Our Worst Holiday Won a Prize

How it begins

The award arrived with a photograph of me vomiting discreetly behind a palm tree.

Most Romantic Travel Story of the Year.

I checked the envelope twice. The judging panel had apparently mistaken Daniel holding my hair for evidence of an excellent holiday.

There were other photographs. Our flooded room. The bus that left without us. Me pointing at a map upside down while Daniel smiled with the calm of someone who had already accepted that dinner would be late.

I had submitted the pictures to support an insurance claim.

Someone had submitted them elsewhere.

Daniel called before I found the correct person to blame.

“Have you seen it?”

“I am considering legal action against the word romantic.”

“They want us back.”

“Of course they do. Nobody who remembers the hotel would return without an incentive.”

He laughed. I remembered the sound more accurately than I remembered the beach.

We had met during a delayed transfer. Five days later he left to finish a documentary, and I returned to an office where I measured inconvenience for a living. We exchanged three messages, two links and one photograph of a sandwich shaped like the island. Then ordinary life resumed its apparently superior claim.

“The return trip is paid,” he said. “They want a short film.”

“A film about what?”

“Us.”

“There isn't an us.”

“I did mention that.”

“And?”

“They said authenticity was very important.”

I looked again at the photograph. Behind the palm tree, beyond the humiliating foreground, Daniel had set his own bag down in the wet sand so I would have something clean to sit on.

I had forgotten that part.

“What would you film?”

“The holiday we actually had.”

“No improved ending?”

“No script.”

On my desk lay six claims from people whose expectations had not survived contact with a destination.

I turned the photograph over.

“Send me the dates,” I said. “And this time, I choose where we eat.”