saskia. She was, and still is, the biggest human being I have ever seen in my life. She was close to seven feet tall and built like a shot-putter. Given her height, I was not surprised to learn that she was a former member of the Dutch national basketball team. In spite of her intimidating appearance, she was a lovely person, and we became good friends during the season. On top of her head, which seemed high enough to entertain snow, she had a wild mane of curly ginger hair. You couldn’t help but notice Saskia; she stood out in a crowd, mainly because she was like a lighthouse in a sea of humans, but her hair was even louder than she was. She explained that she had come to work as an entertainer in Ibiza so she could improve her Spanish. She would be one of the workers in the resort and was anxious that we should all work together.

Her attitude was shared by her companion, Mark. He was also Dutch and, like Saskia, he spoke perfect English. So good, in fact, that if you had asked me to put money on where they came from before I actually found out, I would have said America. Mark had come to Ibiza for the summer to work in the wind-surfing school and to improve his English. Improve, I thought, bloody hell, he spoke the language better than I did. Mark was around six feet five inches tall. He had a lovely natural head of blond hair and he was a stunningly good-looking man. His skin was a beautiful olive colour; he was built like an Olympic athlete and he had a cheeky smile and a confidence that bordered on arrogance. I hated him immediately. Mind you, if I was six feet five inches tall, incredibly handsome and spoke every European language that was worth speaking – fluently – I might display a little arrogance too.

The dynamic Dutch duo bade me a warm welcome to the resort of San Miguel and invited me to a get-together to meet the rest of the team in the bar later that evening, so we could get to know each other. After the pleasant surprise of not having to haul my cases to this room, the bar seemed like an excellent idea. I agreed and let myself into my room, feeling quite happy that I had already made my first friends here in my new workplace. So far, I had resisted completely unpacking my suitcases, but as I was now very close to starting the season, I thought I really should get everything out and take stock. I had a couple of hours to kill before going to the bar to meet my colleagues, so I decided the time was right to try to bring some order to my life.

I emptied the cases. For the life of me, to this day I cannot think why they were so heavy. I looked at the contents lying on the bed and on the floor, and there really was nothing to wear. I couldn’t make out what made up all the weight. I do, though, have to own up to having made some pretty surreal decisions when I was deciding what to bring with me for that six-month trip. I had the following list of useless items in my possession. Six pullovers, woolly. (What on earth I imagined I was going to do with six woolly jumpers in the Mediterranean summer climate, I cannot imagine.) One pair of hobnailed boots, two spanners and over two hundred business cards from my last job … The list goes on, but modesty forbids me revealing more to you. Suffice to say that, in future, I resolved to take advice on packing, before getting someone else to do it for me!

I tidied my room as best I could, leaving a pile of the useless items in the corner, so I would see them every time I entered the room and embarrass myself into throwing them away eventually. Once this was done, I scampered off down to the bar to meet my new colleagues. There were to be six reps living in the area with me, all women, and we would all be living in the same house, once it was ready (I think it was being aired for the summer). For most red-blooded males that would be heaven, and I was no different. I thought I had landed on my feet.

Of the six, four of the girls were children’s reps. There was Anna and Rhona, both of whom would be working in the Hotel Galleon at the top of the resort. Both of them were very young, and this was their first time away from home; they were shy, but happy-go-lucky. Then there was Sheila. She was another children’s rep, had been with the company for years and reminded me of Mrs Baylock, the dreadful housekeeper in the film The Omen, the one that was sent to guard the Anti-Christ as he grew up in his father’s home and who had a Rottweiller dog. Sheila never had a Rottweiller for company, though she was followed around by a stray cat for a few months. The children’s rep that would be looking after the youngsters in our hotel, the Hotel San Miguel, was a short, fat Scottish girl aged about eighteen. She had red skin, covered in freckles, and a mop of the reddest hair I had ever seen. She might have been a nice girl. I can’t really say. The thing is, she had the broadest Scottish accent I had ever heard. I simply could not understand a word she said. She might have been saying all manner of lovely things to us all, but I never knew.

The two reps were Jill and Tracey. Jill was a wily old campaigner who had been with the company for a couple of years. She had long ago lost her enthusiasm, and it had been replaced by ample helpings of cynicism. If ever you needed a reminder of just where your feet should be, Jill was always there to remind you to get your head out of your arse and look at your heels, planted firmly on the ground. Finally, there was Tracey. She was young and attractive, and she was residing firmly under the wing of Jill, who was, it seemed, anti-men – or, more accurately, anti-me.

