Le blues du tennisman

The curse of the catamaran has struck again.

Misfortune has followed misfortune since I introduced readers of the Telegraph blog to the crowd of French strangers, now friends, that I joined on holiday in the French Caribbean in February.

One of our number has seen his dry cleaning business collapse. He and his wife were then gassed as they slept, awakening to find their home outside Paris cleaned out by burglars. Two of us have lost our jobs.

At the weekend, it was Dominique's turn to recount a tale of woe.

Tall, lean and irritatingly handsome, Dominique is a successful tennis coach, with a decent collection of trophies bearing witness to his own playing skills.

He is also well read and sharp, with a magnetic personality. But as if living in Seine St Denis, the often grim north Parisian suburb, were not bad enough, he also seems to endure a somewhat patchy love life.

It must be said that insisting on playing in a tournament on his wedding day was perhaps not the best start to his first marriage. I only think he is joking when he tells of trying to chat up a glamorous Swedish blonde. While he understood her to accept a date for "neuf heures", she knew she had actually replied in English: "Never."

But Dominique tells it so often that you start to feel something of the sort must once have happened to him.

Lately, however, life has been looking up. He has a newish companion. And he was anxious to please her with a holiday in the Maldives. The location looked wonderful, a sunny break from the chilly French autumn seemed assured.

Thanks to some over-enthusiastic manoeuvrings by the lady driver of a forklift truck, however, the excited couple got only as far as Charles de Gaulle airport.

The woman's task, loading food trolleys on to the Airbus, seemed simple enough. But according to local press accounts carefully cut out by Dominique, she managed to dig the vehicle's forks into the fuselage of the plane.

The damage was not discovered until technicians began final inspections before take-off. The forklift driver had not reported the incident; one of the newspaper stories said it was not clear whether she did not know what she had done, or knew but panicked.

On balance, the 300-plus would-be holidaymakers were probably relieved that departure was postponed.

They were less content to learn, and only then after a wait approaching 30 hours, that the damage could not be repaired in time and no substitute aircraft was available.

Dominique's relationship has so far survived the disappointment and he has hopes of taking the same holiday in February. But he still feels a little miffed at having switched allegiance from the Partir Pas Cher travel company to one that turned out to be Partir Pas du Tout .

Out of the original party of 10 on that winter cruise around Martinique and Guadeloupe, just five have so far remained untouched by the curse and will be fervently hoping that it has run its course.

And if it hasn't? Since two of the five are gynaecologists, we can only speculate as to what new mishaps lie ahead.