Ted, Guy, Austin and others were still commuting to Wales every week and needed a more cost-effective place to stay than the lovely Bear in Crickhowell. One day Ted found an ad in the local paper offering Bed and Breakfast for £25 a night.

We all went round there (Pantybaileau House, Gilwern) after work. We thought we had the wrong place. A beautiful country house approached by a half mile drive. Gravel drive, croquet lawn, the whole nine yards.

We were shown roundn by the lady of the house, Christine. We were shown the lovely bedrooms, beautiful dining room, and the cellar bar/pool room. She told us that the £25 a night included bed breakfast and 3 course evening meal.

We moved in immediately.

We spent several months there and had a lot of fun. Countless nights in the bar with John (Christine’s husband) having a great laugh.

Lots of funny things happened at Panty. One of the weirdest was the day they rumbled Micky-D. Micky-D had been hired as Sales Manager. The first momement I met him I thought "pretender". Well, a few months went by and he was never where he was supposed to be, so Ted started doing a bit of checking. Had he been where he said he had all week?…er, no. Did he have an MBA?…er, no. So Malcolm sacked him. Unfortunately he lived in the South East of England, and there was the small matter of getting him home and bringing back his company car.

Coincidentally, this was the first day of employment for the new Security Guards. They were going through their induction session when Malcolm interrupted and asked them to escort him home and bring back the car.

One evening we met a couple of friends of John and Christine, can’t remember their names now, but they were obviously "up for it" and were holding a fortune telling evening in the house.

Time went by, "Gentleman's Evenings" came and went, people picked up nicknames like "red knickers" and life in Panty was fun.

I remember coming back from holiday and there was a newspaper cutting on my desk from the News of the World entitled "To the Manor Porn", with a picture of John and Chris dressed as characters from "Allo Allo" (Rene and a french maid) I recognised the photo – it had always hung, along with many others, on the back of the toilet door at the top of the steps from the bar.

The article was an expose of a sex club at Pantybaileau on a Friday evening. The reporter had answered an ad in a magazine and had been invited to the house. There were lots of people there in the bar, at 9 o clock the lights went off and everybody started s**gging each other. The reporter made a few notes, nicked the picture and left. The story appeared the following Sunday

Talking with John later on, it appears that he had rented the bar to the two fortune telling friends, they had placed the ads and "ran" the evening. It was the third time they had done it.

Did we ever see it? – the commuting life is one that includes Monday to Thursday evenings, not Friday – so no, we never did!