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ease.
    â€˜Drum roll please, maestro,’ said Andy as he set the beers down on the table. ‘Prepare yourself to be shocked and amazed as once again your favourite uncle Andy delivers the goods because tomorrow, my friends, we are flying to . . . Crete.’
    I stared at Andy in horror.
    â€˜I know,’ said Andy, presumably mistaking the look on my face for delight. ‘Genius, isn’t it?’
    â€˜You do remember we’ve been to Crete before don’t you?’ said Tom, barely able to hide his incredulity.
    â€˜Of course I do,’ said Andy defensively.
    â€˜And so you do remember what happened there?’
    â€˜Of course,’ he replied. ‘Which is why we’re not only going back to Crete but we’re staying in the same resort.’
    â€˜Malia?’ I spat in outraged disbelief. ‘Malia? You’re telling me that of all the places in the world you could have chosen you had to choose the one place you know I would least want to go?’
    â€˜Hair of the dog,’ said Andy firmly. ‘Take your poison and turn it into a cure.’
    â€˜Andy, mate,’ I said as calmly as I could, ‘apart from the obvious that I won’t go into right now, you know as well as I do that we can’t spend a week in Malia. Malia’s the unofficial capital of the Club 18–30 world. And in case you haven’t noticed, Andy, none of us is between the ages of eighteen and thirty.’
    â€˜Exactly,’ replied Andy, ‘which is why I had to lie about our ages. So if anyone asks if you’re thirty, Tom’s twenty-nine and I’m twenty-eight next birthday.’
    I looked over at Tom to make sure that I wasn’t alone in thinking that this was the worst kind of bad news we could be hearing. Rather than being shocked, however, Tom apparently found the whole thing amusing.
    â€˜You think this is funny?’
    â€˜No,’ said Tom chuckling to himself as he looked at Andy. ‘I think this is what happens when you let McCormack book a holiday for you.’
    â€˜Tom’s right,’ said Andy calmly. ‘This is what happens when you let me book a holiday for you. I mix things up. I make things happen. Think about it, Charlie. You had the best holiday of your entire life in Malia when you were twenty-five. What better way could there be of getting over Sarah than going back there and meeting someone else?’

    The ice cube game
    It all happened two years after Tom, Andy and I graduated from Sussex University and were living in a shared house in the Bevandean area of Brighton. At the time Tom was back at the university doing a post-graduate course, Andy was on the dole and I had got my first job in the lower echelons of the council’s Economic Development unit.
    Up until this point I’d never been on holiday with the two of them together. In my first year I’d spent a month Interrailing around Europe with Tom as he wasn’t a lying-on-a-beach-soaking-up-the-sun type; and in my second year I’d spent a week on Kos with Andy as he wasn’t a museum-and-monument type. And so, as far as the idea of the three of us going on holiday together went, it just never seemed likely to happen.
    But one summer evening Andy put forward the suggestion. While I was into the idea straight away I was sure Tom wouldn’t be. But I was wrong.
    â€˜Sounds like a great idea,’ he said. ‘A week in the sun will give me the chance to catch up with all the engineering text books I’m supposed to have read by September . . . and have a few beers too.’ With that settled, we came up with a list of criteria for what we wanted from the holiday. The list, as far as I can remember, went something like this:

    1) Girls.
    2) Places to meet girls.
    3) Cheap alcohol.

    Andy volunteered to book the holiday because he had the most free time and the following day, over dinner, he pulled out a list of three