I only said I'd go to Wales for that long weekend because I knew Vicky was going. Otherwise I think I'd have turned it down. Let Hugo go alone with his hooray crowd. Obviously now, in retrospect, I wish I had. Flick, real name Felicity, who'd read Classics at Merton which apparently made her off-the-scale bright, had a cottage down there. Or at least her parents did. Most of them had one hidden away somewhere. Down we went, one windy, autumnal Friday, to a glorious secluded spot in the Teme Valley, where, tucked in a vivid green pocket, sat an ancient yellow-brick house beside a stream. There was only one girl coming we didn't know, a new girlfriend of Sam's, and, as we arrived, pretty much simultaneously, I spotted her getting out of Sam's tastefully distressed Land Rover Defender. Hugo and I drew up beside them in his MG and as the Land Rover door opened a girl jumped out. She was wearing run-of-the-mill trainers, tight blue jeans and a crisp white shirt, and she was called Christina.

It didn't happen in a lightning flash, in fact I'd say I noticed her before Hugo did, but it certainly happened pretty darned quickly over the course of that weekend. As she shut the car door and came confidently across to say hello, she could have been Hugo's sister. Other people have commented on it since. She was tall and slim and athletic-looking; not sexy, but fit, in the old-fashioned sense, as if she'd just come off the lacrosse field. Her short blonde hair was shiny with a floppy fringe and she had friendly blue eyes and a wide, gleaming white smile.

The two of us smiled and said hi, and then we chatted whilst Hugo was still getting our luggage. He was a bit preoccupied, and no glances were even exchanged, so why was my heart already sinking a bit? I couldn't take my eyes off her. And for the rest of the weekend, after that initial distraction, neither could Hugo. She was fun, she was amusing, she was friendly. She was a trainee PE teacher at a London school, so not scary on that front, but she had the confidence to laugh off her terrible mistakes in Trivial Pursuit that evening, her wild guesses, which I didn't, so that everyone laughed with her, not at her. As the games got more cerebral and she became more hopeless, she got even more amusing. I could see Hugo's eyes on her all of Friday night.