Marbella's got talent?

Apologies for having been away for a but the tourist season has finally got underway in earnest, and sun lover that I am, I found it impossible to leave my new summer office (a laptop-sized space at the beach club roughly halfway between the San Miguel fridge and the Hawaiian Tropic Boutique). But having shaken the sand out of the iMac and returned the sunbed to the upright position, Slitherer is ready and raring to through himself into the heady and hedonic summer social scene, wearing my rather fetching Dolce & Banana thong. I’ve spared you the photo.

Summer marks the end of the football season, and, like a band of blinged up lemmings, most of the Premiership’s finest make a headlong charge to the costas. David Bentley (who owns the Buddha Beach club), Ryan Giggs, Shay Given, Aaron Lennon, Carlton Cole and Jermaine Jenas have all been spotted in and around Marbella, and wherever you’ll find footballers, you’ll find WAGs, those large breasted, slingback wearing, dyed blonde, tabloid kiss-and-tell specialists. They are not, however, known for their intellectual capacity. One of the rumours that was circulating at the beginning of the summer was that the entire Chelsea squad were having a boys' weekend in Puerto Banus. And one of Slitherer’s colleagues, paparazzi of some repute, spotted a WAG enjoying a little, ahem, offshore “Dirty Dorsal Dancing” in the Mediterranean with an athletic tattooed male type. When my camera carrying friend asked said dizzy blonde what she’d been up to, she giggled and said she’d been “’avin a bit of fun with a guy who says he’s one of Chelsea’s second team” My friend then had to inform her of the fact that

A) Chelsea, were, in fact, in Las Vegas and

B) Chelsea doesn’t have a second team….

Summer also tends to bring television crews down all eager to get a slice of the action. Now we’ve had some really appalling TV shows about Marbella – Costa del Dosh and the Marbella Belles spring most readily to mind, and they all seem to show that people gain 10 pounds and lose 1000 points of IQ when a camera crew shows up.

The latest to visit was ex Mirror editor, “Britain’s Got Talent” judge and Jeremy Clarkson sparing partner Piers Morgan. Being one of the most recognisable lounge lizards on the coast (normally spotted snoozing on the Chesterfield by the empty ice bucket) Slitherer was approached by the production crew, who explained that, as in previous “Piers Morgan on…” shows where visited Monte Carlo and Dubai, Piers wanted to go behind the larger lout stereotypes and find the real stories of people who lived on the coast. This all sounded refreshing and I put them in touch with several people and businesses that fitted the bill.

Fast forward to the week that they actually arrived and there had obviously been a change of angle. Appointments were missed, due to Piers’ “illness” (perhaps caused by the night before) or filming arranged to be cancelled 20 minutes before – a tad annoying for restaurants that had closed off sections to ensure that “la Morgan” could conduct his interviews. One Marbella real estate legend was repeatedly questioned about prostitutes as she was showing Piers around a million pound mansion, while both Sir Alan Sugar and David Bentley, who presumably have run into Piers before, flatly refused to be interviewed, knowing that they’d be stitched up.

So who did Piers interview for a real taste of Marbella and where? Non other than Wayne Lineker, brother of England footballer Gary, in his bar Lineker’s, a favourite of the stag and hen night crowd in Puerto Banus, followed by spending the day at Nikki Beach’s champagne spraying party, the favoured hangout of the rich and vacuous, where he interviewed Bianca Gascoigne, daughter of Gazza , Z list celebrity, and “glamour model” who, last time Slitherer checked, didn’t own property here, so was hardly qualified to talk about anything, apart from here latest boob job.

I will probably watch “Piers Morgan on Marbella” in much the same way as I did “Doctor Who” when a small boy.

From behind the sofa with my fingers in my ears….

The endless summer started here

As the weather heats up and the first sangrias of the season are supped, I warmed up and slipped from underneath my stone. Now in my experience one really needs a full on Marbella style blow out to get the summer going, so imagine my lizard like squeals of delight when an invitation slipped underneath the door at Grim Towers, my place in the campo bearing the immortal words

“James Hewitt requests the pleasure of your company for the grand opening of Polo House Marbella”

Now, as a professional lunch guest in Marbella for 20 years now, I’ve bumped into James on a number of occasions and have never understood why he tends to crop up on the hate list of the Great British Public every time. He may have bumped uglies with Saint Diana of Kensington, but to be honest, he wasn’t the only high profile figure to do so, as I seem to remember a certain bumfaced English rugby captain also being linked to the Queen of Hearts. But I digress

Heralded in the press release as costing €2 million fit out, the Polo House Marbella is a polo themed restaurant and club with a colonial atmosphere. A brilliant concept if you ask me, for what is Marbella if not a de facto British colony? Did I not hear recently that Spain will give up its claim to Gibraltar if it can have Marbella back from the British?

Of course, all the polo action takes place at Sotogrande, but that’s not were the Eurotrash hang out, so locating the club on the main road between Marbella and Puerto Banus was another masterstroke.

And lets face it, to myself an all the other lounge lizards based on the coast, it doesn’t matter what the theme of the venue is. As long as the booze and nibbles are both free and freely available, we’ll be there. And with Vueve Clicquot supplying the fizz, we were there in force. Slitherer employed his usual tactics at these events, get there early, say hello to the host (who was more than a little nervous, but that may have been at the sight of me) and then get to the bar. From which vantage spot I was able to spy a fantastic selection of Eurotrash, including heavyweight contenders such as Baroness von Thyssen, one of the richest women in Spain, who popped in from cosying with Antonio Banderas in Malaga. The fact that she was known as plain Carmen Cervera from Seville before she married the millionaire art aristocrat doesn’t matter. In Marbella she’s treated as royalty, as were the smattering of German princesses from now defunct principalities and James reputation as one of Marbella’s own nobility was underlined when the Marbella mayor, Angeles Munoz, officially opened the restaurant in a ribbon cutting ceremony. Truth is stranger than fiction I mused as I staggered out into the evening….