Those three letters on my listing mean we are not pretending to have met before.

The version sold everywhere assumes a history: how was your week, I missed you, the apparatus of continuity between two people who have not seen each other. I am poor at it and it embarrasses both of us inside ten minutes.

Mine is two people who have just met and are interested in that fact. Questions that have not been asked before, because nothing has been asked before.

It works better on a first booking than a fourth, which is the reverse of how this is normally sold. By the fourth we have a history and I stop having to invent one.

What it is not is a complaint session. Somebody arriving after a bad week gets the good version of mine rather than the matching one, because two people comparing bad weeks is not an evening either of us paid for.

The other half of that is what happens on a fourth booking, which is that the whole argument above stops applying and something quieter replaces it. Nobody books a fourth on the strength of a listing, so this paragraph is for whoever gets there.

British, 28, Bur Dubai, in or out. 1000.