And his neck was large, and his back bulged and sprouted hair from the shoulders down. What can I say? Sometimes it surprised me that the person I loved was so fantastically male, that the slabs of muscle were covered in slabs of solid fat and the whole of him – all five foot nine, God help us – was fizzed up with hair, so that he became blurred at the edges, when he undressed. No one had told me you could like that sort of thing. But I did.

Conor had just finished a Masters in multimedia, he was a happening geek. I was also in IT, sort of, I work with European companies mainly, on the web. Languages are my thing. Not the romance languages, unfortunately, I do the beer countries, not the wine. Though I still think the umlaut is a really sexy distortion, the way it makes you purse your mouth for it, and all those Scandinavian ‘o’ and ‘u’ sounds give me the goose bumps. I went out with a Norwegian guy called Axel once, just to hear him say ‘snøord’.

But I went out with Conor for the laugh and I fell in love with him because it was the right thing to do. How could this be possible? That, in all the time I knew him, he never did a cruel thing.

There was no big decision to buy a house, it just made sense. Australia was our last fling, after that everything was salted away for deposits and mortgage insurance and stamp duty and solicitors’ fees – Jesus, they wrung us till we squeaked. I can’t remember what this did to the love we were supposed to be in. I can’t recall the nights. Ours was, anyway, a daytime kind of love; Conor took up windsurfing out at Seapoint, and came back smelling of chips and the sea. On Saturday afternoons we tramped around other people’s houses – three-bed semi, Victorian terrace, penthouse flat. We looked at each other standing beside thirties’ mantelpieces, and sort of squinted. Or we wandered into separate rooms where we could imagine ourselves in the space more easily, with a wall knocked, or a smell gone, or the place less uninhabited.