Decade

Right about now, ten years ago, my life's course was about to change while sitting outside an Italian hostel. The moment it happened, when I first saw the boy who would become the man who would become my husband, I was too bogged down in a billion other things to really notice. I was hung up on someone back in England who I'd met twice and decided I was destined to marry, beholden to another boy who'd sort of broken my heart or something like it and who I hadn't quite been able to let go of, thinking still of a tall Australian I'd kissed in Sicily day's earlier. If it sounds fickle and neurotic it's because I was 19. Obsessed by love but not quite able to recognise it or hold on to it. My first thought of Jeremy was that he didn't have any hair, which shows I didn't really look very hard because that wasn't actually true.

My friends started talking to him and his friend. Left alone, I would likely have never spoken to them because, as a rule, I don't strike up conversation with randoms. But they started talking which meant I had to start talking and without very much input from me we planned a trip out to Capri the next day and then a tour of the Amalfi Coast by motorbike and then our plans for Florence were altered to Cinque Terra so that we could travel together and all this before I'd even allowed for the possibility of liking him. (That's a lie - back then I think I allowed for the possibility of liking pretty much every man that crossed my path, but I hadn't done much more than allow the possibility at that point)

Then came late night water fights when other more responsible folks were trying to book us a hostel, and midnight drinking on beaches, and a first kiss had on a rock in the dark mere feet away from our friends.

And so it began.