All our plans were fixed. Our flight to Italy left at 5pm so we arranged to leave the Hilton hotel exactly an hour earlier.

Then, a disaster. The entire bridge on the upper right hand side of my mouth dropped out!

Given the general scarcity of dentists and that this was a Sunday, I was pretty sure that it would be impossible to find immediate treatment. I was about to cut my holiday short when I overheard a man speak to a child about his teeth.

‘Are you a dentist? If so, is there any chance that you could fix this please?’ I asked, showing the man the bridge that I was clutching in my hand.

‘I could certainly find some adhesive for that’, he replied.

I texted a quick message to Kathy to say that I would be back soon, and asked if she could start our packing without me. Then I followed the man into a dusty yard. In the middle of it I saw a dentist’s chair and another man, presumably the dentist’s assistant.

Now it seemed the dentist was offering me more than a tube of dental glue. He would replace the bridge in my mouth just as soon as he anaesthetised me. As I watched him fill a syringe with a viscous clear liquid, I looked around and began to doubt the medical credentials of the two men beside me. I drew the courage to question them. They confessed that they were not dental staff, but professional kidnappers, and that I was their hostage!

I had a plane to catch and no time to be tied up and tortured. Before my captors had the chance to insert the needle into my vein, I leapt out of the chair and ran. Now completely lost in a maze of narrow streets, at least I was free.

In time I found a lift that would take me back up to my room at the Hilton. However, I then faced a new challenge. Once inside the lift, there was no way of exiting it. It wasn’t until another passenger worked out that you could take apart the panels of the lift carriage to create a small doorway that we were able to make our way out again.

We landed not in the hotel, but at an enormous trade exhibition. I would wait for Kathy at the Visit Scotland stand in the hope that she would find me there, even though I knew that by that time my would-be captors would have already sent her several ransom demands, giving the impression that I was still their prisoner.