How it began: the first

View from my Robertson's Close bedroom

How does one write how it all began? It began without my knowing, without my prompting, without my willing it into existence.  If it was an act of creation, it wasn't mine. And looking back now, its even difficult to discern a thread of beginning encounters: they blur, they blur with the people, the countless groups of people, always in droves, the wonderful closeness, a make-shift community of first years at Uni, away for the first time, embracing all manner of things for the first time, and how to go back and say clearly, yes, this was the first time I saw your face.  But those first thoughts of meeting you are all nebulous, a cloud of unknowing, and how to say, to pinpoint when it was that I first knew you?

You were sat, Francis, in a cloud, and one night, a club themed with foam and bubbles, belligerently dancing,  and without possibly meaning to and with no romantic intention, I laughed and found you adorable.  Perhaps you were in adorable in the way a child learns to tie his shoes, but I couldn't say.  They are remembered beyond my memory.

I found it all very British.  The clever jokes, the drinking rules, the formal familiarity, and it felt like I was no longer at home. Even the Christians were seemingly different, more real somehow, the way they belted out their hymns in church, not cowering in front of white screens or slumped in their plastic chairs.  And the food, the Sunday lunches! Will my life ever be the same?

And amidst the hymns and the nights out, the journeys around Holyrood Park and the 3 am bed times, I simultaneously expanded and shrank. I was daily impressed by my utter naivety. At times my flat in Robertson's Close was like living in the book of Revelations. We were tested with fire and not burnt, we were poisoned and not killed, we were threatened with knives in the shower, and were not harmed in our beds at night. Amidst this broadening and winnowing, one cold night in February the entire group walked me home, and somehow, near the door, you slurred to me that you wanted to go traveling with me that summer. I was surprised and sober. You were not. You didn't remember saying this the next day, and when I told you, you were surprised and sobered.

Try for the life of me, I'll never fully know why you decided to come, why you didn't simply say no.  It wasn't for romance.  You had known enough of heartache then.

It frightened us, I think, being singled out, together.  What did I know of you?  I was surely not impressed. You lived and watched a dream-world go by, clouded and detached. And you, what must you have thought of me? A twenty-one year-old nun? Naive and kind? Bat-shit crazy?

Despite all the jokes, despite all the bets, despite all the rumors, you stuck to your inebriated word. I was simply baffled, baffled and frightened. It was odd being shoved together, each the other's means to an end. And that end was glittering Europe, glittering, sunny Europe.  But with you? How could I know. How could I have known?

We sniffed each other out, cautiously like strange hounds encountering each other for the first time, slowly circling.  Paris? Yes, why not Paris. D-Day in Caen? Yes, that too. And vaguely, then firmly, Bayeux, Madrid, Salamanca, Granada, Berlin, Barcelona, and Seville.  I didn't know what to think.

I was determined not to like you in that way. I was adamant and resolute. There was so much I was not proud of, and I was through, and it could make things very awkward. Your beliefs were so different from mine, and I was leaving to go back home.  I embraced all logic and prepared myself very carefully. But logic, you flimsy fool, you pale compared to belief.

Our Eurostar passes arrived, our exams ended, we met for a pint in the Grassmarket before meeting up in London.  I came back to our Robertson's Close flat-of-trauma to the wonderful Gillian Watson, steadfast companion through all our woes.  "Nat," she says, "I've made a bet. Ten pounds you and Francis will never get married. Leo bets ten pounds you do."  I eased onto the bed and laughed, "Easiest tenner you ever made in your life, GW."