It’s fair to say that my husband’s first choice of a precious week’s holiday away from his office would not be at a couples-only hotel resort in the Caribbean.

His idea of a high old time is standing in waders in a salmon river, somewhere drizzly at least five hours north of Aberdeen, with nobody else for company except a gillie and perhaps one other brooding male – also flyfishing through his midlife crisis – with whom to exchange the occasional grunt or compare rods.

He hates sun and sand, and never removes his shoes and socks except to go to bed or bathe. For many years, I did not even think he owned a pair of swimming trunks, and so kept trying to give him splashy Vilebrequins (as worn by yachties Hugh Grant and Tony Blair).

He politely declined my generous offers, proffering as proof of past purchase an old pair, commenting that they were still “perfectly all right”, despite their lack of elastic and – even more alarmingly – the white safety-net inner slip.

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So, when a week at an all-inclusive Sandals resort with several hundred rooms, suites and villas, spread across 200 lush landscaped acres in St Lucia came my way, I knew it would be a hard sell to persuade him to be my plus one.

“It’s a luxury resort right on the sea, and we’ll have our own butler service,” I wheedled, brandishing a lavish brochure that showed a white-gloved butler bearing sticky, floral cocktails to a couple in a vibrantly decorated tropical suite, a plunge pool an eyewatering Hockney blue just within shot, the whole scene framed by the glistening, palm-fringed sea at sunset the shimmering colour of beaten gold.

“The blahs and the blahs are coming (I named two amusing couples of our acquaintance), and there’s tennis and golf,” I took a deep breath, then played my trump card. “And fishing.” “Let’s see,” he said curtly, and I quickly hid the glossy sections of the brochure aimed at honeymooners (“You’ve searched the heavens for each other, now come share heaven on earth”, etc, etc), depicting barefoot, romping couples on white sandy beaches clinking champagne glasses, and the one boasting the eastern Caribbean’s largest pool with a swim-up bar, not to mention the enticing (to me) bumf on the all-important Red Lane spa, as I sensed that none of these would clinch it for him.

Anyway, to cut a long and dull preamble short, he graciously assented to accompany. I heaved a sigh of relieved expectation (a week lazing around the Caribbean having “travel unravel” massages and “pedi coladas” in early December, strangely enough, sounded just the ticket to me) and started bulk-buying sarongs, beach trousers and kaftans in cool, stripy blues from the Kikoy Company. Fast-forward to a week before our departure. I find my husband surfing the web for fishing holidays on the Kola peninsula, in Russia. As soon as I look over his shoulder, he snaps shut his laptop, heaves a sigh and says: “I don’t think I want to come after all. I only get six weeks off a year, and you know how much I hate the whole beach thing.”

Fast-forward to the day of departure. I have soothed his lastminute jitters and we are surging across the concourse to meet up with the others at Gatwick. There’s plenty of time before the 10.30am British Airways flight to St Lucia via Antigua leaves. We approach with happy holiday faces, signalling how up for a good time we are, what super-fun travelling companions we will be. But I sense from their gloomy countenances that there is something amiss.

“There’s been a problem,” says Mary. “Lastminute.com cancelled our bookings and we can’t board the flight.” My heart drops into my boots. I dare not look at my husband in case he takes advantage of the check-in computer saying no to make a break for it. Fast-forward another 24 hours. We all make it to St Lucia after all. It’s time to reveal whether I have converted my husband to my kind of saronged hedonism.

Well, the short answer is, I can’t claim I did, although we had a marvellous time. He never swam from the beach, nor in any of the many swimming pools on campus. But what did happen was this. We fell in love with St Lucia, which is the sort of sunny-side-up place of heart-stopping natural beauty where even grumpy old men who loathe sunning and swimming cannot fail to have a good time. Oh, yes, we loved St Lucia. Let me count the ways.

First, the St Lucians. It’s very cheering after a grim winter in London to be asked “How’s the feeling?” in a giggly Caribbean accent over breakfast by an ever-smiling member of staff, or to make a request for more banana pancakes and crispy bacon and hear the refrain “No pressure”.

When we drove across the island to eat steamed lobster with garlic sauce and crab cakes at the weekly Friday fishfest at Anse La Raye; when we jiggled Englishly with our bottles of beer in hands at the “jump up” (roughly translated as street party) in Gros Islet, where the dancing was of such a lewd nature, it made you blush and titter; when we dropped in at a rum barfor “rocket fuel”, made of 80% alcohol, spices and grenadine,and tasting like cough mixture – we were welcomed as friends, even brothers. I cannot say more for a country than that it makes visitors from almost 5,000 miles away (where they drive on the left and have the Queen’s head on the coins) feel at home.

Second, the natural beauty of the island that the English and French fought over for 150 years is impossible to cloak, even with sprawling hotel developments (and one mustn’t be too snooty – we all have to stay somewhere).

We climbed to the top of the fort at Pigeon Island and swooned at a tropical sunset that held all the boozy colours of a fruity rum punch; we zip-wired through the rainforest canopy, and swam in crystal waters (nobody who snorkels in the bay at Jalousie, where the fish dart in bright shoals with the dazzling plenitude of a Microsoft screensaver, could ever again doubt the existence of an almighty creator). We wandered sweatily through the Diamond Botanical Gardens and springs at Soufrière, fingering fresh nutmegs and cocoa beans, until we reached a spectacular, sulphurous waterfall, where, inevitably, a fashion shoot for a British newspaper was in full swing, complete with sultry model.

We sailed from Castries to the towering green pointy Pitons, which are so beautiful that I feel drawn once again to my excellent Sandals brochure to do them full justice: “Even the twin peaks of Les Pitons, the island’s most famous landmark, pair off as naturally as two people in love.”

Then, to cap it all, we took a 38ft Bertram 100 miles offshore for half a day’s deep-sea fishing for marlin, mahi-mahi, dourado and so on. We didn’t catch any, needless to say, but we did see pilot whales and dolphins, turtles, flying fish and something called a grampus. (“I think I’ve got one of them at home,” I felt relaxed enough to announce.) We chugged so far from St Lucia that we could see the whole island, all 27 miles long of it, in all its lush, dramatic entirety, sitting underneath a puffy bonnet of midday rain cloud, its rolling hills and conical peaks coming in and out of sun and shadow. As he sat like Papa Hemingway in a chair, surrounded by six lines trailing squid-like lures, puffing a Montecristo and squinting at Martinique, I could almost venture to describe my husband’s mood as equable.

So, it had all been a near triumph. I doubtros Islet that my husband will change his position entirely on sun and sand and beach hotels, but at the end of the week, he had the light of West Indian horizons in his eyes, and whenever I closed mine, I saw the Pitons.

Seven nights in a luxury suite from £1,894pp, including Virgin Atlantic flights from Gatwick. Or try Kuoni (01306 747008, www.kuoni.co.uk)

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