Beautiful Stranger

Picture this.

You're on holiday in say, Corfu. Sipping the local ouzo, eating grapes, when a Javier Bardem-esque type strolls up to your table and says hello in his breezy local accent. Do you...

a) Brush him off with a curt "Beat it."
b) Swoon and spend the rest of your vacation drinking morning-after cappucinos in his charmingly rustic hut?

I suspect that for most women, (even the most jaded of corporate types) the answer is B. I've asked this question before, and I strongly suspect I'll be asking it again: in what exactly does the appeal of foreign men consist of? Of course, not all Greek men look like Apollo. The English are not all David Beckhams. The Scotch do not export Gerard Butlers. Nor the French Olivier Martinezes. The ugly truth is - a man doesn't have to be sex on a stick to have his wild and wicked way with you. All he has to possess is a sufficiently exotic accent. Admit it, there's something about the "Grazies", the "S'il vous plait", the "Senorita"- something about the way it trips, lusciously, off the tongue, more velvet than we expect or deserve. The liquid syllables, the strange sounds upon the ear seduce us into a very frenzy of desire.

Here, kiddies, is my profound thought for today: The man himself is secondary to the sound. Our love affair with the cabana boys and Mexican waiters and Italian crooners is only a thinly-disguised affair with a foreign language. With foreign words. Nabokov's Lolita is an account of a man's love not for nymphets, but for the English language. What are we to make of this?

I say, next time you go to Barcelona, skip the obligatory Spanish artist in the corner window, and instead buy a guidebook. No, better yet, an audio tape. Lie back in your 500 sq. feet hotel room, switch it on, and be caressed by the accents of pure seduction.