TPR and I came into ownership of a hotel in Florida. Whenever we visited, we stayed in a separate adjoining apartment with access to three private swimming pools.

One day as we crossed the hotel lobby on the way back to our quarters, a very tall pale young woman with lank dark hair, and dressed in an old fashioned cotton smock, approached me.

‘I’ve just landed in the US and I’m here to do my internship’, she announced. ‘Where should I put  my stuff?’

Until she explained that she and I had corresponded by email briefly about eight months earlier, I had no recollection of this woman. Then I remembered seeing a very bare CV on three slips of paper. However, I had certainly not made any offer of a position for her at the hotel. I told her that since we were returning to the UK in a couple of days, she was welcome to take a holiday in our apartment and make the most of our swimming pools.

Then the woman’s loud mouth Geordie father came into view – followed by her smiling Afro-Caribbean mother, and a succession of eight or nine small siblings. It was not long before the father started preaching his brand of Christianity to anyone who would listen, and I deeply regretted my offer of accommodation. This woman had not come to work for the hotel, but to spread the Lord’s word through the foghorn mouthpiece of her father.