Mummy, why's that man walking funny? «

A few weeks ago I came back from a very chilled out holiday on Gozo (sister island of Malta). I slept lots, walked lots, read half a dozen novels and had some nice food. All in all a very relaxing ten days.

My flight back into Gatwick didn't leave until quite late in the evening and with a couple of minor delays I found myself in U.K. Passport Control with about three hundred other people a little after midnight.

I'd just missed the 12.05am train back to Clapham Junction and the next one wasn't for an hour so I was relatively relaxed about being towards the back of a long queue of “E.U. Nationals” waiting to have their sunburnt faces matched to the paler versions in their passports.

After about ten minutes of standing in the queue I noticed a young lad of about fourteen or fifteen being slowly escorted to the front of the queue by a member of the airport staff who was trying to keep a straight face but not doing a very good job of it.

The lad was still in his holiday clothes: shorts and a loud T-shirt with a wide-brimmed sunhat and flip-flops. He was also carrying a small, inflatable rubber ring you'd be more likely to see wedged around the middle section of a temporarily aquatic toddler than tightly gripped under the arm of young adult.

The reason he was making such slow progress was that he was walking very gingerly indeed, taking tiny pigeon steps, the net result being that he was moving only slightly faster than the queue itself.

He was soon attracting a fair amount of attention from the other people in the queue, who frankly had little else to look at, but he seemed strangely immune to their stares and whispering. His face seemed to say: “You think this is embarrassing? This is absolutely nothing. This is a good day.”

As he passed me, he nodded wearily to the pair of middle-aged women immediately in front of me, and it became clear that he was with them — I would guess they were his mum and an auntie or family friend. They both watched him pass with supportive smiles, but by the time he was out of earshot they dissolved into “I know I shouldn't laugh, but...” giggles.

“Poor lamb. Is he still on the painkillers?” said the Auntie/friend.
“Oh yes. Has to. Four times a day.”

“And how's he sleeping?”
“Not well. He can only sleep kneeling down.”

I'm sorry, he can only sleep kneeling down? He can only sleep in a position you would normally only assume if you were trying to listen to a private conversation in the downstairs flat?

I snorted with involuntary laughter which I quickly turned into a cough, albeit a fairly unconvincing one. But I was now desperate to find out what had happened to this unfortunate teen.

So I mentally reviewed the facts: he was in constant pain, he walked as if his ankles were tied together, and he had to sleep kneeling down like some kind of heavy-faced foetus. It didn't take Miss Marple to work out that we were obviously talking about some kind of arse, or inner arse injury. Probably an accident rather than anything particularly sinister, unless his relatives were being shockingly matter-of-fact about a violent assault...

“Well I did tell him — if you keep hanging around the docks late at night sooner or later you're going to get bummed. But he won't be told...”

And let's be honest, if you had recently been horribly violated in that particular way, the last thing you're going to do it let yourself fall asleep with your bum in the air...

Anyway, I couldn't help listening in to the conversation of the two women, hungry for some clue of what had happened. And for a while it looked like my curiosity would remain unsatisfied until the very last moment, as they were about to step over the yellow line and present their passports for inspection, when Auntie/friend uttered the magic word that completed the painful jigsaw puzzle — “cactus”.

Cactus! It was like a magic eye poster suddenly coming into focus. This hapless teen, probably clowning around in some awkward, youthful fashion, had tripped and fallen on a cactus, and managed to get a least one of its needles right up his bumhole. Not just spiked in the cheeks. That's a bit of Savlon and a plaster, not a dose of morphine and a whole new sleeping strategy. No, not in the cheeks, right up the bumhole.

I pricked myself in the thumb a while back trying to sew a button back onto a pair of combat trousers and that was pretty bloody painful. Well imagine that, but up the bumhole.

What is the correct pain scaling factor? 10? 100? That's like the difference between being hit in the face with an acorn and being hit in the face with an oak tree.

And, of course, when I say up the bumhole, I clearly don't mean exactly up the bumhole. I don't mean clinically navigating adjacent layers of tissue like the well-oiled finger of a tiny doctor. I mean approximately up the bumhole. Roughly up the bumhole. Give or take.

Just imagine I gave you a stack of ten bagels and challenged you to impale them all in a single, rapid movement on an upturned knitting needle without damaging any of the bagels. In theory it should be possible — in theory.

But in practice, even with the best will in the world, there's going to be some bagel trauma. For every bagel whose puckered hole the needle passes neatly through, there's going to be at least two more that get scratched or torn or even completely impaled.

So while most holidays don't go entirely to plan, if your perfect summer break was slightly marred by the odd hitch, you can now surely feel grateful that you at least weren't anally raped by a flowering succulent.

And also take some comfort in the knowledge that you didn't have to spend the whole of the “no frills” flight home sitting on a child's inflatable ring to keep your own painfully inflamed one off the seat.