Puerto Rico was such a dump. I was so relieved that we hadn’t suggested we come here on holiday with my Canadian cousins at Easter. Unfortunately though, we were still stuck in the shabby resort for a week and would have to make the best of it.

The holiday began with a tedious lecture on nothing in particular. We sat indoors on hard white plastic chairs wondering what on earth we were doing here. We’d been listening for three hours and still the speaker gave no indication of how longer much we would be cooped up in the crowded hall. I could take it no longer and stuck up my hand to interrupt. “I’m a lecturer”, I called out “And I spend much of my time in classrooms just like this. I am on holiday. I want to do something different. How much longer do we have to sit here?”

My interruption had the desired effect and within minutes we were released to sample the delights of the resort. A stranger came up to me and whispered “They know who you are. The boss is busy tweeting everyone telling them to watch out for you.” I didn’t care.

There wasn’t much to explore around the hotel. The “restaurants” were nothing more than grubby canteens. Here the staff expected payment, even though the resort was meant to be all-inclusive. The one beach was small and shingly, and was clearly not the one displayed in proud photographs on the resort web site. The only thing that I could approve of here was the lovely warm temperature of the sea water.