Look, I know we've been together for a while now, and yeah, it's been good, but we've really got to talk.
You see, it's the music. I don't know how to break it to you, but Phil Collins just isn't cool. And nor is Bonnie Tyler. Hell, none of the stuff you play in your bars is cool, and it's so not-cool that I don't think we can stay together any more. We're not living in the eighties any more, you know, and you just don't have the same excuse as Cuba.
It's not you, it's me. Everyone else seems OK with the fact that your taste in music is in arrested development, but I just can't see the funny side. Hell, even the ex-pats are into it; back in the Hotel Kangaroo, Gary played endless DVDs of 1980s big-hair soft-rock bands in his bar, and when we asked him about it, he said that the boys in town sold these DVDs for a pittance... and he presumably thought that made it all right to inflict the likes of Foreigner ('I Want to Know What Love Is') and Van Halen ('Jump') on his bemused guests, night after night. And then we were in what seemed like a really cool American blues bar in Antigua, and suddenly on comes Cyndi Lauper ('Time After Time'), swiftly followed by Kenny Loggins ('Dangerzone'), and nobody bats an eyelid, even though the bar was full of tattooed biker-types whom I thought would know better. Thankfully they switched to Exile -era Rolling Stones before I had to leave, but don't think I wasn't listening, because I was.
And on the bus into Antigua, on comes the radio, and it's all about the greatest hits of the eighties, with the likes of Toto ('Africa'), Roxette ('It Must Have Been Love') and even 1980s Abba ('The Winner Takes It All'). Or how about the American-style pizza joint in Guatemala City who serenaded us with Eurythmics ('Here Comes the Rain Again'), Roxy Music ('More Than This'), Irene Cara ('Flashdance'), Julian Lennon ('Much Too Late for Goodbyes') and Talk Talk ('It's My Life'). And not to mention the Irish restaurant in San Pedro, which not only insisted on playing Phil Collins's Greatest Hits throughout lunch ('Easy Lover' anyone?), but followed it up with a medley of more eighties dross, including Jennifer Rush ('The Power of Love'), which I last heard just a few weeks ago on a bus in Belize. You don't forget that kind of thing in a hurry.
But the line was well and truly crossed when we were relaxing round the pool in five-star luxury in Monterrico, and one of the guests got out his Android phone and started playing some music (because listening to other people's music pumped through the tinny speakers of a smartphone is what we all love to do when relaxing round the pool, naturally). And what did he play? Something from this millennium, perhaps, or even something from the last quarter of a century? Not quite. He only played Lionel Ritchie's gut-wrenchingly awful 'Say You, Say Me', loud and proud, and then to make matters worse, he had the nerve to sing along, half-heartedly and out of tune. And this guy wasn't single, he was there with his other half, who seemed OK with all of this!