‘Listen, Pete, I really like spending time with you and would love it if we could be open about it and see if we could make it as a couple. But until you sort it out with Claire Haslett, I don’t want to see you again.’

‘I’ll sort it out, I promise. Now come on, forget all that. Pick an article from the paper for us to consider.’

‘You promise?’ I asked with what I hoped was a deadly stern look in my eye.

‘Promise,’ he replied as he stuck one end of the jelly snake in his mouth and started to chew. I flicked through the paper and stopped at a colour photograph of a greater spotted woodpecker.

‘What do you think of that? It’s quite a look, isn’t it?’ I asked.

‘Bit fancy if you ask me, a bit contrived,’ he replied.

‘It’s the opposite of contrived! It was born that way. He hasn’t put any thought into his look.’

‘I realize that, but I’m just not drawn to flashiness. Keep it plain; let your words do the talking. You do realize that all those spots and red patches are designed to intimidate? That’s a bad opening, don’t you think? Where is the love?’

I laughed, grabbed the jelly snake off him and turned my head towards his to invite a kiss. He responded immediately. It was the first heartfelt snog I had experienced and therefore the most challenging. My lips were dry from the sea breeze and his were sticky and sweet from the jelly snake. I had heard that the tongue should be used and so flicked it in and out of his mouth much like a snake sniffing the air. I had also picked up, from the movies and the television, that a noise of appreciation should be made, and so let out intermittent grunts akin to the noise a python makes when it feels threatened. I took a breath and used the moment to bite the head off the jelly snake to unify the stickiness of the situation. It was too difficult to swallow and as we re-engaged the head slipped out between my lips and fell onto the bench. I kept staring at it as the kiss got more frantic and gloopy. When we finally stopped, both our chins were dripping with green slime. I pointed at him in the style of a cute extra-terrestrial and slowly said:

‘You. Boyfriend.’

He replied with a reciprocating finger:

‘You. Girlfriend.’

That sounded fine by me.

We never made our relationship public, but of course Haslett found out. In the first term of the following year, she took her revenge.