Six weeks later, the first week in May, I picked up the keys to my Dream House. With pounding heart I spent an afternoon stepping through the stillness of unlived-in rooms with Steph, as we planned and pictured where my current possessions and the items I still needed to buy would go. I’d learnt how to use a sewing machine before I could read, and had already picked out the material to run up curtains and cushions. The previous owners had left behind the furniture they’d purchased before the big win, so I had a red checked sofa and end tables in the living room, and a kitchen table repurposed from an old barn door, along with matching chairs. Upstairs, there were plenty of fitted storage units, but the sagging double bed in the main room would have to be replaced.

Steph had brought a bottle of fizz and two plastic wine glasses, and she insisted we sat in the kitchen and raised a toast to hopes and dreams for the future.

‘Don’t worry about driving home, it’s non-alcoholic,’ she said, pouring me a second glass.

‘Of course.’ Given her parents’ car-crash relationship with alcohol, Steph had never drunk.

As soon as we’d taken the first sip, Steph got out her laptop. ‘Right, now that this is officially happening, it’s time to get some ground rules in place.’

‘What?’ The steely look in her eye made me wish that the bubbles contained some alcohol after all.

‘I know you, Ollie Tennyson, and I also know how tough it is to break habits formed at an impressionable age.’ Steph was a social worker in children’s services, acting as protector and advocate for children whose parents were either unwilling or unable to do so. She was amazing at her job, but it was somewhat irritating when she started applying the significant psychological expertise amassed over the years to me. ‘You’ve spent twenty-nine years trying to please your mum at the expense of your own wants, needs or opinions. We need to make sure that you don’t prise yourself off her only to reattach to the next available person looking for someone to dominate.’

‘You make me sound like a limpet or something.’

‘You said it, not me. Anyway, my point is this. Until the Dream List is complete, you need a No-Man Mandate.’

‘A what?’

‘You need this time to focus on you, for once. Like I said, to give yourself time and space to practise becoming your own woman, so that by the time the list is complete you can start dating knowing what kind of life you want, and what kind of woman you are, so that you don’t readapt yourself to what someone else happens to want.’