ON THE RUN IN GIBRALTAR

You can keep the Rock, says Colin Bostock-Smith,who remembers his holiday

after eating some dodgy pork

THE British Foreign Secretary's ongoing attempt to unload Gibraltar on to the Spanish might be the last Straw for Gibraltarians and Spectator readers alike. But not for me. I can't even see the name 'Gibraltar' without feeling a flush of shame, a shiver of fear, and a slight but clearly detectable loosening of the bowels.

I spent one of the worst days of my life on the Rock of Gibraltar. Compared to my one day on Gibraltar, eight years on that other rock. Alcatraz, would be a doddle. Compared to my one day on Gibraltar, that Picnic at Hanging Rock would have been . . . well, a picnic.

Allow me to share the experience, as modern bores say. Then, if you're like me — that is, British, middle-class, and with your mid-life crisis now only a distant memory but all your neuroses and complexes still intact — then even you may wonder why on earth we want to keep the place, and why in the name of God the Spanish want it back.

We were on holiday in Spain itself: the Costa del Sol. And, with the temperature in the eighties, I had some pork for lunch. Experience told me not to. My wife advised against it. Even the waiter looked doubtful. But I had it.

That night I entered the bathroom at approximately 10 p.m., and emerged, a pale, trembling shadow of myself, some eight hours later. My system, as it's called, was out of control. It was one-way traffic. thank God, but it was bad.

However, a day of Imodium and rest followed, then a night of comparative calm, and on the third day I rose again from the bed, ready to live life to the full. That morning we were due to visit Gibraltar. We drove down the coast road, parked the car, walked through the border, and boarded the bus that takes you over the airport runway and into town.

Halfway across the runway we both heard a rumble so loud that my wife looked around in alarm for an approaching 747. But the rumble came from within me. Franco's Skitters were returning with a vengeance. Thankfully, 20 yards from where the bus drops you off, there sits the most modern, clean and functional public convenience in the entire Mediterranean, and I made it with both my person and my dignity intact.

Fifteen minutes later, feeling both relieved and newly alarmed, I conferred with my wife. I told her I probably had dysentery. Disinterested in dysentery, she went shopping, while I went off to find a doctor; and, with the help of a tourist information office. I found one. My Doc of Gibraltar proved to be an amiable young English woman, who listened to my symptoms and responded by handing me a letter and a small, transparent pillbox. 'Get something in that,' she said, trying not to laugh, 'and hand it in to the hospital laboratory with this note.'

Back out on the street, sample box in hand, I contemplated my immediate future. Did I really have to go through with this distressing business? An alternative course of treatment raised a tempting head: a sovereign remedy, something more fundamentally associated with such problems of the fundament. Brandy.

In the nearest pub — and I have to admit, wherever you are in Gib, the nearest pub is never very far away — I sank one. Fine. Then, halfway through the next one, I realised that brandy is not a sovereign remedy for what I'd got. Quite the reverse. I abandoned the brandy and set off to return to my idyllic public loo, sample box safely in my pocket, rattling against my car keys.

I was in a hurry. But in my condition you can't exactly stride out, can you? What's more, Gibraltar is, as you'll have guessed from its profile, mostly hill. I found myself descending that hill in a sort of knockkneed shuffle. No doubt my features were creased with furious concentration. I didn't care. All I cared about was reaching the privacy of the public privy. I got there. It was shut. Not just shut, but barred and gated with great steel rods and locks. Panic seized me, thus ensuring that my need for a toilet, already acute, was immediately doubled. I limped across the road, found a café and entered. Its loo was locked, too.

Another few frantic steps, another bar. Their loo was not only locked; the way to it was barred by a jumble of up-ended tables and chairs. I ordered a brandy, drank it and blundered onwards. More bars. More locked loos. More despairing brandies. What the bloody hell was going on?

In the fifth or sixth bar the waiter told me what the bloody hell was going on. It was not, as I had begun to suspect, a personal vendetta against me. Gibraltar's water supply had been turned off. No water means no loos. Not for the public. anyway. I didn't ask why. Gibraltarian incompetence? Spanish nastiness? Not enough rain? I didn't care. I had other things on my mind.

Then, in extremis, I remembered the hospital where I was supposed to deliver my sample. Surely they would have an emergency water supply, and, therefore, a working lavatory. Of course! I set out.

The site for the hospital was probably chosen by the same man who chose the site for the Millennium Dome. It is — or so my fevered memory tells me — virtually the highest inhabitable building in the colony. And I discovered that, in my condition, climbing up that hill was even more dangerous than climbing down it.

My wife tells me that I passed her in the street at that point. She says my teeth were clenched, my eyes were staring and people were avoiding me. Sweating pure Martell, I staggered on upwards. I found the hospital. And in it, after a desperate series of lurches along corridors, I found a toilet. It was open. There was one cubicle, and it was free. I entered. I closed the door. And I thanked the Lord for my deliverance.

Some minutes later I remembered the sample. This I now began to collect. I won't describe how. Why cause unnecessary distress to the innocent reader? Halfway through the operation, however, I realised two things. First, by some quirk of hospital design, there was no lock on the cubicle door. Second, someone else was entering the room, with no doubt as urgent a need as my own had been some minutes previously. Both my hands were occupied. Just in time I raised a foot and jammed the door shut. The newcomer tried it, shoved it, rattled it. I stood on one leg and cursed. The top of my sample box fell in the toilet.

Well, all nightmares end. The intruder went away, I collected my sample, I delivered it to the laboratory and staggered out into the sunshine. There I found my wife, and escorted her and her shopping back down the hill, and across the border into Spain.

Ali, Spain. Land of plentiful cafés and service stations with running water and working loos. Suddenly it seemed so safe, so normal, so. . British.