It's difficult to find a system of spelling Greek words in English letters, but in general I've spelled words pretty much as they sound, except where it would look too unusual. So for example, Yorgos, because that's how it's pronounced, not Georgos.

  Male Greek names usually end in -s when they are the subject of a sentence (Yiannis) but drop the -s when you are addressing the person (Yianni!) or they are the object of the sentence (talking about Yianni). For simplicity, when I'm writing in English, I've used the -s form throughout, except in speech.

  This is a true story, so I've altered some names and changed identities to protect people's privacy.

Prologue: How I Got Hooked on Greece

1. Pick an Island, Any Island

2. The Gifts to Self

3. Bye Bye Love, Kalimera Happiness

4. Sun, Sea and Spanakopita

5. My Big Fat Greek Sunday

6. Tangled Webs

7. A Walk to Gera

8. Swimming with the Fishes

9. The Sound of the Sea

10. A Change of Season

11. Meanwhile, on Another Part of the Planet

12. Out of the Blue

13. Dolphins and Dolmades

14. First Catch Your Octopus

15. Dreams of a Greek Island

16. A Bumpy Beginning

17. An Octopus in My Ouzo

18. Living the Dream

19. The Honey Factory

20. The Birds and the Bees

21. Greek Dancing and Moonlight Shadows

22. Enjoying the Open Road

23. Life and Love on a Greek Island

Epilogue

Food for a Greek Island

Acknowledgements

  Inside the honey factory, Pavlos removes the wooden frames from the hives. 'I'm just the worker!' he says; but without the worker bees, there'd be no honey… The frames are like hanging folders in a filing cabinet, and each holds an uneven slab of honeycomb. The best ones are almost covered in sealed wax cells. Pavlos takes a heated knife and skims off the outer edge of wax, releasing the clear golden liquid. It gleams as it pours off thickly. 'Here, taste,' he says, and hands me pieces of oozing soft honeycomb.

  It amazes me that it's ready to eat straight out of the hive, this perfect food full of goodness – it needs nothing from us. What we're doing here is just releasing and gathering it, cleaning it and putting it in jars. The actual making of honey has all been done by the bees. As Pooh bear said to the bee: the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it.

  The smell of warm honey is intoxicating. It's thirty plus degrees outside and the hives were standing out there not long ago, the bees happily coming and going, blissfully unaware. When there are flowers in the fields, the bees can fill up a honeycomb in as little as a week.

  'Here, take some more,' says Pavlos, scooping up spoonfuls of honeycomb that looks like treacle sponge onto a plate. My hands are getting sticky.

  'This honey is made from herbs, votana, flowers that are healthy for your body, and thyme. We don't use any chemicals.' Tilos was always famous for its herbs that grow wild everywhere, and its mountainsides are mostly empty except for tiny chapels, goats and bee hives. Pavlos and his family grow a lot of food and are passionate about never using chemical pesticides or fertilisers in their gardens and fields: it's not only bad for you, but for the birds and the bees.

  As each frame is opened up, it is slid into a compartment in the centrifuge which will extract all the honey. When all the compartments are full, the machine is closed and starts spinning.

  It circles to the left for a few minutes, to the right for a few minutes, slowly at first to protect the delicate honeycomb from breaking as it empties. If you were on one of those fairground rides that spin you round, you'd be saying: that wasn't too bad, was it? Then it starts to the left again but fast this time, causing the honey to start pouring, thick and caramel-coloured, into the vat. And then it stops and spins fast to the right, at which point if you were on the fairground ride you'd be thinking this was a bad idea.

  But it's only a bee or two that was on the ride, having been asleep perhaps in one of the honeycombs, and now they've fallen in the honey and are perhaps thinking 'But what a way to go…'

My dad sometimes says his happiest memories are of family holidays we took when my brother and I were young. I'm pretty sure he's not thinking of the holidays when we drove to the south of France and he swore a lot trying to put up a seventies-style three-bedroom tent made of scaffolding and canvas during a torrential thunderstorm; or of the holiday where the old estate car broke down carrying that tent through the Alps, and all my mum's clothes were stolen at a campsite in Italy while Hare Krishnas chanted next door. I expect he's mainly thinking about the later holidays when we ditched the tent and started going to Greece.

