Two people, at not quite their first meeting but coming together out of boredom and as a result of the deliberate steeping of their own hearts in salt, in a squat-style nightclub in East London at the beginning of Spring, will medicate each other’s wounds only partially successfully and, kiss.

If there were more space here, or time, a fuller description of the time they spent hanging out would be written. Instead it’s going to be enough to say that by the time it withered off for both of them the corpses of the previous relationships that had had their nasty fists curled around each person’s ankles, effectively hobbling them, had finally crumbled away. This left only a residual bitterness and a not quite believing in themselves yet, a not quite trusting that they could pull off a real relationship, or even that they deserved it.

He recovered first, being quite sturdy, an alpha male of Australian stock, never mind his idea of himself as more gentle than that, perhaps he was, she didn’t know many other Australians, maybe the others are more red blooded but that was hard for her to imagine, his neck being so thick and his manner so abrupt at times, often shocking her with his toughness. And if this sounds convoluted, then it was, actually, a bit like this, clause upon sub clause, wrapping themselves in the grammar of not wanting to make a commitment again, at least not to each other (although in the back of her head she thought, ‘and not to anyone else, ever, again.’).

In the end what it came down to was this: keeping warm while waiting for a ceasefire in separate internal hostilities.

It was a good idea and not too damaging.