A short history, incomplete ...

So carrying on from the middle, this is about how I am divesting myself of ten luxury properties by means of drawings. Full information is now at http://www.myhideawayinspain.com, but this is a process of evolution, so this is the story of how I've moved from simply selling the hotel to deciding to raffle it off, to now selling hotel vouchers, ten of which will be drawn to win those glorious houses and studios.

It's an adventure you may want to follow, populated as it is with hopeless, hapless wannabes, shady agents, coniving crooks in league with the big hotel chains, and not least the Mafia, bent on laundering money through us.

To begin in the middle ...

It was the flat-faced guy with the heavy Slavic accent who put us on this path. He handed me an attaché case stuffed with 500-euro notes and told me I could take it with me. The rest I could pick up later.

We were in an 800-euro-per-night suite at the five-star George V in Paris and to hear him tell it all I had to do is sign the contract and I would have 4.5m euros and he and his buddies would own our little mountain paradise cluster of houses and studios on the island of Mallorca in Spain.

What was unspoken was that they would also own me.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you the back story.

Some months ago my doctor told me to slow down. He wasn't happy with my state of health. Besides, I'm of an age when I should be slowing down anyway. "Retirement" was the word the doc threatened me with. Thinking it over, it just made sense to give up the little boutique place in the mountains, however reluctantly.

So a few months ago I began to put out feelers for someone to take it over.

What a fiasco! First came the impoverished wannabes with no hotel experience, no Spanish, but who had always had a dream to run a small gem of a hotel in the Mediterranean. Would we mind financing them privately? 100%, of course.

Then there were the hotel chain agents, convinced that anyone who was even thinking of selling must be flirting with bankruptcy. For them, an offer of 40% of the fair market value was a logical start to any discussion.

And we must not forget the property agents, willing to put a photo in their window in return for only 6% of the sale price.

But finally there were the money launderers, with whom I started this text. They were willing to pay our price, our fair price, but only in filthy money from drugs or prostitution or whatever. Which is how I wound up in Paris, invited to sign on with people who had described themselves on the phone as "international investors". Ha!

And just by the by, if anybody ever asks you the question in a trivia quiz, a million euros in 500 notes weighs about 20 pounds; I had it in my hand.