Cut me some slacks

Sam Delaney has something to declare

It is the summer of 1991. I am 16 years old, on a beach in Sardinia, and I reckon I might actually be managing to chat up this pretty Italian girl. Which is especially improbable when you consider that (a) I can’t speak a word of Italian, and (b) I am a pale, gangly berk who is sporting nothing but a pair of garish orange trunks from Next and third-degree burns of the chest and facial areas.

But, still, there’s no accounting for taste is there? The fact that she can’t understand a word I’m saying is almost certainly working in my favour. She probably thinks there’s a load of romantic poetry tumbling from my lips right now. Little does she comprehend, it’s just a bunch of witless innuendos and cack-handed sexual propositions.

Anyway, my cousin (a native to these parts) does a nifty bit of translating and establishes that her and her mate would like us to accompany them to a local disco this evening. Buonissimo! We’re reaching the end of the afternoon, which means I’ve just enough time to go back to our villa, have a shower, apply 15 litres of soothing after-sun lotion and put my best togs on.

Only, I haven’t. Turns out, the pal who gave us a lift to the beach has naffed off without us, and the next bus doesn’t leave for another hour. “We’ll never make it,” says my cousin. “You’ll just have to go out dressed as you are.”

Easy for him to say: he brought a fresh T-shirt and pair of jeans with him. Italian men are like that, see? Always thinking three outfits ahead. We Brits take clothes less seriously. We’re more sober-minded than Johnny Italian, with his girlish sartorial obsessions. Still, no one likes heading up the local disco in nothing but their trunks and an array of unsightly skin complaints, do they?

The girls were very understanding. One of them nicked a pair of their dad’s gigantic white slacks. The other lent me her sexy white vest. Only, stretched over my blotchy white torso, it wasn’t so sexy. Combined with the baggy trousers, I looked like an albino MC Hammer.

“Needless to say, my bella donna was stolen later that evening by a swarthy – and properly dressed – Italian. The moral of this story? When in Italy, never leave the hotel without a change of clothes. And some factor 40.