  I still have a diary from when we first went to Corfu when I was eleven:

  After a few seconds of waking up I literally jumped out of bed and dressed immediately.

  Apparently I enjoyed every minute of the three-hour flight (including the meal, described in great detail right down to the sachets). Then arrival in Corfu: the heat, the drive through quaint villages, the Greek folk songs, the vines and olive trees, washing hanging outside the whitewashed or stone houses.

  We step off the coach and the holiday really begins. We were on the beach after 15 minutes. The sea was blue and warm and the sand hot, white and soft, even if it was a bit dirty with sticks and seaweed.

  I ate souvlaki and chips and Greek salad, and drank Greek lemonade, 'which is more like fruit juice, and much nicer than English.'

  If the first day is anything to go by, I think the holiday is going to be wonderful. Already by two o'clock we have sunbathed, swum, played in the dinghy… The sweets like Turkish delight are so cheap and sesame bars are only 8.50 dmx which is the same as 8½p. We did some Greek dancing at a hotel.

  One day there was a local holiday and 'real Greek dancing done by the Greek people'. Soon the diary entries become shorter, simply beach and tea and dancing, except the day when it sounds like all that dancing and Turkish delight wasn't mixing too well.

  Sick once. Expenditure £2.63.

  I'm afraid we did bring back a record of Greek dance music. I remember all of us dancing around our house in Saddleworth to 'Zorba'.

  In case you're not familiar with it, you hold your left arm around the shoulders of the person to the left of you, and your right arm around the shoulder of the person to the right; you kick one leg out gently in front, then the other, then take steps to the side and repeat, slowly at first, but getting faster in time with the music until you think you can't keep going another minute and collapse, laughing, at the end. (At least in our house we did.)

  But I also remember the solo dances by the men; shows of grace, agility and strength to slow songs about pain and heartache that were utterly mesmerising.

  Miss Hatch, Hulme Grammar School for Girls' most eccentric teacher with a passion for playing the violin and tending her tropical fish, scared most students off the classics during first-year Latin by making us all jump around the edges of the classroom carrying a ruler and shouting 'Um, am, em – object': a lesson most of us will never forget. But a few of us who were also perhaps eccentric went on to do Ancient Greek and memorised long monologues from classical plays, to be rewarded with powdery Greek coffee brewed in a metal jug and biscuits made from sesame seeds and honey. It's partly Miss Hatch's fault, too, that Greece got under my skin.

  Over my teenage years there were holidays to Rhodes and Crete, Cephalonia and Ithaca. By the time I was seventeen, I was the only student at my school still studying Ancient Greek, and Miss Hatch gave me extra lessons in my free periods if we wanted to finish reading and translating a text. She taught me how the ancient roots were reflected in Modern Greek, instilling in me a fascination with words.

  When I was finishing school and the time had come for me to think about university, my secret plan had been to study Modern Greek, which was offered at Birmingham. But once I voiced the plan, my school advised against it, saying it would narrow my choice of career, and instead I should study English at Oxford. I was so amazed they thought I had a chance that I took the entrance exams, and passed. So I read English at Oxford happily enough, managing to find a weird alternative course that included archaeology, translating from Old English, and even some Classics. When we finished the first year, my friend Ali and I saved up money living and working in a country pub for the summer and then spent a whole month travelling around the Peloponnese, the southern Greek mainland, visiting ancient sites at Mycenae and Delphi and Olympia.

  After graduation, I'd had no idea what to do. I'd been applying for all sorts of graduate jobs but with no clear goals, I wasn't getting very far at all. Then I saw an ad in the paper: an agency looking for graduates to be English teachers in private language schools in Athens. I thought of warm sunshine and blue sea, dancing and ancient amphitheatres. Maybe it was time to stay for longer. So I went to Greece.

Athens, when I first arrived a few months after finishing university, was not much like those dreamy holidays I'd been on before. My new home as an English teacher – it came with the job that the agency assigned to me in a frontistirion, or language school, in the district of Galatsi – was beside a six-lane highway that never seemed to sleep, among an endless stretch of grey concrete apartment buildings. But in the afternoons, I went up to the roof of my building where people hung their laundry, and high above the noise of street level I marked papers or read books in the sun, looking beyond the jumble of faded apartments to the gleaming silver sea. On Saturday mornings I'd hurry to the port of Piraeus. The clocks on the back of each ferry showed what time they would leave for which islands, and that would determine my adventure for the weekend.

