SUN AND SEX

Or how the British enjoy a drink or two beside the Mediterranean

ANDREW GIMSON

WHEN I told Mr David Bird I was going on a Club 18-30 holiday, he implored me to Tetu fisider. 'They'll tear you to shreds,' he said. 'You've got to be street-wise to go on one of those. When you talk they'll think you're taking the piss.' Mr Bird is a compositor at Saffron Graphics, where the Spectator's pages are typeset, and the workers are prone to levity. 'He'll lose his virginity out there,' one of the younger printers predicted. Mr Bruce Anderson, of the Sunday Telegraph, demanded that on my return I give my score. A colleague in Doughty Street told me about an acquaintance of hers called Jaqqi, a waitress from Leeds. Jaqqi was well pleased by her Club 18-30 holiday. She had 'seven lads in 14 days', but her most exciting experience was to be covered in crisps, which the men had to eat off her.

The Club 18-30 brochure explained how I was feeling:

THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE IS HERE

The time is now. You're young, independent and looking for excitement. You know what you want, and you want to get it before its too late. You want to see and be seen. You are the scene. You're not alone. All over the country there are people like you making the most of their freedom, determined to live life to the limit before they get trapped within the system. They too want to get away from their everyday surroundings, to spend their hard- earned holidays not stuck in some boring British seaside town watching the rain, but basking on a sun-kissed beach, sharing the days and nights with new friends who speak their language . . .

The brochure was full of pictures of beauti- ful girls and handsome men, on beaches kissed by the sun. After long thought I decided to go to Majorca, which with Ibiza and Corfu is one of Club 18-30's most popular destinations. `You can leave that "good book" for another holiday if you're coming to Major- ca,' the brochure told me. It said I should book accommodation which was exclusive to Club 18-30: 'you can be sure that there will be no old fogeys complaining about the noise, and no screaming kids to disturb you. It also means the party never stops.'

I chose an exclusive hotel in Arenal, about seven miles south-east of Palma. A week's stay cost £147.95, including flights to and from Gatwick, a single room (£19.25 more than sharing), breakfast and insurance. There was some criticism at the Spectator of my decision to incur the extra expense of a single room, but I tried to suggest it would enable me to seduce an even larger number of girls.

I landed at Palma airport one morning in early May. An attractive girl from Newcas- tle upon Tyne was standing on the far side of the customs post, which I went quickly through, having only cabin baggage. She was the Club 18-30 Rep. She told me there were eight other arrivals on my flight, of whom six were girls.

One by one, after long delay, my fellow passengers emerged from customs. They carried enormous suitcases. It would be unkind to mention the various disfigure- ments from which they suffered. None resembled the people in the brochure more closely than I did myself. I started to fear that its pictures had shown the Platonic essence of the Club 18-30 girl, laid up in heaven.

We left for our hotels in taxis. I found myself alone in a taxi with the Rep. She had spotted my rapaciousness and sat in front with the driver.

Arenal is a dump. Most of it has been shoddily built in the last 20 years. The hotel where I stayed is shoddier than many. I left my luggage in my room, which enjoyed a good view of the sea, and went to explore. The Rep attached to my hotel, a friendly young man from Stevenage, said he would meet me later with some of the people who were arriving on other flights, in order to describe the many `goodtimes' arranged for us.

When I returned to the hotel, I seated my- self near a man who was describing the 11 mur- ders which have taken place in the Slough area this year. He had wit- nessed only one.

`Where you from?' 'London.'

`Don't sound like it.' `Only since 1979.' Td've thought you'd've picked a bit up.' Later on, someone told me I didn't have an accent. Nobody seemed to think I was taking the piss. Poor old Bird, I thought, wrong again.

We drank beer. Drinking was the most uninterrupted theme of the holiday. I was told a story about a man who was sick and started to eat it. Among the Club 18-30 notices in the hotel was one informing us: 'Drunk people will not be allowed on the plane.' The man from Slough told me how much his tattoos cost. Many of the men were tattooed.

At seven o'clock, three drunks entered singing a football chant. They danced on a table, to the irritation of the barman. I met a Marine called Yorkie, who was after- wards to try to help me.

