When I was planning a holiday with a group of girlfriends recently, the single most important factor in deciding our destination was "anywhere, as long as we avoid resorts full of pissed-up British blokes with their lobster tans, loud shorts and beer bellies".
My holiday romance fantasies invariably involved Gorgeous Italian Man who would sweep me on to the back of his moped, walk hand in hand with me along a deserted beach at sunset and read poetry at my feet, after pouring me an unfeasibly large glass of chianti. I assumed my friends were indulging in similar imaginative wanderings with Cultured French Geezer or Cute American Guy. How wrong I was.
It was only when we ran a holiday survey on NewWoman.co.uk that I discovered what British women really really want on their fortnight in Corfu is Bawdy British Bloke.
In a poll of 2,000 women, with an average age of 26, the majority said British men were the best looking and more than half voted them the best in bed. As if that wasn't far-fetched enough, the great British bloke was unmasked as a romantic, only being pipped to the post by the Italians.
French men, who are traditionally credited with being the most romantic in the world, trailed in third place, with a miserable 17%. This despite the fact that almost half the women surveyed said they could speak a foreign language "reasonably fluently".
So if it's not the language barrier, what is going on? Have half the British female population had too much sun? Has this lovely bout of June heat frazzled their brains?
Well, perhaps not. Three-quarters of the women in the survey had had a holiday fling, with a whopping one in 10 of the women proclaiming they had met the love of their life on their travels.
Holiday romances are notoriously short-lived, and if they're to have any chance of surviving beyond the airport departure lounge, they need to be based on something more than mere physical attraction and novelty. If you meet someone you like and you're seriously attempting to keep the relationship going without the aid of sun or sangria, it makes sense to get it together with a man who at least lives in the same country as you, if only to save on the plane fare.
• Read the survey results in full on newwoman.co.uk
