I have had a fortnight on the couch in Hammersmith to recover from Croatia, which is to say that I have had two solid weeks of bad sleep, slightly too much red wine in the evenings, and the kind of long quiet days where the brain finally starts to sort through what it has been carrying. What I am ready to write, today, is the part of the story that comes before Croatia. Not the actual breakup — that one needs another month and probably another draft and I am not yet up to it.

It's late September. The first properly autumn evening. I've got the window open in the new flat and there's that particular London air coming in — cold enough to need a jumper, but still carrying the last warm breath of a summer I can barely remember having. A few months ago I was in a T-shirt on the South Downs. Now the leaves on the plane tree outside are already starting to turn. It's been a big few months. I've changed jobs, changed postcodes, been to four countries, mis