So there we were, all gathered in the bar of the Hotel Galleon, ready to meet our entertainers, the boys and girls who would be providing entertainment for our guests when they arrived. The games of bingo, darts, snooker and rifle-shooting, and at night the cabaret shows. We had already met the two Dutch dynamos, Mark and Saskia, and there was one more to go: Kira. Kira was from Denmark. She was, and probably still is, stunningly beautiful and I fell in love with her about two seconds after I met her. I wanted to marry her there and then – so did every other male who set eyes on her during the season – but she wasn’t into pale, skinny men from England with no language skills. She was about five feet five inches tall, with lovely natural curly blonde hair and a beautiful, kind face that lit up every time she smiled, which was about every two seconds. I made great friends with Kira, which was just as well, because she spent an awful lot of time working in our hotel during the season. She was a winner before she opened her mouth; everybody loved her. With this team, and Anna our long-serving colleague to complete the line-up, how could we fail?

Anna was to be my direct colleague, meaning that we would be working side by side in the hotel for the next six months. We had to get on. I soon discovered that she planned to run the ski school as well as carry out her repping duties. Unless I was very much mistaken, that meant that I would not be getting her undivided attention. Oh well, I had to forget all those fancy ideas of being taken under the wing of a more experienced member of staff – that is, unless I wanted to learn to water-ski. Anna had the most glorious of suntans. She was a beautiful golden brown and beside me, her pale and pasty colleague, she looked even better. In the photograph that we arranged to be taken for our information books, together we looked like an advert for the United Colours of Benetton. I was probably the palest-skinned rep ever to set foot in Spain, apart from Sarah our children’s rep, that is. I put it down to my Irish heritage. It takes me a good six months of intense sunshine to even go pink; along the way, I just burn.

Anna made it quite clear from the beginning that she had very little time at all to spare for me. She treated me with contempt, as if I was the reason she could not dedicate all her time to the water-ski profit-making machine. There were others in our team in the resort, but Anna and I were to be working more closely together than anyone else. This was a bit unfortunate considering her dislike for me, but that was the way it was going to be. Our duties coincided at the same time in the hotel every day, unless she had to take a water-ski class. And we put together our own time-off and guiding rota. When I say guiding, I mean taking coaches to excursion venues in other parts of the island. I was lucky enough to get the youth guide every week, and that meant that once a week I had to gather up all the young people in our resort and take them down to San Antonio, the heart of the party area of the island, about an hour’s drive away. I looked on this as my saving grace, my weekly escape from the confines of San Miguel.

Our first guests arrived along with the first of the summer rains. Good timing, really. It pissed down day and night for the first three days of their holidays. As San Miguel is only a six-month holiday resort, not every bar opens its doors for the first day of season. They kind of yawn first, and then start to clean their bars and shops; normally the resort will not be fully functional until about mid-June. When you only have one alternative bar to the hotels in the resort, and that is closed during the first two weeks of the season, this can present a slight frustration to the guests, who begin to feel imprisoned in the area. As our first customers expressed their frustration at the lack of activity, I could only sympathise with them. The rain made it difficult to use any of the great facilities outdoors, such as the tennis courts or the football pitch or the rifle-shooting range, or even for the guests to use the free mountain bikes that were on offer.

During that first week, I thought the rain would never stop. In desperation we organised dart-throwing contests and pool competitions. The attendance levels at these events was fantastic. I am sure that if the rain had kept up we could have sold the rights to cable television, such was the excitement of a double top. Our duty times were never meant to be more than six hours a day, but I found myself staying anything up to twelve hours every day. There really was nothing else to do except stay with your guests. At least this secured us the friendship of the first lot of arrivals; we developed a kind of siege mentality, trapped in the Port of San Miguel. I felt just a little cut off from what I thought was happening up in San An – and whatever it was, I still wanted to be a part of it if at all possible.

Eventually my time came. I was called upon by the youth team to go up to San An and help out with the first bar crawl. This proved to be a wild occasion and ended up with six of our guests in hospital with various injuries, after getting involved in a fight in the middle of the town. It was great fun and kind of whetted my appetite for a weekly jaunt to the fun area of the island. Alas, though, it was only a distraction. The real work for me was going to be in San Miguel. There were no wild nightclubs or the like in this area, but we still had a lot of hard work to contend with.

