I am staying at a posh resort hotel in Malaysia. Once or twice a day it rains. Rain is a hopelessly inadequate word in the circumstances. Living, as I do, in England, I have always felt I understand rain and its myriad forms in much the way that an Inuit understands snow or ITV understands the lowest common denominator – that is with a near instinctual holistic grasp. This rain here isn’t just stopping play at the local cricket ground, it is knocking monkeys from trees and undermining building foundations. It hammers from the sky, deforming roof beams until, just when I have reached for my water wings and swimming goggles and kissed P adieu, it stops.
No rain means sunshine and sunshine means me baring my moobs and swaggering about in shorts. There will be those amongst you who will have been smugly confident that that sort of thing is banned by international convention. Malaysia is not, however, a signatory. Yet despite my nipples been street (or at least beach) legal they have not been getting much of an airing. There are two good reasons for this neither of which relates to a need to avoid outraging public decency.
The first is that the hotel is favoured by honeymooning couples. These days the tradition is for both bride and groom to prepare for their nuptials with a punishing programme of physical fitness training so as to ensure that they arrive at the altar at their peak attractiveness. That means that as I lift my T-shirt at the poolside, 40 firm bottoms, 40 pert breasts and 20 six-packs, re-orientate themselves with a depressing sprightliness in order to gaze fixated at what I am bringing to the pool party. This is proving a substantial disincentive to undressing. I feel I am making the place untidy, even unseemly.
The second minor issue is that on day one, when there was no sun, I lay outside on a sun lounger reading contentedly in the gloom and not bothering with the obviously unnecessary inconvenience of slathering myself in factor 50. On another day P might have saved me from myself but I had just finished telling her that she needn’t keep ordering me about like I was a 6 year old or some other equally cheery and temperate comment so she left me to it. I am now two-tone like a 50s Cadillac. The right hand side of me is a bruised purple and painful to the touch. If I lift my arm, however, my armpit is the same phosphorescent white colour that characterises my left hand side. revealing my torso means that the emergency burns unit scramble but the blinding reflective glare from the rest of me prevents the chopper ever landing.
It is time to come home.
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