Will Harris searches for a companion on the road

There are several distinct advantages to being in a relationship. Shared rent, regular hanky panky, not to mention – if you bat for my team – you need never buy a pair of socks again, but can just leach off your other half’s sock drawer like a vampire with a foot fetish. More to the point, you also have someone you can go on holiday with.

When you’re single, and too knackered to endure one of those ‘four to a bed, out ‘til six, up at noon and carry on drinking’ affairs that typified our younger days, the prospect of planning a week away can be fraught with self-doubt. Which of your friends should you ask? Who among them has a similar outlook, interests, a roughly equivalent income? And, if they do say no, what does that mean for your friendship?

Because, as much as we love our friends, we know only a select few of them can also be packed into that slim mental suitcase marked ‘ideal travelling companion’. You might think you want someone who won’t judge you for stumbling into the hotel room at 3am with Pina Colada on your breath and a pilfered deckchair under your arm, but what you actually need is someone who can also hold their shizz together when you’re stranded in some Aegean backwater, the last ferry’s just left, and neither of you can remember if Greece is still clinging on to the Eurozone or has reverted to the Drachma. Achieving balance is all-important.
“Well I’ve googled ‘Does anyone straight go to Mykonos?’” says K, on the phone, “And the good news is they do and they’re young, loud, drunk teenagers from other parts of Europe.”
“Yay!” I say. “I’m so pleased you’re up for it.”
K, as you’ve probably guessed, is my ‘ideal travelling companion’. I know this because three summers ago we shared seven blissful days under the Balearic sun (free of charge, thanks to K’s burgeoning domination of Fleet Street), and there wasn’t a single cross word between us. Not one.

“Even the day I fell off my hire bike, had a tantrum and ran off into a vineyard”

she just waited patiently for me to return, handed back my bike, then suggested we stop off somewhere for an ice cream. It just worked.

It wasn’t until the final day of that holiday, during a blow-out buffet of Caligulan proportions, that both of us confessed we’d had misgivings about the trip prior to coming. We’d been friends for a number of years, but there was something binding about going on holiday together; we knew that – if for whatever reason we didn’t get on – there would be no escape for the next week. Fortunately for the continuation of our friendship, it was on holiday that we discovered a shared interest: letching over the adolescent sons of our fellow holidaymakers. Roll on Mykonos!