and started to get fat (a besetting problem with Ayrabs). I nevertheless bedded him on several business visits in some of the City of Light’s swankier hotels, in spite of the wiff’s frequent lack of cooperation over the matter of passing on telephone messages (or rather not doing so).

Last news was that he had gone VERY fat, and was also probably in the drug business (trafficking, not consuming) so I wrote him off.

My next - and last so far - visit to that Garden of Earthly Delights called Tunisia came in 1985. Let me say in parenthesis that I had briefly visited Egypt, Algeria and Morocco in the meantime, and found none of them - though enjoyable - not quite so agreeable. Apart from the natural beauty of the race and its natural charm as well, Tunisia had a major advantage in being - though peopled virtually entirely with Muslims - a secular state.

And while homosexuality was as technically illegal as in other Maghreb (North African) states, a much blinder eye was turned to it.

This 1985 visit was a business one, for the annual "sales" meeting of the plastics group of my American employers, for whom I was one of the PR men. We were lodged in the Hannibal Palace hotel at a small resort called Port El Kantaoui (where the ship used in Roman Polanski’s film Pirate was in the port, and frequently out of it when filming), It was a vast Trust House (at that time; it’s changed hands several times since).

[Do you know the one about the woman who told a friend that her brother was going to stay in a Truss House?

"Really", said friend, "where is it?"

"Why, at Hernia Bay", says sister.

"And what do his neighbours think?", says friend.

"Well of course, they went into ruptures of delight", says she.

It’s as old as God, but perhaps you haven’t heard it.]

It was plain that - as I had suspected in advance - there would be no dragging back of Ayrhabs to Hanny’s Place, except possibly the on-site staff, so I’d had the foresight to rent a most untrustworthy and expensive Hertz car at the airport. I needed this anyway, because I was taking off for five days vacation based in Hammamet thereafter.

The company group numbered over a hundred (the department was making big profits at the time) and our lives were heavily organised, morning, noon and evening. Following a noxious supper on the first night, there was a cabaret during which I found myself the face-saving victim of a simulated strangulation by a magician.

Of course I knew it wasn’t really going to happen, but, but, but, but ..... in the end I got a cheer from the crowd, who would not, I am sure, have offered themselves up for sacrifice quite so willingly (and the conjuror wasn’t even pretty).

After this cabaret, there was an open house bar in a private room, which was the last thing I needed so - after two or three drinks and some networking - I showed the independence which contributed to my eventual downfall, and went off to investigate other watering holes in the hotel.

There was a vast bar-lounge near the entrance, where I found a few people (non-company) dotted about and two toothsome lads, ca. 18 summers, at one extreme end of a long horseshoe bar. I took up action stations nearby, but diplomatically not right next to them, and was soon