  In the course of my meanderings I met a few well-worn travellers who trotted out the platitude that the world gets smaller the more you travel. I thought how much I disagreed. If a place had been just a dot on a map, when I put myself there it expanded into an infinite number of unique experiences, skies, animals, meals, feelings, words… and people.

  On the island of Hydra, with houses clinging to rugged hillsides, there were no cars allowed and no real roads. I followed a footpath to the other, emptier side of the island, past a monastery and fields where mules and goats wandered, until the huge expanse of sea opened out before me. I found a flat rock on a hillside, and lay barefoot on it, feeling like an Arcadian shepherdess as I ate my bread and cheese, basking in the warmth of the sun and the gentle breeze.

  In the winter, on a ferry to the island of Aegina, I ran into my friend Yiannis, who I'd first met in Hydra. He had just bought a new artist's studio outside the town, and invited me to come and stay. It was a converted stone barn with thick walls and wooden beams. French doors opened out onto a patio where bougainvillaea trailed from a wooden trellis, the fallen leaves and petals swept by the wind into a pretty drift against the wall. The bedroom window looked out across an orchard of frost-covered fig trees and vines. Yiannis soon looked perfectly at home, transformed in his potter's apron and woollen hat, his bushy black moustache peeping out over the top of a scarf. Unfortunately my attempts at getting a fire going while he got absorbed in his work were useless. So he taught me instead to help him shape the clay and we drank ouzo, the strong Greek aniseed liqueur, to keep warm.

  For the Easter holidays, I took the overnight ferry to the huge island of Crete. After another term's teaching in Athens in winter, I needed solitude and the rugged beauty of the wild, west coast. I found a room on a farm, whose big window looked out onto a deserted beach and a clear, pale blue sea. I scrambled high up rocks to vast views of wild scrub and mountains whose tops were enveloped in clouds. I tired myself out and then retreated under the quilts to fall asleep to the sound of birds and waves. Dinner was tomatoes stuffed with rice and herbs, or stews of potatoes, aubergines, broad beans, tomato and more fresh herbs, with lots of fresh crusty bread. In the evening, I drank brandy and had live music played for me on the bouzouki, a Greek stringed instrument like a lute. The simple physical pleasures of sea and fresh air made me feel alive.

  The island of Mykonos in early summer was completely different, with its exquisite whitewashed dovecotes, the town a jumble of baffling alleys and painted balconies. I wasn't sure I liked the designer boutiques – Mykonos has been a playground for the wealthy as far back as Ancient Rome – but I loved drinking coffee while the sea crashed up on the rocks just below. Wending my way towards the harbour, I turned a corner and there was a huge bird strutting up towards me: Petros, the resident friendly pelican, with a soft pink quiff that he let me stroke. You couldn't help liking a town that had its own pelican. Later, I made friends with someone who made a living by performing Greek dancing and catching fish; he taught me a few steps of syrtaki and directed me to where I could watch locals dancing to traditional music, holding hands together in never-ending lines that snaked around the room, the steps far more complex than they looked to the observer. I danced and I swam at Paradise Beach and soaked up the infectiously free-love atmosphere of the bars and cafes. A beautiful stranger said, 'How do you say goodbye in England – kissing? On the lips? Like this?'

  I was happy travelling on my own, keeping my own pace; those long empty hours on ferries were so perfect for reading books. I tended to find interesting places on my own, as I wasn't afraid to do something a little unusual or get talking to strangers, or to change the plan if an opportunity for adventure came up. Greeks never let you feel too lonely anyway. One day I was the only person sitting on a bench in Syntagma Square and an old woman ignored all the empty benches and sat right next to me. Travelling, I usually found there'd be some local man keen to show me around; perhaps a fisherman who had no work because it was windy that day, someone who did odd jobs on the farms or in tavernas; one told me it was nice for him because he couldn't go out for an evening with a girl from his village without it being a sign of something more serious.

