Just About Me 24

One of our wedding presents was the loan of a villa on the Costa Blanca in Spain by our friends Simon and Karen Hierons, Denia a coastal city that for me was in 1987 unspoilt by tourism,  Denia Link we arrived in the middle of the night and neither of us had been abroad before, customs completed we went to find a taxi, it had not occurred to me that in Spain they speak Spanish and it took a while to find the hire car. I may not say this too often but I was proud of my new wife for driving for two hours from Alicante to Denia in the pitch darkness and on the opposite side of the road and found the front door of a villa in what to us was the middle of nowhere. We had a fantastic week, the highlight of which was the night we met 2 Dutch guys in a bar we had found, I started a conversation about Holland and the chat eventually came round to football, they asked me what team I supported, I told them " The mighty Chelsea ", to be honest in 1987 they were not so mighty, anyway, one of them was straight up the bar shouting "Drinks for Chelsea" and bought us a drink each Mandy's was a soft drink whilst mine was a vodka and orange juice, it only seemed right that I should reciprocate and shouted a round of drinks in for "Ajax", now I am sure that you the reader's are familiar with Spanish measures of drinks, if not they consist of a high ball tumbler, at least half filled with spirit and topped with a mixer, a lot different from the thimble full of spirit on offer in English bars. 26 drinks later I was to put it mildly, pissed out of my brains, the two dutchmen wanted to go on to a nightclub which I declined to do, but did offer my wife's services as a cab driver, it is at this point worth pointing out that Mandy is 10 years younger than me and frankly if the dutch guys had leapt on her I could not and would not have been able to do much about it, luckily they were both gentlemen and we bid them good night, the journey back to the villa was traumatic for me as we hurtled along towards all these blinding lights and oncoming bouts of nausea. I ended up curled around the big white telephone moaning like a 2 year old whilst Mandy stood over me crying and yelling at me for being slightly tipsy.

The biggest regret that I have from our honeymoon, was that somebody on the complex was selling there 2 bedroom villa for just £30,000, we viewed it and made up our minds to purchase it as we had no mortgage or rent obligations, the estate agent visited us and told us that we had to own property in England to be able to buy abroad, this is totally wrong and to this day I am convinced that the cow bought it herself, it would today be worth approx £200,000 but that about sums my life up.