‘Alex,’ he said, putting out his hand after first rubbing it off his jeans. Steady handshake.

‘Sinéad.’ I smiled.

‘I wouldn’t like to see you at three a.m. outside a chipper,’ he said, and we both laughed. ‘Glad you’ve the milk carton though, that’ll come in useful, I imagine.’ I laughed again. I suggested we get a drink. We got many drinks. And we got very drunk, stayed up all night chatting and laughing until it turned to crying and I passed out on his futon bed in a flat with guitars and crystal ashtrays sunk into tall copper stands.

After our day of breaking up swan fights we continued seeing each other, getting drunk, getting lentil curries from a small stand near the river, getting to know each other. He’d walk me over the Salmon Weir Bridge and back to my flat with all its cliché rubbish, white bread, a toaster, an empty bottle of peach schnapps with an ivory candle stump, colourful wax hardened on the glass, skins, dream catchers, Che Guevara posters, Harley Davidson Zippo lighters, mix-tapes, CDs, Portishead, Pixies, an unframed Proclamation of Irish Independence, large grandfather clock, guitars with three strings, strings of fairy lights, a menatwork sign or a yieldrightofway sign, damp patches, mildew, pizza boxes, loo roll, broken chairs.

I felt intense pain. I always start out thinking they’re amazing, the men I meet, and then getting let down, or letting them down.

But he was reliable.

And love slid up on me. I didn’t look for it. I tried, if I’m honest, to utterly avoid it. I liked Alex and so I quickly showed him all my worst traits, to warn him. Still, he stayed. I had simply wanted to watch the swans, to escape, but we drifted along as a sort of a couple for some time, made no plans, visited the swans every weekend at one of the canal spots, until he proposed there, with a ring tied onto a milk carton.

The Fred Perry hoodies were the first to go, next the posters, and on and on I went, fixing him. By year two, married him, everything in a strict order, and so it began. Or perhaps something ended and something else began. Planning. House. Meals. Wedding. Baby. Work. (Daughter.) Baby. Work. Baby. Children. Money. Cut your hair, grow a beard, clip your toenails, drink spirulina, eat less red meat, drink less beer, run, walk, run again, until my suggestion of hair plugs became the final straw and he threw a dumb-bell through the patio door of the New House (which is now just The House) and the glass smashed into a million little pieces, and he screamed at me that if he were to start on a Snag List of me, then it’d never end. It would be the first list of an eternity of things.

And. There. Was. Nothing. Down. That. Road. He. Roared.

We patched up the door with duct tape and a cornflake cereal box that offered free trips to the zoo, which Alex immediately began cutting out, meticulously. I consoled him by saying that I didn’t really notice his thinning hair, it was just a little bit John Travolta, and that he was still a ride, and not to worry and we eventually laughed.