English Football and a Bottle of HP Sauce

---

Pattaya is the place that you would end up with if you combined Benidorm and Amsterdam and gave it an oriental flavour - nothing but huge great hotels and bars full of prostitutes. Everywhere we went there were the cries of "Hello sexy man, I want to go with you!" There were the usual fat Germans, walking around with tiny Thai girls. On the positive side however, after all the secluded, no-frills places we'd been to so far, Pattaya was much more like the resort type holiday that you go to to have a good time - bars, clubs, lively beaches, jet-skis, live Thai-boxing, junk food, ice-cream parlours, decent accommodation etc. etc.

We spent most of the days on the beach either growing the skin cancer, swimming or trying out the jet skis. We'd then go back to our hotel for a few beers before finding a restaurant for a meal. After that we would usually look round some shops and pick up some cheap clothes or whatever before finding a bar for some more beers. Our favourite bars were in a cluster surrounding a Thai-boxing ring. Give or take a few rules, Thai-boxing is like kick-boxing. One night an English team challenged the Thais and one of them actually managed to beat the Thai champion. The Thais won overall unfortunately.

One night Mike got talking to a woman which for some reason the bar staff found very amusing. When pressed, they admitted that she was in fact a 'man-woman' at which point we got Mike well away before he found out the hard way.

When shopping one evening we made a very significant discovery, something that we had not seen the whole time we had been away. One of the supermarkets actually stocked HP Sauce. It was £1.50 for a small bottle, but worth every penny.

Another day, whilst we were on the beach, a film crew turned up along with a Thai pop-star and they started filming a pop video. We did everything possible to strategically locate ourselves so that we were in the shot, but our big break came when the camera deliberately panned the whole beach. We were busy getting down to the music, using all our best moves when the camera stopped on us for a while. Unfortunately, we never saw the finished product so we could never say for certain, but we were reasonably confident that we were in a pop video.

The highlight of the whole week for Mike was something that I could not have cared less about. It was the night that Arsenal played Liverpool in a match that was to decide the 1988/89 League Cup. All was looking lost (as far as Mike was concerned) until Arsenal scored the crucial goal in the 91st minute. He was ecstatic and partied all night. I'd long since gone to bed. Conversations were very tedious for the next few days.

---