Low life | 2 March 2017

All told, I find that in the last week I’ve slept with a Chinaman, three black women from the United States, four South Korean women and one South Korean man.

I slept with the South Korean man first, for two nights running, at the Chameleon Hostel in Alicante. Joon-woo and I shared a 9’ by 8’ four-bunk cell. We were both on the bottom, 18 inches apart. This quiet, cheerful chap was always showered and in his black pyjamas and yellow duck head slippers by 9 p.m. and fast asleep by 10. He slept silently and soundly and with no discernible movement until 9 or 10 in the morning, when he would greet me with the same smiling equanimity with which he had said goodnight. He had been in Spain for 40 days, he said, visiting the stadiums of lower league Spanish football clubs. So far he’d clocked up 22. He had heard that Britain had the worst food in Europe, an accusation which boggled his mind, he told me, because he couldn’t imagine anything worse than Spanish food.