That night, we went to a sunglasses party in another hotel, organised by the Reps. 'Those without sunglasses will be stripped naked,' I was told. The Reps moved among us, encouraging us to have fun. We were determined to have fun whether they encouraged us or not, but in order to leave nothing to chance they organised team games. In one of these one had the opportunity, each time the music stopped, to adopt a 'Latin lover' position with one's partner. There was also a competition between five of the men, to see which could most quickly eat a plate of crisps and two bits of garlic bread, drink a bottle of beer and a glass of peppermint liqueur and smoke a cigarette. Later I went to the Piccadilly Corner, a popular pub and disco, and to another disco called Snoopy's. Much later, I returned to the hotel. Throughout the night it resounded to shrieks and chants as if it were a mad- house, though I suppose the inmates of modern madhouses are drugged not to shriek.

My memory of the next six days is blurred. The scenes which follow are based on notes in my diary. Some of these are too disjointed to mean anything even to me. Phrases such as 'Played 20: won none' defy interpretation.

But a few images remain in focus. Many of the girls were pretty. I was especially charmed by a girl from the West Country, who not only looked but sounded delight-

4 She had spotted my rapaciousness and sat in front with the driver

ful. We fell into conversation, and I so quickly heard her story, or part of it, that I realised it could not be especially private.

She had a boyfriend at home. This sounded a standard Bunburying gambit: many of the girls had boyfriends at home, fidelity to whom could be made to seem as noble as Algernon's concern for Bunbury. There was, on the other hand, a more encouraging way of pointing out where the boyfriend was.

Her boyfriend was looking after their seven-month-old baby. He was unem- ployed so she was working. He thought she was somewhere else in England. She had just had a miscarriage. She didn't want to get married because she didn't love the boyfriend enough. She had had to come on holiday because it was all getting too much for her.

'Why are you looking at me like that?' she asked, in her beautiful West Country accent. 'I'm sorry to be rude but it embar- rasses me.'

My pathetic excuse, that I was thinking she was the sort of girl a latter-day Thomas Hardy might write a novel about, did not work. The name Hardy meant nothing to her.

The Reps offered us a programme of `goodtimes' during the week at an extra cost of £79. I went on three of these, costing about £45, on the grounds that this was the price given in the brochure. One was a beach party attended by 320 18-305 and 18 Reps. Another was a barbecue. A third was a show called 'The

Pirates Adventure', attended by about 400 of us.

In the coach on our way to the Pirates, I sat next to Yorkie. It appeared to him that I was having less than his success with the girls. He offered me some of his chat-up lines. For example, he would take an overflowing ashtray up to a girl he fancied and say to her: 'This exquisite antique could be yours if you become my lover.'

`Does it work?'

'One in ten,' he said. 'The girl in the red dress is after your parts.'

`How do you know?'

`I can tell.'

When we reached the Pirates we found ourselves sitting nowhere near Red Dress, but next to two girls called Loraine and Tracy. We had dinner, diverted by an excellent pantomime. The Pirates were also acrobats. There was unlimited wine to drink.

After the panto, I asked Loraine to dance. She said Tracy would like to dance with me. Many of the girls had arrived with a girlfriend, who could be used, or not, as a means of protection even more reliable than an absent boyfriend. I did not want to dance with Tracy, so went in search of Red Dress. Red Dress gave me a regretful look over the shoulder of the man around whom she was already fastened.

I returned to Yorkie. 'I don't think Red Dress is that attractive,' I said.

`You stupid bugger leaving it until half- way through the evening.'

At five to 12, just before our coach was due to leave, I went outside. Several people were being sick. One girl looked as though she might choke. Two Reps came up, took hold of her in a practised way and ordered her to be properly sick.

When we got on the coach, we were warned that we would be fined '1,000 pesetaS a throw' if we vomited. The Reps organised a singsong on the way back to Arenal. Several people were sick into bags. As we drove past Palma's magnificent cathedral, floodlit above us, we were sing- ing a song of which the sense, if not the exact wording, was 'Sex is good for you'.

The cathedral was built by the Christian invaders of Majorca. One day, in direct contravention of orders, I caught a bus from Arenal to Palma and went to see it. The whole of old Palma is worth seeing and the cathedral crowns the town. Two of its features immediately catch the visitor's eye: the serried buttresses of the southern façade, and the extraordinarily high nave. Its columns are, according to the guide- book, nearly twice as high as those of Chartres, but only half as thick. This guide says of Majorca:

For the enchasing [sic] beauty of its shores, its flowering vegetation, for the caressing sun and benign climate, it has come to be called 'The paradise Isle'. It is not strange, there- fore, that through the centuries so much beauty has been much coveted, and for this reason the island was seized by the plunder- ing Moorish ships; the Moors having long wished for so precious a pearl. The island was under Moslem rule for more than three centuries.