  Athens began to feel like home. I liked the orange trees lining the streets, even if they were straggly and dusty. It was a joy to listen to men standing in the bakery having detailed discussions about different types of bread, or to brave the busy queues in the local market to buy heavy bags of vegetables. Good things happened out of the blue. I would be reading a sign, and an old man would offer assistance; I would end up with incomprehensible instructions in Greek and a foolish smile on my face. One evening, a man from Crete started talking to me as we were walking the same way; he liked Athens, he said, because he didn't need to buy cigarettes any more – he could breathe bad air for free. 'I like the pollution. I like the rubbish. I like fighting people for my position on the bus.' I laughed. I knew what he meant. I liked the random, bizarre excitement of my new life, too.

  The sun and the mountains over this crowded concrete city yielded a wealth of beautiful moments. I went up to the roof of my apartment one spring evening and caught an unexpectedly splendid sunset. The mountains were all smoky-blue, Athens a hazy white jumble of crystals, and off Piraeus tankers lay motionless in the sea. It wasn't exactly clear what would happen at the end of this year. Sometimes I thought I'd stay. Coming to Greece was not just about a job, I knew that now. I was having the adventures that life should be about. I was searching out what my life was supposed to be.

  That year led to years of living abroad, several of them in Canada. I moved from one neighbourhood of Toronto to another until I ended up on the Danforth – the Greek district. The street signs were in both English and Greek, and there was a Greek butcher's that sold marinated souvlaki, Greek restaurants and travel agents catering mostly to Greeks going back home, one of which was a setting for My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and a Greek night club. I liked just standing in the shops and listening to people speaking the language I missed.

I am looking for a Greek island.

  If I was going on my own, maybe I'd just take a backpack and trust to serendipity. I've fallen in love with so many islands over the years just by hopping on the next ferry: islands that smelled of herbs and pine trees, whose villages had whitewashed alleys overhung with magenta bougainvillaea, stalked by cats and chickens. Islands where pigs roamed on the wild beaches and cows wandered through the ruins of ancient hilltop castles; where people gathered in the village square at least once a day to gossip and play backgammon; where the hills were filled with olive trees and thyme and dropped away to a deep sparkling blue.

  Once, island-hopping with another traveller, we'd arrived on the night of a big local festival. All the rooms were booked up, but sometimes you could sleep on someone's rooftop. It had been too late to ask permission, and I was slightly nervous the next morning when I heard a window opening by our heads, expecting a sharp telling off. Instead, we got an amused 'Kalimera!' or good morning, and a coffee and biscuits.

  Later, we found a room to rent at the back of someone's house; our landlady Eleni gave us plates heaped with ripe fresh fruit from her garden every day. In the mornings I had a coffee and home-made biscuits on the balcony with her, and one day we went to help the family with the grape harvest. We followed stony tracks all over the island, accompanied by the sound of birds and crickets, but mostly to the empty beach where Eleni's mother used to go when she was courting. As the sun was going down, we sometimes stopped at a farm where a jolly man would fill up our water bottle with slightly fizzy home-made wine that we sipped on the way back to the pretty port, and we sat on the quayside watching brightly painted fishing boats bobbing in deep blue water, their nets laid out to dry.

  The spontaneous hospitality, the colour, the traditional, rural, island life, the shimmering blue sea, the sheer, sunny beauty of it all – that's what I'm looking for again.

  This time John and I are going together, so I've offered to book somewhere in advance. It feels like the grown-up thing to do, and a good compromise. I want him to get hooked on Greece too. I want to find somewhere new, so that we can discover it together.

  Guidebook to hand, I look at some beautiful places to rent on various websites, but keep going back to a big villa with a swimming pool available for a reasonable last-minute deal on Tilos, halfway between Rhodes and Kos. It's an island I've somehow missed before, even though I've travelled up and down the Dodecanese. The villa looks fantastic. It's within walking distance of a village and two beaches.

  'Hey, Jen.'

  I find John dozing in front of the Grand Prix in his sunny, cosy flat; he's been working some crazy shifts. Nestling into the couch for a while with him, I sift through the options, tell him about the villa and what little I've managed to find out about Tilos.

  'Book it! It's huge. We can bring Kate and Chris over. I owe her a birthday present – I'll pay for her flight.'

  I smile. What a lovely, generous idea. 'Are you sure?'

  'Yeah, why not? I'll leave the decision to you – you're the expert on Greece, Jen! But it sounds great to me. Let's do it.'