When I try to remember our guests from that first year, I can only think of the dickheads. I am not sure if other industries are like the tourist industry in this respect, but when reps sat around and gossiped about the people they worked with – i.e. the general public – we only ever really talked about the troublesome ones. We never sat around for hours and discussed the nice people we looked after. There were hundreds, no, thousands of nice people who came on holiday with us, not only one year, but every year. But the dickheads were as plentiful as ever, and it’s those we remembered.

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 make a grand entrance at this stage. I made polite excuses and had to content myself with talking to her from the car window. Kind of ruined the moment really. Shouting from the window was not as romantic as whispering in the car. When she returned to the vehicle, she unwittingly let in another passenger who would get a lot closer to her than me that night. A very lively mosquito proceeded to bite her no less than thirteen times. We returned to Beth’s home with her scratching and trying to swat the offending fly. As romantic evenings go, it was pretty memorable. It didn’t quite end the way I would have liked it to, but at least now I had hope for the future.

* * *

Sometimes your guiding duties took you away for a whole day. One such trip was a day out with the guests to the water park, known as the Aguamar. It was a fun day out that lets us visit the park and try out all the slides and generally have great fun. For the reps it was the easiest day out there was. You took your guests there and then simply killed time until they were ready to come home. On the coach on the way you warned them about the dangers of the sun and how it could burn them if they were not careful. Reps are great at giving this advice, but they are not always so adept at heeding it. I decided that on one particular day I would kill my time sunbathing in the park. It seemed such a good idea at the time. Five hours later, I had changed colour from a very pale white to an angry deep red. I was unable to sit down due to the searing pain in the back of my legs from my frying skin. My head felt as though my brain was far too big for the encasing skull. Very painful and very embarrassing. Needless to say I wasn’t keen to repeat my role as a walking demonstration of why the guests should heed our sun-care advice.

Anna and I learned to tolerate each other during our time working together in San Miguel. As long as I didn’t moan about the fact that she was hardly ever at work, due to her commitments at the water-ski school, then we got along fine. She was, though, very good at doing the paperwork and reckoning up the money we had taken for excursion sales at the end of the week, and there were times when she used her experience to get us out of some sticky situations. We didn’t like each other; the relationship was all about tolerance. There were occasions, though, when we had to make sure that we worked closely and seamlessly.

One such occasion came towards the end of the season. We had gone away to the capital of the island for a team meeting. As we left the resort, it started to rain. While we were at the meeting it continued to rain. It continued for the next few hours and proceeded to flood large parts of the island. When we returned to San Miguel some four hours later, it was pouring down. This in itself didn’t bother me at all. I thought nothing of it. Indeed it was quite welcome, as we had seen very little rain at all for months. I went back to my room and, as I had a couple of hours before I was due to start work, I decided to have a siesta. I drew the curtains and dozed off for a nap. I awoke later that afternoon to the sound of raindrops. I stretched and opened the curtains to let the light in. As I looked towards the hotel at the bottom of the hill, I thought I must have still been dreaming. The hotel appeared to be in the sea. I blinked. It was not a dream. Cars were floating around the hotel towards the open water beyond the building, jostling for position like a surreal marine traffic jam. Metal fish swimming to the open seas.

I dressed as quickly as I could, and made my way towards the hotel. By the time I reached reception I was thigh deep in water. Confusion and panic greeted me. Understandably, guests were fretting about the consequences of what was happening. The entire ground floor was under three feet of water; the pool had disappeared, and it was still raining hard. The guests were demanding answers to impossible questions: ‘What shall we do?’ And making impossible demands: ‘Get us out now!’ ‘We want transfers to higher ground now!’ I ushered as many guests as I could to the first floor. Some were happy with this, but others were not, as they thought that if the water level rose, they would be trapped. I couldn’t quite work out this logic, as if they stayed on the ground floor, they would drown. Oh well. I thought I’d phone the office and try to get some reinforcements. This proved to be impossible, as the phones were out of order – this was only a few short years ago, but mobiles were not a part of our everyday life at that point, and so, without a land-line, we were stuffed.

I knew things were quite bad because, although the lights were still working, they were in fact all leaking. It was bizarre, all these lighted cascades. Quite pretty as well, though. Normally when it rained, one of the lights leaked, but never all of them together. The manager had the bright idea of ordering all his staff to fetch every available blanket in the building and push them up to the doors, in an attempt to prevent any more water entering the hotel. Predictably, this proved to be a useless exercise and the blankets were later seen floating around reception in mute defiance.

