Our eldest took his family to Alicante for a week’s break at the start of the month.

One day they went travelling and his wife, having heard of a big shopping complex at a place called La Zenia, insisted that they stop there so she could get a bit of retail therapy.

After strolling around for about an hour in the boiling heat – there are more than 100 shops in the complex – he had enough, and decided he was going to a wee café to have a coffee.

So, the family all eventually joined him in this little Italian place.

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There they were eating their pizzas and enjoying the respite from the 40c degree sunshine when his wife said, “There’s a guy over there who looks like John Paul” and a couple of seconds later repeated it, stating, “That is John Paul”.

My son dismissed her comments as delusional.

What would his first cousin, born and reared in England, someone he hadn’t seen in years, be doing in a restaurant in Spain on a boiling hot day in July?

To cut to the chase, he was eventually persuaded to look around, and it was none other than the aforementioned John Paul.

Just to finish this part of the story, the........

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