  I go back to book the villa with a big smile on my face, remembering how I met John and his sister Kate the first time.

  Almost a year ago, I was sitting at the bar of the Park Tavern one evening with a glass of wine and got into conversation with Kate, who was visiting from Vancouver. That's the kind of place the Park Tavern is. When I first moved to this town near the south coast of England for my work, the Park was a welcoming place to stop on my way home, read and eat a sandwich. Soon, I got to know the landlord and he'd introduce me to people. I might end up talking to the local judge, a builder, a city policy officer or a sausage maker. When John took on managing a local restaurant, he was welcomed into the special club of the Park Tavern too. He and Kate were half English and half Canadian; I knew Vancouver, had stayed there with friends and visited the islands. We all swapped notes on favourite places. Kate wore vintage clothes and was a music producer, and had a mischievous grin. John looked very clean-cut with his suit and tie and baby-blonde hair, but there was much more than met the eye; he had a wicked sense of humour and the more I learned about him, the more I was fascinated. There was good chemistry between us. Before long, we started seeing one another.

  I don't mind that John's job involves working long and unusual hours. I happily spend the early parts of the evenings seeing friends or reading or catching up at the office; it's good having a bit of down time for myself. I go for challenging bike rides or walks at the weekends while he works. I don't have to faff around in supermarkets making sure we have something for dinner; if we're hungry, he'll make us something later. When he finishes work he comes to meet me wherever I am and we exchange news of our days on his sofa over a good bottle of wine, or listen to music. We talk about our experiences and our dreams. I'm drawn to his passion for his work, the way he throws himself into what he loves doing, the way I do; I'm inspired by the way he nurtures his staff. And finally he's found a way to take a week away from work in the summer, a super-busy time of year for him, and spend it with me in the place I love, Greece.

At the start of June, Kate and Chris arrive from Vancouver, then a few days later the four of us fly to Rhodes, and from there later in the day we take the ferry to Tilos. There isn't a boat every day, so it isn't the easiest place to get to, but maybe it will be all the better for it.

  That first night at the villa, after a welcoming drink at the owners' bar, we all sit out on the roof terrace and look up, amazed, at thousands of bright stars. In the morning, awake before anyone else, I sneak outside to see deep blue sky, rugged grey mountains and a pool fringed with pink and white oleander; there's a vague aroma of honey. I'm in love.

  Tilos is a tiny eight miles long and a few miles wide. The official population is somewhere between three hundred and five hundred depending on the season, people far outnumbered by thousands of goats roaming wild. The dirt bike trails my out-of-date guidebook complained about are gone, if they ever existed: the whole island is a conservation area for wildlife such as rare eagles and buzzards. From the villa the only sounds are crickets, bees, crows and donkeys. There are little chapels built into otherwise empty hillsides. Walks to nearby Eristos beach go through a lush valley of olive and fig trees. One morning, alone, I follow a dirt track in the other direction and end up wandering through a deserted valley pungent with thyme, marjoram and sage, until gradually blue sea appears in the distance. I keep going and find a secluded cove of red sand and clear water: this must be Skafi beach. The others are jealous and the next day we walk there together. I've never seen John walk much further than the hundred metres from his flat to his car. When he sees the bottom of his feet are blotched with nasty black oil that has washed up on shore, perhaps from a passing tanker cleaning out its hold, instead of losing his temper as he has a tendency to do when stressed back home, he actually laughs and makes me take silly photos.

  Tilos hasn't succumbed to mass tourism or become the kind of place that sees you only as a source of money; but, thankfully for us, it hasn't developed itself into a 'holistic spa yoga retreat' either; it is pure, unreconstructed Greece at its best. We seem to be the only tourists staying in secluded Megalo Horio, the 'big village' built into the mountain below a ruined castle of the Knights of St John. The two cafes listed in the guidebook are clearly closed but there's a small locals' kafeneion and a bus into the port of Livadia if we want more. But mostly we don't; we're happy doing very little. The four of us have big lunches at a taverna by the sea where they bake their own bread and catch their own fish and add pickled local capers to the salad, and another place where they grow their own vegetables and have friendly cats. At the restaurant in Megalo Horio, where I endear myself to the owner by speaking a few half-remembered words of Greek, they serve dishes of their home-reared goat and pork baked with tomatoes, and mash up their own potatoes and herbs into irresistibly melt-in-the-mouth keftedes. I laugh as John eats record-breaking amounts of ice cream.