After about an hour of rushing around and trying to help people who were very scared, I realised I hadn’t seen Anna for some time. At least an hour, in fact. I hoped she hadn’t done anything too ambitious in trying to save the guests, and managed to fall in and get washed away. I made my way to the roof of the hotel so I could get a good view of the surroundings, and see if I could spot her. The rain was still raging. Cars and other objects were still floating all around the hotel. It all looked very dramatic and dangerous, to say the least. Alongside the building the water was flowing so fast, white-water rafting would not have been out of the question. A person could quite easily have been washed away. I called Anna’s name. No answer. I called again. All right, we didn’t get on so well but I really didn’t want her to become fish food. I called her again, this time a little more panic in my tone. A shrill, angry cry rang out from behind me.

‘What the bloody hell are you doing up here?’ It was Anna, and she seemed to be all right. ‘Get downstairs now, the manager wants you!’

‘You’re all right then,’ I muttered meekly.

‘Of course I’m all right. Get downstairs now.’

Lucky escape for the fish, really. They would probably have been sick anyhow.

Downstairs, confusion reigned all around. Guests were wandering around clutching their belongings and their children, and demanding action immediately. I was helpless. The rain was still pouring down; the phones were out, and it had become clear that the roads in and out of San Miguel were also blocked or washed away. The manager, Miguel, wanted all the guests to make their way to the first floor, where he was planning to serve them dinner. Not everyone was convinced this was such a good idea. Then he announced that he would be giving away free drinks as well. I was nearly killed in the rush. His reasoning was to get all the people out of the way so he could try to block the flow of water into the ground floor. The problem on the first floor was that there were only two staff in the restaurant; normally there were ten, so this was not an ideal situation. I immediately rolled up my trousers and waded in, serving the guests their free drinks in my bare feet. I worked solidly for about four hours, serving all and sundry, until every guest, British and German alike, had been fed and watered.

I didn’t even notice that the rain had stopped and the water had begun to subside. Not one of our own British guests thanked me or any of the other staff. They just kept whingeing about the rain and demanding more free drinks. One German couple who had stayed in the restaurant throughout this time came up to me at the end, thanked me for my efforts, and gave me 500 pesetas ‘to buy new shoes’. How nice. I was back downstairs at 10 o’clock in the evening, where I met all of our guests in the hotel, who were now demanding to be moved immediately. I explained to them all that this was impossible, as all the roads were blocked and the phones were down, but that the hotel would do anything they could to make them comfortable for the time being. They were angry and unreasonable, and later all wrote to the company and accused me of doing nothing to help them. (Wherever you all are now, I hope it is raining on you.)

The clear-up operation had begun. It was all hands on deck as every available receptacle was used to bale out reception. It took a good two hours before the water was completely cleared. The entertainers worked tirelessly, as did the maintenance man operating an antiquated water pump, and the German guests also slaved away to clear the water. Not one Brit lifted a finger to help out, but when the manager opened the bar at the end of the ordeal to give everyone a free drink for helping out, the Brits were first in the queue. How predictable.

The next day the sun was shining, and within hours there was no sign that it had rained at all. The road was repaired and the phone lines were restored. We moved most of our guests, who saw fit to complain to the company about the weather. They joined together in a group they called the ‘San Miguel Survivors’ and even had T-shirts printed to honour this brainwave. Dickheads.

It felt sometimes as though we were skating on thin ice. You never really knew what you could do to help out in these situations until they confronted you. The term ‘thin ice’ is quite apt for Ibiza really, as the pavements that adorned the resorts up and down the island could all have been mistaken for ice. They were made of the shiniest tiles, which were as slippery as hell. Goodness knows what the people who designed these pavements were thinking about. I am sure that Torvill and Dean had a hand in it somewhere. Many people found themselves on the seat of their pants as they tried to walk up a hill in the resort. In spite of our protestations, new streets that were then under construction were being made in exactly the same way. One word of advice: if you don’t want to end up on your arse, wear rubber-soled shoes when you go out walking on this island.

Ibiza was a great season, and I thoroughly enjoyed it all. I went there to work just as the dance and drug culture was taking hold of parts of the island and really grabbing the imagination of Europe’s youth. I managed to avoid any kind of addiction to any illegal substances that were on offer. I found instead that I had become addicted to the lifestyle. The island had left me on a high. My appetite was now well and truly whetted. I had only joined for six months to have a laugh really, but now I found myself thinking, Where shall I go next?