‘The first prostitute I ever visited was in Las Vegas. She told me that I was the youngest guy she’d ever slept with … and the best.’

I glance up from my sun-lounger where I’ve been pretending to read my kindle and stare (with my nostrils flaring) at the man speaking. He’s about sixty and up until then I’d assumed gay. I am so grossed out by the fact he is talking about Vegas prostitutes at 10am by a hotel pool that I shoot him a stare that would make a Gorgon flinch. He doesn’t seem to notice because he’s far too busy telling the 50 year-old woman next to him that he’d love to wake up next to her and that her arse is perfect.

The woman preens a little and I think to myself, lady he just told you he sleeps with prostitutes…are you fricking deaf or something? I don’t know about you ladies, but if a I guy tried to pick me up by telling me that a prostitute in Vegas told him he was great in bed, and I happened to be standing by a pool at the time, I would push him in and then I’d probably stand on him until he drowned a bit. OK, that’s probably a little harsh, but you get me? I wouldn’t preen. I wouldn’t pout. I wouldn’t giggle. I would find some way of expressing my disgust that would hopefully render him impotent for the rest of his life. I believe I have that in me.

‘I’m celibate,’ the woman answers, thrusting her cobalt-bikini clad breasts towards him like torpedos. ‘I swore off men three years ago,’ she continues. She doesn’t act like someone who has sworn off men, I think to myself, eying her over my Kindle as she flicks her hair and bats her eyelashes. I glance around wondering if I have in fact wandered onto the set of a really bad movie because these lines…these lines are beyond reality. Surely they’ve been scripted. But I see no lights, no camera. No one is yelling action.

‘I decided,’ the lady continues, ‘to go celibate after my fifth marriage ended in divorce.’

The man dives under the water at this point. Resurfacing at the far end of the pool.

I start to scribble down this epic dialogue for use at a later date in a blog post or a cheesy TV pilot or a comedy romance novel or a geriatric porn movie (you never know where my career might head, I have to keep my options open and maybe the Universe put these people here in front of me so I could record these incredible lines and then use them in the future for something truly epic…maybe I’ll win an Oscar with it or a Pulitzer…you never know…).

Just then Alula comes skipping over to me and I decide it’s too risky to stay to hear more. I don’t want my five year old asking me what a prostitute is. I grab our towels and my Kindle, ready to hustle her away from the skanky man talking about sex and the divorcee with the torpedo boobs. I head to the desk to pay for our drinks.

Suddenly from behind me I hear. ‘Wow, what amazing eyes you have.’ I wheel around and see the man speaking to Alula who thankfully has a similar approach to dodgy old men in speedos as I do. She stares at him and starts backing the hell off.

‘So beautiful,’ he continues oblivious to her death stare (she gets it from me…I’m so proud).

My warrior mama comes bursting forth at this point.  I’m about to go tearing over there like a lioness hunting down a gazelle. But John is already there. And I’m waiting for my change.

‘I draw eyes,’ I hear the man tell John. ‘I’d love to put her eyes in my painting.’

That man is not putting her eyes in his painting. I will push him in and drown him in the pool if he even thinks about putting her eyes in his painting.

‘I think the eyes tell us everything about the human condition,’ he adds, as though that might sway us into letting him paint Alula’s eyes.

Push him in the pool, I yell silently to John, that’ll teach him all he needs to know about the human condition. I curse John for not having developed his psychic mind reading abilities and myself for not having developed mind control ones. How handy that would be right now.

But John being John, (ie. being far nicer than I) and not having heard the prostitution conversation, just nods genially at the man and makes a non-committal sound followed by a polite goodbye.