Hiring a villa somewhere hot with another family for a week or two in the summer is one of those peculiarly British middle-class rituals that set us apart from our European counterparts, like eating marmalade or talking incessantly about schools and property prices.

Our fellow Europeans tend to holiday in the warmer climes of their own country – with the notable exceptions of the Dutch and Germans – either alone with their children, or perhaps with members of their extended family.

We are more likely to go with friends rather than family, and to travel further afield. When it works, there are few more relaxing ways to punctuate the summer holidays than a couple of weeks with close friends and children of similar ages in someone else’s house in a country where the weather is almost guaranteed to be hot.

Children spend all day in the pool; adults have time to read lots of books and catch up with each other over long lunches.

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But one of the many things I have learnt since becoming a parent is that there are myriad incompatibilities that can turn a holiday from Boden-catalogue, picture-postcard happiness to the kind of League of Gentlemen discomfort that can seriously compromise even an old friendship.

A straw poll after last summer revealed the following skirmishes in villas in southern Europe: a Tuscan stand-off over who should have priority for limited supplies of fresh milk; a Provençal stalemate over villa tidiness; a walk-out in Andalusia over differing attitudes to fighting children.

There was even a situation where friends went with a family they had met at school only to discover the husband wasn’t coming, and the wife had a dope-smoking habit that kept her in bed until after midday – although of course her children still got up at the usual time.

So for the uninitiated, the key ingredient to a smooth holiday with another family is to consider compatibility in much the same way you might before you decide to move in with someone. Two weeks might not sound a long time, but when lots of people are confined in a small space, little tensions can quickly escalate into the kind of fully fledged rows that make the bougainvillea wilt – especially if children are the source of friction.

So our first port of call when considering a holiday at one of CV Travel’s villas, nestled into the Serranía de Ronda mountain range in Andalusia, were old friends from Norfolk, the Combe family, whom we have known for years, and whose laid-back approach to holidaying is at one with our own.

Our combined force of seven children all get on and span a good age range from three to eleven. Most importantly, our flaws are compatible. So when they turned up with a few hundred extra friends (head lice are very sociable), we didn’t balk, and neither did they when we had to abandon, temporarily, a much-anticipated trip for an evening meal in Gaucín to go in search of jump leads, because we had left the lights on in the car overnight.

Our biggest problem was the discovery, mid-week, that three-year-old Florence had been using the long-stemmed flowers from a bed of agapanthus by the house as microphones for her cabaret act, to devastating effect.

The Casa Gandolfo, just outside the medieval town of Gaucín, was a perfect home for two families for one week (although, of course, even longer would have been even better).

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