Scotland on Sunday staff relive their holiday romances

It was my last evening of a jaunt to America's west coast at the tail end of 1997 and by then I had resigned myself to the fact that, just as with all my previous travels that had taken me across four continents, this holiday was destined to end without even a whiff of amorous adornment. Until a captivating young Argentinian woman sitting side-on to me, but just sufficiently within eyeline to clock her striking looks and knee-high boots, leaned across and asked: "Has anyone ever told you you look like Quentin Tarantino?"

In those days, when I sported both real-live - often dyed - hair and sideburns, I did get that comparison the odd time. Normally, I bemoaned that I surely wasn't so geeky. With her, I seized on it as a chance to engage her in conversation. And lose myself in it. We bonded over journalism. The next day she was getting on a plane to interview Nelson Mandela in New York and I was returning home to report on Celtic's Scottish league games for the club's magazine. Same difference really. Yet rapidly we peeled away the social layers to find ourselves discussing the true nature of life and love; the heart and soul she poured into every conviction was mesmerising. At the edge of the dance floor, it seemed as if we became wrapped in soundproof bubble, so utterly was no utterance lost in the blare.

In what seemed an instant, though, the lights were up and she was declining my invitation to continue our ruminations at an all-night diner. That was that, I thought, but as we walked out of the club door and into the dead of night, she clasped me tightly and brought me alive with the most passionate of kisses. "You must write to me," she said as we unwound, before she scribbled her Buenos Aires address and phone number on a club flier with an eyeliner pencil. Initially I rang, and chatted to a friend house-sitting while she was off interviewing Bill Clinton. The fact the number was legit emboldened me to pen a melodramatic missive, and OD on my Oscar line within it.

She never replied. Predictably. And so for years I swooned at the very thought of her. My daytime reveries consisted of all manner of alternative narratives to my life post-1997 in which we met in different circumstances, and with a different outcome.

It may be hard for you to believe, but we have often had folk want to extend the happy holiday experience and meet up with us again.

Nothing to do with the fact that we live in Festival City and accommodation can be hard to come by at that time of year - oh no. So, when it comes to the final night and you swap phone numbers, just remember this: always, always, give them the wrong number. Let's face it : that's what they're doing to you. My swooning stopped four years later, when romance blossomed with the love of my life, Sara, the woman with whom the marriage and children I had told Clara Rodriguez would never be for me seemed so natural and right. I also met Sara in a nightclub. It might have only been in Glasgow, but it was on a Bank Holiday.

MARY CROCKETT

When I first saw Rhett, I mean Brett, I went weak at the knees, and not just because of his square, chiselled jaw and bulging physique. I was already feeling queasy.

On the last ferry out of Piraeus in a storm, this rippling college baseball player offered me his seat. Imagine that. Later, when the storm had abated, we disembarked together on an island in the Cyclades. It was 2am and Rhett, all 6ft 5in of him, accompanied my friend and me (of course I had a friend) on to the beach.

For all I know, these days strings of coloured lights loop around the bay. But the time I'm talking about, the ferry pulled away and a little clutch of us were left in total darkness to make camp until the sun came up. Rhett offered us a corner of his blanket.

Next morning, as we rolled our sleeping bags and headed into town to find rooms, he asked me on a date. All day long, as my friend and I cycled from one side of the island to the other, picnicked, sunbathed and swam in the azure blue sea of clich, I saw him round each corner, behind every rock, in every pool. I wanted only to be alone, with him.

We met by the sea wall as the sun was setting and watched the horizon turn as red as Atlanta burning. Which is when Rhett decided to tell me about his holiday job as a gas station attendant out West; all six weeks of it, and with all the parched delivery of a dust storm on a forecourt at the end of the world. After 40 minutes I managed to interrupt him. I don't give a damn, I rasped, my voice unaccountably high and squeaky. And then I'm afraid I turned tail and walked away.

MARK SMITH

FOR many thirtysomethings, Ibiza in the late 1980s and early 1990s will always be about the dance music revolution that turned the island into a paradise of superclubs and sexual freedom. Sadly, for me and my mates from the less salubrious parts of west Edinburgh, the whole Ibiza music scene was a bit of a non-event. All the clubs charged a fiver a pint, all the girls were well out of our league and by the time Pascha opened for business at midnight we were too legless to get past the door.