  One evening, we hear music near the villa. 'D'you think that's a bar?' asks Chris. There's a big garden with a terrace at the end. Chris walks towards it.

  'It might just be someone's house though,' we whisper. He keeps going, and we follow a few steps behind. Sure enough, we've walked onto someone's terrace, where a man and a boy are playing traditional dance on a Greek lute and a lyra, the three-stringed fiddle. They invite us in to sit down and listen, and the man's wife brings us a plate of melon and apple. I am delighted to have found this island.

  We only have a couple of days left, so John and Chris decide to go to Livadia to rent scooters so we can explore some more. Kate and I set out to walk to Plaka beach together and they'll catch us up on the bikes and drive us the rest of the way.

  It's a good opportunity to get to know Kate again after so many months. We chat about our careers and how time races ahead from one busy year to another. Gradually she brings the conversation around to the idea of children. Although she's a few years younger than me, she feels it's getting to that time when she needs to decide fairly soon; more than that, she feels ready to be a mother. After turning thirty, the challenge of her work has decreased and she's ready for another stage of life.

  'It creeps up on you, this age thing,' I say with a sardonic smile. My odds of conceiving are getting lower by the year. 'I still feel barely old enough to look after myself.' I've only recently committed myself to a mortgage after moving back to England and have just about stopped getting hangovers; I've given up a few things that are bad for me over the years, though I'm still prone to a bit of adventure. 'I know John likes the idea of having a family one day,' I continue, 'though we haven't really discussed yet whether… You know, whether we want to together.' It's been less than a year. I don't want to scare him away, but we've talked around it and both know it's a possibility. I'm not sure how much I should share with his sister.

  Throughout my twenties and beyond, having kids was far from a priority: I figured I'd know when the time was right, and only wanted a family if I was absolutely certain and in the right relationship. So it's come as a big surprise to me that for vast swathes of my mid-thirties as a child-free woman all I can think about is children. My body is finally telling me something – loud, if not clear. Babies have become vastly cuter, although I still feel occasional blasts of uncertainty. The pub landlord at the Park Tavern, Richard, got so used to me talking about the issue that he cheekily referred to John, when I started seeing him, as 'The Donor'. I haven't solved the conundrum of knowing if I'm in the right relationship, but I'm feeling good about this one.

  'If it happened by mistake, though, if you got pregnant by mistake now, would you go ahead with it?' asks Kate.

  'At this stage – yes!' I think: it's pretty unlikely; I've been on the pill my whole adult life. 'It would seem like it was meant to be and I might not get another chance.' Meant to be? It would be a miracle.

  'I'm pretty sure I would,' says Kate, thoughtfully.

  When John and Chris catch up with Kate and me on the scooters, we all drive together to Plaka, where peacocks roam in a garden behind the deserted beach. We fall asleep on the sand in the shade, and awake to the electric-blue face of a peacock which has hopped over the fence and is staring right at us.

It's later in the summer when Kate announces she's pregnant. She must have had an inkling of it when we were in Tilos. I'm thrilled for her, knowing how ready she is for this. Sadly, Chris says he isn't ready to be a father. But Kate is happy and will go it alone with the help of family and friends; she's sure she wants this baby and perhaps he might come around to the idea later. In August, I am throwing a party for all our friends and both families to celebrate a little victory in my work, and John kindly foots half the bill and runs around all evening like a mad thing topping up people's champagne glasses. We have lots to celebrate.

  John flies to Vancouver for a week to see Kate towards the end of the year and to look at a business opportunity. The restaurant he runs is going through a change of ownership, and he's been talking seriously about setting up his own bar and restaurant back home. We're thinking of moving to Vancouver together; I could work there, my growing love for the outdoors would be amply catered for on the nearby islands, and the whole new arrangement might be perfect for starting a family if we decide we're ready. It's been an exciting time, looking at places for sale and business plans, and plots of land in the islands. I'm in a bookshop in London one day when he calls from Vancouver to let me know how things are looking with this particular business opportunity; it's not as rosy as he thought and he's frustrated with some red tape. He seems to be missing having me around to talk to, and I'm touched.

