This letter has been received from Mrs Maude Dugbury of Hall Green, Birmingham, England.

Dear Editor,

I have been seeing an awful lot of complaints about timeshare touts in your newspaper lately, even more than usual.

My hubby and I have been coming to your beautiful island on our holidays for over 40 years, and we hope to continue doing so for the next 40. However, in recent years our holidays have frequently been spoilt by the persistent activities of what you call timeshare touts.

Many, if not all, your correspondents seem at a loss as to how to deal with these offensive pests. We too had this problem, but no longer, and I would like to tell you how we beat the timeshare touts.

To begin with, we adopted a simple but effective ploy. Whenever we were approached by one or more of these timeshare menaces, who always addressed us in English, we denied all knowledge of the language. Some of the more persistent ones then tried Italian, French, German and even Spanish.

To all of these we shook our heads and jabbered away to one another and to them in, what my hubby described as cod Slavic. This is a completely incomprehensible language, to us as well as to anyone else, that my hubby thinks sound vaguely like Bulgarian.

How he'd know is not entirely clear, since, to the best of my knowledge, he's never heard any Bulgarian spoken. But anyway it seemed to work. As we chattered at the touts in our bogus lingo, they soon lost interest and wandered off to source some more amenable victims.

This ploy worked a treat... right up until last year, when we were waylaid by an attractive but unrelenting young lady of Slavic appearance, who claimed an intimate knowledge of every Slavic dialect ever minted. Fearful of being unmasked, we abandoned our one-sided dialogue and fled to the comparative safety of our hotel... where we were obliged to remain holed-up for the rest of that particular 14-day holiday.

However, this unpleasant experience did make us reassess our tactics in timeshare tout-repelling.

One ploy which proved quite successful - for a while - was to always ensure that we left our hotel dressed in rags. It did cause the odd guest and hotel employee to stare, but we reckoned it was worth it, since the touts totally ignored us... thinking we must be far too poor to afford a timeshare.

All went swimmingly until one day we emerged dressed as usual in nifty little numbers, straight off the Maghtab dump. Unfortunately, as my husband bent over to scratch his bare foot, he exposed the Rolex on his wrist and we had to beat a hasty retreat back to the hotel.

A similar fate befell our next anti-timeshare wheeze. This time we decided to go along with all the proffered inducements to buy... without having any intention of purchasing so much as a kennel.

We lapped up all the free booze they lavished on us, pocketed the freebie paste jewellery, had a nice day out in Gozo on the timeshare company, wolfed down all eight courses of the free meal at "the restaurant of our choice", we even consented to a guided tour of the timeshare property we were supposed to part with our hard-earned cash for. Then, we did a runner, just as the tout's boss put the pen into my hubby's hand for his signature.

But this was just the start of our problems. The touts concerned merely upped the pressure, so that we were forced to spend the last 10 days of that holiday holed up in a refugee camp at Safi, for our own protection.

After this experience it would have been easy, and probably wise, to cross Malta off our holiday destination schedule. But, we decided not to let it beat us. When we returned to England, my husband immediately enrolled in a class of martial arts. Yes... we decided the answer to tout harassment would be... violence.

And so... despite the fact that my hubby is 76 and suffers from palpitations, he is now ready to take on the timeshare touts... six at a time, if they like.

We are convinced that aggression is the answer. Will we succeed? Watch this space.