So our Ibiza experience was basically this: four pimply 18-year-olds hitting the tacky pubs and clubs of San Antonio's West End, looking for a quick fumble from any girl daft or drunk enough to succumb to our charms.

Except for one night.

Sitting in Ibiza's only rock pub (we were still into The Jam while everyone else was blissing out) a middle-aged lady and her stunning daughter sat next to us. Despite severe drunkenness I managed to get the girl, who was a year older than me, up for a dance.

Unlike every other girl in San Antonio, she was funny, interesting and - crucially - seemed to be quite keen. In what I assumed to be a miraculous turn of events, she asked if I wanted to ditch my pals and her mum and set off on our own. "Only too happy," I replied.

Emma and I got on famously, and in my teenage hormonal haze I thought maybe she was my perfect woman. At the end of the night we bought a bottle of Bacardi and headed off to the beach, where I drank a bit too much, but remember having a lovely time. So pleasant, in fact, that when we sheepishly returned to her apartment, she called me her "wild Scottish pal" and insisted I pick her up for another night of wild abandon the next evening.

Next afternoon, I woke full of anticipation at the delights to come that evening. Until, that is, I set off to find Emma's apartment.

San Antonio can be a confusing maze of streets even to sober holidaymakers. To those on a continuous stream of San Miguel and vodka, finding a cow's backside with a banjo would be impossible, never mind an unnamed holiday apartment known only to me as "Emma's mum's holiday flat".

So despite several hours roaming the streets trying to find Emma, I never did manage it. If I had, who knows what might have happened? We might have embarked on a torrid and passionate affair and stayed on Ibiza for ever. Or she might have seen me without her beer goggles on and been sick on the spot.

AIDAN SMITH

SUMMER 1980, the song on the pub jukebox was Funkytown by Lipps Inc and she was Karen - blonde curls, cute smile, all the way from New Jersey, and our first cultural misunderstanding was my joke about the name of the sports shop she managed, The Athlete's Foot. Karen was the most exotic girl a cub reporter on the Dalkeith Advertiser could hope to meet and the one occasion we incorporated lips sustained us through a year of letters (hers on orange paper) until I disembarked the Laker Skytrain at Newark.

We'd got a bit ahead of ourselves in those letters and she hadn't told her folks about me. I could stay the night (guest's bedroom) but then I'd have to begin my Greyhound Bus trip. Her dad's welcome was cool and my fate seemed sealed when he caught me with my eyes open as he said grace. I couldn't stop staring at his baldy heid; when he arrived home he'd had hair.

Leaving New Jersey with its multiple branches of The Athlete's Foot and pubs called What Ale's You?, I didn't understand what Bruce Springsteen, my rock hero, saw in the place. No matter, I now had all America to explore. Except on your own that can be lonely. In New Orleans there was a message from Karen asking if I wanted to come back. Having been propositioned in Nashville (by a man), I did the 1,200 miles without stopping.

At last, Karen and I were on the same wavelength. She introduced me to her friends. It felt, increasingly, like we were betrothed. "Call me Mom," said her mum. Her dad, now my buddy, taught me the rules of baseball. Kisses up to that point: five and a half.

Whenever I'm told about American dating rituals, how much they differ from ours, I think back to '81 and our intense non-romance.

Oh well, no one died. Except Karen's dad did. Checking on her whereabouts online, I found some nice obituaries from a few months ago, praising his skill at rose-growing. And his bonniest rose finally got married.

ASHLEY DAVIES

A precocious 15-year-old girl will lie about most things to get what she wants but will often be too deluded to imagine she'll ever get caught out.

On a beach in Bali in the mid-1980s I met Glenn, a square-jawed Australian. To be more specific, we were in the surf — me trying to mount a boogie board and him surfing with his friends. How exotic, I thought. How manly. He smiled, revealing a becoming gap between his front teeth. I smiled, revealing more than was decent, thanks to a rough wave. We laughed, and ended up chatting on the beach till after sunset.

He was in training to be an army officer and was — gasp — 20. A quality guy like that would never be interested in someone as young as me, so I said I was 18. What the hell, I thought, we're never going to see each other again.

We got on incredibly well. He had broad, brown shoulders and did gentlemanly things — like walking on the traffic side of the pavement — that I'd never experienced before. Boys my age were more likely to punch you on the arm to indicate an attraction.

