The pain woke me in the middle of the night, like a knife had been rammed into the lower part of my back. I was in a hotel in Baguio, in the middle of the Philippines. I had been travelling with a government guide, retracing the life story of Ferdinand Marcos, the country’s President, as part of the same vague, unspecified public relations brief that had led me to lunching with his wife in Manila. I had no idea whether the guide was staying in the same hotel; she had merely made sure I was checked in before disappearing for the night.
Until the day before I had been with a group of journalists on an ‘educational’, but the others had now flown home and I had gone on with my guide to do more research. In the dark and quiet of the tropical night I suddenly felt very alone as the pain repeated in steady waves.
I pulled myself out of bed and tried moving around the room to see if it was a muscular cramp of some sort. It abated for a few moments and then returned with greater severity, almost knocking me off my feet and making me feel nauseous. It was time to ask for help. I phoned down and enquired if there was a doctor attached to the hotel. A few hours later I had been given an injection and the pain had magically lifted.
When my exquisitely groomed government minder arrived at breakfast time to escort me wherever we were due to go to next I told her of my night’s adventures. She listened with a serious level of concentration and when I had finished she raised one immaculate eyebrow.
‘Could it possibly have anything to do with the things you got up to in Manila?’
It was a fair cop, if a rather dubious medical diagnosis. On one of our days touring round Manila we had been taken to a beach where a gentleman from the London Times (with whom I had been designated to share a room) and I had been approached by a young man selling weed. Despite the disapproving looks we had received from the rest of the group, and from our minders, we had made a purchase and later settled down in our hotel room to enjoy the goods before dinner.
That night was to be an official banquet to mark the end of the tour for the other journalists and some important person was coming from the other end of the country to meet me and brief me on whatever it was I was going to be doing on the next leg of my trip.
Up to that point I hadn’t had much more than schoolboy experiences with drugs and I was not prepared for the strength of whatever it was we were happily puffing on as we sat on our balcony overlooking the beach, serenaded by the waves and the cicadas. By the time I realised that I was high as a satellite it was too late to do anything about it apart from giggle and talk nonsense. Aware enough to know that I needed to sober up if I was going to make sensible dinner table conversation, I decided to have a cold shower. That might have helped if alcohol had been the problem but the only effect it had that evening was to make my hair stick out from my head at right angles.
Not bothering to look in a mirror I decided that I was now in a fit state to present myself and floated to the banquet as if everything was normal. It was only as I started to come gently down from the clouds an hour or so later that I realised everyone around me had been having considerable difficulty following whatever it was I had been babbling about. With the immaculate politeness that characterises so many people in the Far East no one had mentioned that they had noticed anything, until the moment I owned up to my night-time pain.
The rest of the trip passed uneventfully and a kidney stone finally worked its way agonisingly through my system once I was safely back in England. It almost seemed like a fitting punishment for my transgressions.