My Favourite Holiday: Nik Speakman on his treasured island-hopping memories

NIK SPEAKMAN and wife Eva are two of Britain’s best-known psychotherapists.

They have helped patients suffering agoraphobia, PTSD and OCD.

Celebrity clients have included Kym Marsh, Peter Andre and Katie Price.

Eva, 47, and Nik, 55, live in Littleborough near Rochdale and have two kids, Olivia, 20, and Hunter, 12.

They are regulars on ITV’s This Morning, weekdays at 10.30am.

My dad was in the Welsh Guards during the Second World War and after it he and my mum spent 20 years travelling.

Ironically, though, as a kid I never left the UK. I had bad asthma and ended up in intensive care on one break to Blackpool.

So my mum, who was really over-protective, didn’t want to take the risk of going abroad with me.

I’ve made up for that since, of course, and my favourites are a little triangle on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

The first place is Sanibel Island, which actually has a bit of a Caribbean feel.

I first went there a few years before I met Eva. It made such a huge impression I decided that if I met someone special, that’s where I’d want to get married.

I took Eva there when we started going out and she loved it too, so we were married there, on the beach, 21 years ago this month.

Sanibel Island, South Florida, where the Speakmans were married (iStock)

The second place is Marco Island, a real retirement place where the average age is about 78. I took my mum and dad there not long before my dad passed away and I have such lovely memories of them experiencing America, a place they’d never been.

There are a series of canals running behind the homes and I’ve seen dolphins swimming up them. Just amazing.

Eva and I love animals and that’s one of the attractions of the third place over there, Naples.

It has a zoo founded by a guy who used to work in the movies and it’s unlike so many others. The animals are largely allowed to roam free, like the monkeys on three islands which you sail around on a boat.

Eva and Olivia quite like to laze around when we’re in Florida. But Hunter and I went there so often – maybe just for an hour or two per time – that we bought an annual pass which we still keep up.