We wrote to each other for ages after the holiday ended — cheesy, handwritten airmail love letters. He even sent me some sapphire earrings. I had to rely on him not understanding the definitions of British educational institutions and referred to school as "college" so he'd think I was at university.

Then after two years he flew over to see me. The magic had subsided: my hair was no longer yellow and crispy and my skin was white. He seemed to take himself — and our relationship — too seriously and it was awkward. But not as awkward as when he saw my passport.

I felt sick when I realised he'd seen my real birth date. He felt betrayed by my dishonesty — and I felt like an idiot. I didn't have to wait for the next, and final, letter to know I was dumped.

LEE RANDALL

We arrived in Firenze just after New Year's Day, 1983, in a brace of lorries. My friend and I had cadged these lifts by lying in wait for drivers at a truckstop outside Paris, asking anyone with a Union flag on his vehicle if he was bound for Italy. Between us we had schoolgirl French (mine), a couple of Arabic curses (me again) and a smattering of Greek phrases (my friend, C's), but not a word of Italian.

Luckily in those days there was a helpful tourist kiosk at the railway station that could organise accommodation, and with their assistance, we managed to find ourselves beds in a pensione run by a kind woman prepared to overlook our blatant poverty and rag-tag appearance.

Mimma was glorious. She looked, though I didn't know it at the time, like an Italian Barbara Windsor — tiny, blonde, bubbly — and had an infectious zest for life.

One night C and I returned from mooching around Firenze trying not to spend money (you'd be amazed how long a cappucino lasts if you sip it one foamy bubble at a time), and discovered Mimma, her sister and a handsome man loitering in the communal area. Introductions were made, and as this gorgeous, mustachioed, pocket Adonis shook my hand, he murmured something in Italian. Laughing, Mimma and her sister fought to be the one to translate: "He says he will service you."

With a smile of my own, thinking I was finessing an awkward moment of linguistic confusion, I replied: "Ah, he must mean, ‘at your service'."

"No," they insisted, "he does not."

It transpired that Gino, who was from Parma, worked for the railroad, and lodged at Mimma's for months at a time whenever the job required his presence in this most beautiful of cities.

That night he organised a pizza party and introduced me to my first wood-oven baked pizza. It had a crust as light and crispy as a tortilla chip, and toppings equally as delicate and flavourful. From the first bite, I was madly in love, and though I rarely say no to pizza, the truth is, the stodgy, doughy variety has never held quite the same appeal.

And what of Gino? Well, dear readers, he proved as good as his word.

CLAIRE BLACK

"Hello ... hello." The line crackled and squelched. Then came the unmistakable "Clara?" Obviously that's not my name, it never has been; it's not even my Sunday name. But I recognised the voice immediately and knew I had made a terrible mistake.

His name was Asanka. He was a waiter in the hotel in Sri Lanka that I'd stayed in with my partner a month before. He was nice, friendly, young. It was the year after the tsunami so the hotel was very quiet. All the staff seemed glad that there were any tourists at all.

We got talking one morning over breakfast and then whenever I was lying around reading my book, he'd pop up. He couldn't pronounce my name so he called me Clara.

He told me about his job (he didn't like it) and that he lived at home with his mum. He asked lots of questions. Some were easy: What job did I do? Did I like Sri Lanka? What kind of music did I listen to? Others were trickier: What kind of house did I live in? Where else had I travelled? What did I want to do with my life?

Factually they were easy to answer, but the words stuck in my throat as I spoke them. I owned my own flat, I'd travelled all over the world, always on a budget (or a credit card), of course, but money was the only restriction.

Asanka was 23. He was desperate to travel but had never left Sri Lanka. The only work available was in local hotels and he was worried about being laid off. I was only a few years older than him but already I'd seen and done things that he'd never do.

Guilt made me write down my contact details when I was leaving. Asanka wanted to send me a Bob Marley tape (I didn't have the heart to tell him I didn't even own a tape recorder) and I didn't for one minute think he would. That I wrote my phone number was madness.

Asanka phoned three more times after that first call. It was awkward. He was spending money he didn't have on a long distance call to convince me to bring him to the UK, which I never would. Eventually I told him not to call back.

And then I felt awful. n