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resorts that he had managed – with the help of the girl he’d chatted up in Thomas Cook – to whittle down from a cast of thousands:

    1) Faliraki, Rhodes.
    2) San Antonio, lbiza.
    3) Malia, Crete.

    Whether it was because of the girl in Thomas Cook or because of his desperate need to go on holiday, Andy knew his stuff. He gave us a detailed presentation of not only the pros and cons of each resort, but each hotel and apartment block, too. Casting aside lbiza on the grounds that we suspected the type of girls who went there might possibly be a bit too trendy for guys like us, we narrowed our options down to Faliraki and Malia. We debated the issues as best we could. Tom pointed out that the flight and hotel package in Faliraki was a bit cheaper than the one in Malia. Andy countered by making the point that the girls on the Malia page of the holiday brochure seemed marginally more attractive. We put it to a vote and despite Tom’s earlier defence of Faliraki decided unanimously that Malia would be our destination.
    We were already having the best holiday on record when, after two days, I first noticed Sarah and her friends lying on sun-loungers by the side of the hotel swimming pool. She was absolutely amazing to look at. Shockingly so. And I was well aware that none of my tried and tested cheesy chat-up lines would have worked on her in a million years. A girl like Sarah required a special kind of approach. A one-off that would get me noticed without making me look like the sort of bloke from whom she’d run a mile. And so began my campaign . . . of smiling. That was it. Nothing else. I smiled when I passed her table as she and her friends had lunch by the pool; I smiled when I passed by her in the hotel’s reception; and if we were out for a drink in the evening and our two groups met in the street, I’d smile at her then too.
    I always gave her the same kind of smile too. Short, friendly, and not in the least bit suggestive, as though we were work colleagues or vague acquaintances. After the smile, I’d follow up with a quick exchange of eye contact and then look away. Initially she didn’t notice me but then gradually her friends picked up on what I was doing so she started to notice too. Soon it got to the stage where if I looked up to smile at her she’d be all ready to smile straight back at me. And that was when I knew I was right where I wanted to be: slap bang in the middle of her consciousness.
    Of course being in her consciousness wasn’t the ultimate aim of my campaign. What I needed was the opportunity to take things further. And it came in the form of a night out organised by the tour operators billed as: ‘The Club Fun Big Night Out’ – a gigantic pub crawl involving about forty of us from the hotel.
    Halfway through the night, having already consumed more flavoured vodka shots and luminous-coloured jello shots than would normally be advisable on an empty stomach, we were herded by the tour rep into a bar called Flashdance. Over his loudhailer the rep informed us that once we had downed the bar’s free strawberry-flavoured jello shots we would have a couple of rounds of The Ice Cube Game.
    The rules were as simple as they were off-putting to the sober. Two teams had to form a line behind each other in a ‘boy/girl’ fashion. The two people at the front of the line would then be handed a beer glass filled to the brim with ice cubes and instructed to pass as many ice cubes down the line as quickly as possible without using their hands. On realising that this so-called game was just a huge excuse for a free-for-all snogging session a number of the more attractive girl members of the pub crawl bailed out immediately. Sarah was one of them. I was just about to drop out myself as a fearsome-looking Welsh girl sidled up in front of me and grinned suggestively in my direction. In desperation I looked across at Sarah and realised she was