"One return ticket to Greece please, the special." I pointed at the board, unable to contain my excitement.

The woman looked slightly irritated with me. I'd barely given her a chance to open the shop and slide a high-heeled toe inside. I'd been waiting so impatiently that I'd practically cartwheeled through the doors the second they were opened. Not my usual style. I always waited patiently in queues and let pensioners, or women with children go in front of me. But today, if there'd been a pensioner with a Zimmer frame, I may have actually used the thing to catapult myself inside.

"Sure thing." She smiled sweetly. "Just give me a moment please."

She turned on the lights, fired up the computers and fiddled with some knobs and switches.

"Right." She started typing with her excessively long, pink tipped nails.

"Mmmm," she looked up at me over the screen. "You're lucky. It's the last one available on this special. When would you like to go?"

"How's tomorrow?" The words completely caught me off guard as they flew out of my mouth. I hadn't even considered the practicalities of leaving so soon... I needed to pack my clothes, stock up on sun cream, get medical supplies, little travel bottles to decant things like shampoo into, an extra roll of floss and, the list was endless. The woman looked as surprised as I felt and blinked at me slowly.

"All right." She sounded reticent but tapped away on the keyboard. "Ah. Lucky again. One more space on that flight."

"Great!"

"And accommodation, where will you be staying?"

I paused for a moment. This was a very good question. I had no idea where I was going to stay and certainly no clue where to start looking for my father.

"What's the most popular holiday destination?" I asked. My birth mother had been on holiday at the time so I reasoned it would have been somewhere touristy.

The woman looked at me again with blinking lashes. Her make-up was fresh and thickly applied. Her mascara was so heavy and still moist that some of her lashes stuck together like large fat worms. She pulled them apart, which left black streaks on her pink tips.

"Mykonos I guess." She took out a pamphlet and slid it across the table. "Very nice there. Hot men," she added with a wink of her sticky lashes.

"Mykonos, Mykonos, Mykonos." I repeated the word out loud a few times, stretching it out as I went, "Myk...O...nos". I hoped it might give me some kind of inexplicable psychic feeling, or an Oprah ah-ha moment that told me that I was on the right track. But nothing came.

"Any more you can recommend?"

"Corfu?"

"Corrr—fu. Cor—fuuu. Corrr—fuuu."" I did the same, but the more I said it, the stranger the word sounded and the less I wanted to go there. "Nope. Another one?"

"Um, Spetses."

"Spet-ses-sss" It sounded a little too much like something you might find floating in formaldehyde inside a specimen jar. "No. Definitely not right! Another one?'

"Rhodes?"

"That doesn't really sound Greek enough. More?"

"Zakynthos."

"Perhaps a little too Greek. Anything else?"

Pink nail was officially looking at me strangely now. She titled her head to the side, revealing a dark stripe of foundation that she clearly hadn't blended properly – my mother would have had a field day with that. She narrowed her eyes as if she were trying to bring a far away object into focus and gave a kind of confused looking pout.

"Santorini?" she finally proposed.

"Santorni. Santorni. Santorni, SAN...tor...ini," I repeated. I'd obviously heard of Santorini. I said it a few more times and this time I felt a little something. Nothing mind blowingly Oprah-ish. No heavens opening up with a chorus of trumpeting angels. Just a tiny little tug in my gut. Under normal circumstances I would never have based a decision on a barely-there gut feeling, but these were not normal circumstances. And it's not like I was my normal self today anyway.

"Perfect. Santorini it is." I said quickly. But as the words escaped my mouth, a bolt of familiar self-doubt grabbed hold of me. "No. Wait. Maybe not Santorini... maybe. I'm not sure. It could be Santorini but... no!"

"Do you need to phone a friend?" The woman gave me a slightly irritated look now.

"Good idea. Do you mind if I do?" I could phone Stormy-Rain, our resident psychic friend who claims to get "vibey-vibes and feels" about things. I pulled my phone out and started dialing.

"I wasn't being serious." Pink nail stopped me dead in my tracks. I didn't much like her tone. .It seemed to imply something.