  The night after he gets back, a few days before my birthday, we sit on his couch in our usual way with a drink, some of our favourite music playing while he demolishes a pack of cigarettes, and he tells me he's started to feel troubled. I know he's had a difficult time recently with his grandfather dying – they were very close. With the problems he encountered in Vancouver, it turns out he's suddenly feeling unsure about everything, though. The move back to Canada. Buying a business. Us.

  I have an awful falling feeling, wanting to rewind the tape and for him never to have said that. This isn't how it's supposed to turn out.

  The rest is a bit of a blackout. Do we talk about anything, or do I just cry? Am I trying to be cool – he's only said he's 'unsure', after all? I see his upset and nervous face as he says those words to me, and then later, 'It'll be OK,' as I cry next to him that night. What does that mean? The next day, he leaves for work and locks me out of his life. I sit at home in tears, trying to remember the Buddhist philosophy I've read about letting go, and I eat chocolate, and send him a funny message about it, which makes him laugh. Later I ring the buzzer of his flat over and over again, with no answer.

  Nothing's gone wrong. Nothing's changed. He just isn't sure any more, and he knows how important it is for me to know that. He knows how much honesty and trust mean to me. An old friend of mine recently found the courage to leave his unhappy marriage of many years, and his wife accused him of taking away her child-bearing years; we don't want to get to that.

  Just let me back in to your life, I think. We've made it so far together; we can get through this. It all still feels like a horrible dream. But he is wrestling with his own demons, and suddenly, I am on my own in a very cold, harsh place. It's a bad night. I learn to smoke cigarettes again, drown my sorrows in red wine until the pubs close and walk around in the dark on my own until dawn. I call in to work, speak to my boss about what's happened and arrange to take a day or two off.

  I spend a lot of time after that just walking through winter countryside during the day and going out every night, drinking and smoking and clinging to friends. He's having a crisis of doubt about everything in his life. Maybe he'll realise that this is what he wants after all. It doesn't look hopeful, but I'm not willing to give up on our relationship just yet.

  Finally he makes contact, and we agree to meet in a neutral pub to talk. I childishly dress for the occasion in my best seamed stockings and high heels and a short enough skirt that he might notice the tops of the stockings. He arrives, and gives me a dull birthday present of a brown wool scarf which I pretend to like until he confirms it's definitely over between us. He hates the way things have turned out too. We're both in tears with not much left to say.

  I can't just go on as normal, and keep taking days off work. I need to do myself a favour and give life a shake. I start the next day by sending a text to my boss, quitting my job. Then I call in the cavalry, sending texts to any friends in my phone book who might help me get through the day. Shivering and numb and weeping from time to time, I pass the afternoon in the Park Tavern, drinking whisky macs; the alcohol and the adrenalin of free fall allow me to get through the day. My friend Mike tries persuading me that giving up my job might be somewhat rash, and that things always look bleak in winter. But I'm insistent. I have to do something drastic and meaningful.

I get on a train and spend my birthday not being taken away by my beloved to his favourite Spanish city for the weekend as he'd hinted in what now seems like the distant past, but weeping and shaky with my parents. I feel pathetic, crying on the train. But at least I recognise that my parents are pretty amazing people and I am lucky to enjoy spending time with them. First stop is my dad's in London, and he takes me for dinner at his local pub. Dad, who knows how hard break-ups can be, tells me wisely that sometimes people just fall out of love, just change their minds, and there isn't anything you can do about it. It's horrible but probably true. When a few friends show up at the pub including his ex-girlfriend, we all laugh and cry about the various traumas we've experienced over huge glasses of red wine. Then, as the searing pain and bewilderment and emptiness kick in again the next day, I take the train to Mum's and do the whole thing all over again: one of the benefits of having divorced parents.

  'Don't let him do this to you. You've got so much going for you, so much to give,' says my mum, distraught at seeing me still sobbing away.

  'I know, Mum… So – why? What am I doing wrong?' It isn't just about him. It's about what's wrong with me – why is it so difficult for me to find someone to share my life with?

  When Mum has to go away for a few days, my stepdad looks after me, letting me work at home and take the dog for long walks during the day until dinner time, when we have a chat and laugh and I try not to cry.

