Wake up, sleepy Jean...

A further recollection from that fantastic holiday in Crete....

George the hotel bar manager was quite a find - handsome, charming, smart, with great English (he'd grown up in America) and impeccable taste (we spent long hours swapping favourite film recommendations, comparing favourite Tom Waits songs). We stayed in touch for several months after I'd returned home (photography was another shared interest, and I spent some time shopping around to try and find him a good price on a rare secondhand Nikon he was determined to have).

On a couple of nights when I wanted to stay up longer than his work commitments would allow him to, he left me the run of the bar, trusting me to pay for any further drinks my companions and I consumed; he also left me his ghetto-blaster and some of his Tom Waits tapes, so that we could enjoy suitably mellow late-night music. Better yet - an act of unwarranted generosity which leaves me stunned and moved to this day - he stood me all of my drinks on a very tipsy last day in town, after I had been unexpectedly left almost penniless. (One of the kids in our party had taken over the pool table from me mid-evening the night before, and had craftily stayed up playing all night, without anyone noticing; however, the balls had been signed out in my name, and George the decrepit doorman, whose responsibility it was to account for the unpaid-for 12hr game, had little alternative but to stitch me up for the whole of the rather hefty bill the next day!)

It might well have been that penultimate evening (although there were three or four more almost as good) when I found myself alone in the bar with a few of my favourite students (they were all 17 or 18, and about to leave school, so were trusted as adults) and the rather lovely local woman with whom I was enjoying a very intense little holiday romance. Ed, my brightest student and a very fine chorister, had just come back from a karaoke contest, flushed with victory, and proceeded to act as a human jukebox for the next hour or so, singing beautiful unaccompanied versions of just about any pop song we could think of to request. My favourite was the old Monkees hit 'Daydream Believer'; a song which still has enormous emotional resonances for me, primarily because of its association with that sublime evening.

A deserted bar all to ourselves, a comfortable sofa and a sexy woman beside me on it, sitting in darkness looking out at the harbour lights twinkling off the Mediterranean - and a perfect song, perfectly sung. I don't think there have been many finer moments in my life.