"Fine. Ok. Santorini it is." I said, pocketing my phone.

She went back to typing and as she looked like she was about to hit 'Enter' the self-doubt gripped me again.

"Wait!" I almost shouted the word and held my hand up to stop her. "Just give me a moment."

"I am Dimitri from Santorini. Hello, I am Dimitri from Santorini." I said, role-playing in a male voice (I tried a Greek accent. I think I sounded more like a vampire being strangled.)

Now she was really looing at me strangely. "Maybe you'd rather go somewhere else?" she asked pulling out a few other brochures. "Somewhere closer to home?"

"Why?"

"Well, do you even know anything about Greece?"

"Of course I do!"

She looked at me expectantly. I reached into my brain to retrieve everything I knew about Greece, but nothing really came. What was there to know anyway? Their flag is blue and white... Then there's the Parthenon and... lots of other ancient ruins and pillars and rocks. Mythology, togas, the Olympics. They like to dip their pitas in things and there's that famous dessert...balaclava? Besides, this wasn't a holiday. This was business.

"And?" she asked.

"I'm thinking." I paused again. This seemed to elicit a loud, long irritated sigh. This woman had a bad attitude, not to mention a slight gap between her central and lateral incisor. I hoped she flossed properly. Daily flossing can add up to 6.4 years to your life you know.

"It's not like you have a million customers today." I heard someone snap.

"I beg your pardon. There's no need to be rude."

I looked up, and glanced around to see who she was talking to. But there was no one there and when I looked over at her she was glaring at me. And that's when it dawned on me...

I'd said it.

I slapped my hand over my mouth. I'd said that!? I had actually spoken my mind. Clearly the filters in my brain that stopped stuff like that from tumbling out of my mouth had completely malfunctioned.

What the hell was wrong with me?

"Santorini. Please." I tried to smile sweetly at spider –lashes.

"And how long will you be going for?" The fake pleasantry returned to her voice, reminding me of one of those annoying call center workers selling you a dreaded death and disease policy as if you'd won the lottery.

"As long as it takes!" I replied.

"No, seriously. I need to put in a return date."

"I'm being serious. As long as it takes."

"As long as it takes for what?" she asked slowly and deliberately as if she were taking to a child.

"To find the answers."

Pink nail put the pen down that she had been grinding between her teeth and folded her arms. She sat back in her chair and her eyes came up and met mine.

"Um... are you sure you should be, you know, traveling? Alone?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It's just... you seem... you know."

"No I don't know."

"Are you sick or something?"

"Sick?" I smiled sweetly again, like I always did when someone insulted me, trying to ignore the unfamiliar feeling rising in my throat.

She was treating me like I was trying to make a quick getaway from my asylum, all the while tapping her stupidly long pink nails, blinking her irritating, judgmental eyelashes and raising her badly penciled eyebrows on her orange face.

And then it snapped. The elastic band inside me that had been stretched to breaking point over the years finally broke and gave up. And whatever it had been holding together and keeping neatly in place, all fell apart in one surreal moment.

"Look! I'm having a really weird, bad, day today. And I don't need you making it any worse than it already is. So I would really appreciate it if you would do your job and put your pink nails – which you should really consider trimming by the way because it's incredibly unhygienic - back down on the keyboard and type up my ticket as fast as possible. And while you're at it you should really stop chewing your pen, you're going to get hairline cracks in your enamel which can lead to all sorts of oral health issues not to mention bad breath if debris gets stuck in them."

Her bottom jaw fell open. "What did you say to me?"

"Um... I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to. Sorry."

She shot me a look that could murder kittens and started hammering on her keyboard.

"Here," I quickly slid my credit card across the counter.

She picked it up and glared at it. "Dr. Jane Smith." She looked up at me suspiciously. "Doctor?"

"Dentist."

A smirk washed over her face slowly. "Well, that explains a lot."

When the whole encounter was finally over, I walked out clutching my ticket. I was leaving for Greece tomorrow, it was almost unbelievable. This was all so not me. How the hell was I going to explain this to my friends and family?

How was I going to explain the reason I had made the most uncharacteristic decision of my entire boring life?