The year 1229 was the year of its 'Libera- tion', of its 'Conquest'. King Jaime I, a vigorous man of strong character, with a fleet of 170 large ships . . . sailed from . . . the

Catalonian coast. . . . The story runs that, as the ships approached on the night of 7 September in the year 1229, there broke loose a tempest so violent that the expedition seemed doomed to failure; whereupon the King, praying for guidance, on the poop of his ship Montpelier, made a vow to erect a church under the advocation of our Lady St Mary, Mother of God.

I am afraid the pagan invaders of Majorca who arrived in their millions in the latter half of the 20th century did not build 4 "What did you do afterwards?" I asked. "Went to prison," he replied

anything so fine. The Christian invaders destroyed the Arab monuments they found, but the pagans ignored the Christ- ian monuments. Instead they destroyed the coast, especially where it was sandy.

Descending to the sea to gain a better view of the cathedral and the palace next to it, I found a notice stencilled in black paint onto a concrete pillar:

MAJORQUINS YOU ARE SHIT U.S. NAVY

Beneath, in red letters, someone had sprayed:

MARINES =HARLOTTS

It was impossible to be certain which notice had been painted first.

On my other unauthorised excursion, I walked into the country behind Arenal. It was the only time during my stay that I was reminded how wonderful the Mediterra- nean countryside smells, when it has not sunk under chip pans. But walkers should be warned that a major road has been built behind Arenal, and that several others are in the process of construction, as well as a gigantic leisure centre.

I asked the manager of my hotel whether he liked what the English and German visitors were doing to his island. 'The people born in Majorca, we get the money to live very well,' he said. 'With the young ones, maybe they make some trouble when they drink too much, but generally they are not bad people. It's very nice work. I love

'Fancy a quick game of profound pursuit?'

it. You know many people during the summer, you get friends with these people, most of them say thank you very much, we've had a nice holiday. I hope we get tourists for 100 years. I think the English people are not as the news on the television shows, because I work with the English for 20 years. There were more gentlemen before than now. But I don't want to mean they're very bad now. The Germans are good but the English are as good as the Germans. When you are drunk, you can- not have control of yourself, whatever nationality you are.' However much I pressed him, he maintained, and evidently believes, that the tourists and the money they bring are a blessing to Majorca. On the last day I wore my Michael Heath tee-shirt, which bears a drawing by Heath of a yob wearing a tee-shirt, nn which are the words 'ANOTHER IDIOT WITH WRITING ON HIS TEE-SHIRT'. Under that are the words 'The Spectator', but nobody attached much significanCe to them. was hoping that the garment might especially appeal when I went to the disco, but first I met a man to whom I had talked in the Welsh Dragon the night before. He had been in the Army. 'What did you do afterwards?' I had asked. 'Went to prison,' he had replied, with a look which discour- aged further inquiry. 'Domestic trouble.'

Now we went for a drink, and I heard about his lifelong hatred of authority. Another court appearance hangs over him, so I do not want to write much at the moment. It was, however, the first time I had talked to anyone who has a passionate loathing of the police. To a bourgeois who has never, for example, been conscripted into the army, such conversations are enlightening.

Human flesh defies the laws of cookery. Lightly fried in a little oil it turns brown, but fried for longer it goes pink. My own flesh remained whitish, since I flouted convention and did not fry myself. Perhaps that is why the girls laughed at me as well as my tee-shirt, or perhaps Bird was right after all about my accent. Yorkie was in despair. He was, I think, trying to save my pride when he asked, 'Have you already met the girl of your dreams?'

`Yes,' I said. Whether or not this was true, it made the situation less embarras- sing for Yorkie as well as me. I recalled the advice given by the editors of China Youth News to a lovelorn young man jilted by his girlfriend:

To die over an unhappy love affair is absolutely worthless. You should plunge yourself into the hot struggle for production and gradually your wounds will be healed.

Production? I recalled the firm instructions the editor of the Spectator had given me, to enter into all the activities of people who go on Club 18-30 holidays, and asked an exquisite blonde to dance. She agreed. If only there were more space in this news- paper, I would tell you what happened next.