  At last I feel strong enough to go back home again, and I return to work on a tentative basis. There's only so long my friends and family and colleagues can put up with a miserable me who weeps herself to sleep on their couch. And this isn't what I want either, obviously. I want to go back to being the person who enjoys life to the full. Only I can make myself happier.

  And that's how the Gifts to Self begin.

I am suffering from more than just heartbreak. I've been putting up with my work and home situations because I thought they were temporary. I need to replace the plans I had with him, and come up with new ones. Now that there's truly only me to consider, what do I want to do and where do I want to be? Why wait for someone else to change my life, for goodness sake?

  My boss, knowing what I'm going through, has told me to take some time to think before he'll accept my resignation. I still enjoy the work; as with many interesting jobs, the problem is its intensity, the tendency of the years to roll around fast in a never-ending cycle. I don't want to give it all up, but by cutting back my hours, perhaps I can carve out some time for other projects, without surrendering my weekends or letting my work suffer, and ideally then will appreciate the days at the office more. I consider going down to three days a week, but I don't like worrying about money. Losing just one fifth of my pay will be easier to take. The first Gift to Self will be not quitting a job I still like, but giving myself Freelance Fridays.

  The second Gift to Self is the vow of celibacy.

  Let me define my terms here: this isn't really about becoming nun-like. The idea is merely to stay away from a relationship. For six months, I am having a break from emotional involvement, from looking for the right man. Otherwise I'll meet someone nice as I always seem to (a blessing or a curse?), and it will start all over again – too soon. I need to become myself again before I can meet anyone else.

  In the very, very dark days of this winter, it's been hard not to get confused and let a friend looking after me turn into something more. I often need someone to look after me. It isn't pretty, but it's the truth. I'm scared. I numb the pain with alcohol and cigarettes and sometimes I can't go to sleep without a friend holding me.

  But I'm setting off mines – I'm a danger to myself and others. And physically, emotionally, I just can't go through this again; I'm getting too old for this. Refusing to consider getting romantically involved with anyone for half a year, however good and honourable and warm-hearted they seem, gives me a positive power, a force field of protection. And somehow, making this decision really does give me strength. After moping around all sad and victim-like, suddenly I feel like a warrior princess. As the weeks go by and I recover, I wake up in the morning feeling surprisingly happy: no one is going to break my heart today, or tomorrow, or next week, or next month. The vow of celibacy is something positive I can tell people about at last. 'If I so much as mention that I've "met a nice man",' I explain to friends and family, 'give me a stern talking to.'

  It turns out, of course, that a vow of celibacy is a great way to meet men, even ones who seem pretty nice. It gives me hope to hear from more than one male friend: 'Well, I'm only interested in a serious relationship, so if you change your mind, let me know.' But I deflect them with the warrior sword.

  After the initial novelty wears off and I feel stronger, it's harder to adhere to the plan – I still believe that good things happen out of the blue, and my biological clock is still ticking aggressively away. I'm not going to beat myself up if I falter. But the aim is to protect myself and focus the mind on other things.

  I really need to think some things through; to reflect on where I want to go next. I need to get out of this town that's associated with so many memories for a while. More than that, I want to do something that's purely for me.

  So the third and most important Gift to Self is a month in Greece.

  Greece is like an old friend; we go back a long way. Greece was the answer before, and now maybe Greece is the answer again. During this cold, dark winter, I feel a need for warm sunshine, and plenty of it. I am drawn to the idea of giving up my job entirely and moving to Greece, maybe working in a hotel for the summer as I did once before. But I also wonder if I might go for a long break without giving up my job.

  And where? I've found what might be the perfect Greek island for me at this stage in my life. I discovered it with the man I once saw my future with. Trouble is, he's changed his mind. Can I go back there?

  Oddly, I don't need to think too long about returning to Tilos. That island is a special place, I think, and I'm not finished with it yet; maybe I even need to reclaim it for myself. Over a couple of months I've come to terms with what happened with John, and have tried to move on. Clearly I can't rent the same place again (it's a big, luxurious villa, too expensive to rent for a month, and going back to the same place I stayed with John would be silly) – but the owners were friendly, and I reckon there's nothing to lose by writing to them. So one evening after work in February I send an email saying I'm thinking of coming back to the island, and if they hear of a cheap room available could they perhaps let me know? I go off to the gym, and when I come back two hours later to drop stuff at my office, there's a response.