I’m sure Rachel will be mightily disappointed to be missing out on this most gossipy of emails, but she is right this minute having her own very romantic holiday with her much immortalised man. So, with lots of people in the office coming and going from holidays, we got ourselves thinking about  r o m a n c e; about the tantalizing possibilities of a holiday fling, a chance encounter with a stranger that leads to love, or a wobble into the sea with a bikini full of sand, a belly full of cerveza and the vague sense of something regrettable about to take place between you and that lucky being at the end of your arm.

Well, gulp, this is when you really hope the subject of the email doesn’t happen to now work in an office in central London and organise said office’s recycling.

Harry: I went Interailing when I was 19 with my friend Abi. We started in Amsterdam, we finished in Amsterdam but managed to cover quite a distance in between. In fact we both managed to detour to places where the boys we had crushes on were staying. Well, stop No. 1 (my fancy-man), San Sebastian, lead to nothing but heartache. At stop No. 2, a campsite outside Florence, however, we both got lucky. Oh dear. Perhaps because of the heartache and the view over the city, and the wine drunk straight from the bottle, and the fact that Abi would rather share a tent with the boy she had travelled hundreds of miles to see, (you know just ‘cos he happened to be there when she was…); I ended up locking lips with the mate (for purposes of anonymity all names have been changed). Except it wasn’t really locking lips, more like my face being mauled by the tongue of a cow- in the dark and dank of the canvas … ooh it makes me shudder even now. Poor Gary (names, changed), he probably thought he was being romantic and rugged. I left in the morning very early, on my own to Rome, where I ran out of money and got stuck in a train strike in a torrential down-poor. That I’ve come to think of as my penance for my ‘kiss and run’ antics.

Steph: I’ve only had one holiday romance, when I was a pretty young, and it was really only because my mate had hooked up with his mate. We rejects were left, then, to discuss the finer points of why the whole world was against us when we realized that actually, we could join forces, stop complaining and just get down to some serious snogging (interspersed with musings on the nature of injustice, naturally). Result! So, for a week every night me and my mate would sally forth to the beach (where our bad-boy Brummies had set up their dwellings) and make an evening of it. Exchanging addresses at the end of our holiday may have seemed like the end of it for the lads, but we were smitten and determined to see them again. Telling our olds that we were going into town for the day one Saturday, we got the train to Birmingham and somehow navigated our way across the city to Rowley Regis where a really disappointing hour of tea, telly and twitchy silence ensued before we went home, mightily aggrieved.

On a more lovey note, a family friend from France (I already wrote a blog about limericks, so I’ll not take this one any further) was sitting on a train going back to rainy Paris and got chatting to her neighbour. They got on like a house on fire but she, a shy beauty, got off the train without exchanging numbers. However, unwittingly, she left her brolly on the train and, it being a rather nice one, had her name and address on it. The young man, Pierre, was clearly delighted and he proceeded to get in touch again at the first opportunity. They are now happily married with two children! Ain’t that sweet?

Come on, dish the dirt on your holiday fling-flops…

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