WHAT WITH banks falling like autumn leaves and the general post-summer monsoon gloom enveloping us all, word arrives of yet more killjoy carry-on in another part of the forest.
A Turkish hotel has sacked all of its male staff because they were seducing older women guests - over-60s English ladies with a fondness for a holiday toyboy on the side, as it were.
So why spoil the fun?
Manager Pelin Yucel says she took the drastic step after catching male waiters and barmen bed-hopping with guests looking for Shirley Valentine-style romances. The lads have been replaced with a woman-only team at the 27-bedroom hotel in Marmaris, a tourist town on Turkey's Aegean coast.
"It got beyond a joke," said Ms Yucel (32). "The last straw was when I caught my bartender coming out of a toilet with a woman guest. She was embarrassed but he was beaming all over his face."
Ms Yucel also said she could never contact her night receptionist because he was always in bed with one of the guests.
"The waiters would prey on older English women," she said.
"They would wait for them to come back from nights out - often drunk - and then seduce them.
"They would have one guest one week, wave goodbye to her, and eye up the new guests as they arrived."
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Interpersonal relations are different in Texas, however (well, isn't everything different in Texas, home of George W Bush for Crissakes?).
In Fort Worth, a woman aged 20 faces an aggravated assault charge after she bit her boyfriend, broke a picture frame across his face and swung at him with a sword, all during an argument about . . . him not doing the dishes.
The woman, who has not been named, was arrested last week after trying to boot her boyfriend out of her apartment.
She was upset that the dishes were dirty.
Police Lieut Paul Henderson said that when the man refused to leave, she tried to remove him physically. During the ensuing struggle, the woman bit his right shoulder and broke the frame across his face, causing visible cuts, before grabbing a 2ft sword and swinging it at him.
Lieut Henderson said the couple had been living together for about four months.
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Elsewhere, love springs eternal . . . or lasts a long time, at any rate. A couple in Taunton, Somerset, who were forced to split up by their parents more than 40 years ago, are finally going to marry each other.
Chester Locke was banned from seeing Christine Orchard when she became pregnant at 16.
Her parents helped raise her daughter Tracy.
But Tracy decided to track down her natural father recently and her parents' romance started again.
"My intention at first was to get him to meet his grandchildren and the great-grandchild that was on the way," said Tracy.
"It was never to get them back together. When they did I was shocked but it was lovely."
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Travel and romance go together, for some reason, but a new travel book - Can't Be Arsed: 101 Things Not To Do Before You Die - seeks to de-mythologise the guff about "once-in-a-lifetime" experiences.
Author Richard Wilson, the television producer behind Have I Got News For You, suggests avoiding sites such as the Taj Mahal and Egyptian pyramids.
"Advice to anyone about to travel to Thailand is simple," he writes. "Before you go, sort out a decent photo of yourself, preferably taken at a party smiling and celebrating the joy of being alive, because the newspapers and TV news bulletins will want something to accompany the article about your tragic death."
On the pyramids: "One big disappointment is that they are right next to the ugly urban sprawl of Cairo. It's like turning off the Birmingham ring road and finding the Hanging Gardens of Babylon."
And about Machu Picchu, he writes: "It's a 6,000-mile journey - 12 thrombotic hours on a plane followed by a bladder-bursting seven-hour bus ride - to see something you could watch Michael Palin climbing up on TV - all in the company of the 400,000 intensely irritating gap-year students who think it's totally awesome, dude."