“Here looks good,” I say, stopping. The sign outside the cafe says Salon de The which is pretty much exactly what I look for in a cafe.

The tables outside, covered in red polka dotted tablecloths, front a pretty, leafy square speckled in sunlight. We’re in the arty bit of Paris, Marais. We have pranced into Jo Malone, into Diptyque, sat down in immaculate green gardens filled with tulips and kissed underneath Victorian-looking lamposts.

We order coffees and I order a diabolo menthe purely because I remember learning about them during French GCSE without ever actually finding out what they are.

MindReader covers my hand ith his on the table. I take off my cardigan. The sun warms the skin on my shoulders for the first time in eight months.

“Ah,” I say. “Let’s just stay here.”

So we do. We order red wine and, as the Parisian evening darkens around us, peruse the food menus. They sell Japanese food here and I end up eating my very first sushi dish followed by scallops in the most beautiful caramelised sauce.

MindReader makes me laugh so much he gives me hiccoughs.

“I think it might be raining,” MindReader says as the sun is setting. I feel a few drops on my bare shoulders and look up. The sky is darkening to the bright, lit-up blue of early-evening.

“Don’t think so,” I say, gesturing to the cloudless sky.

“Ah.” MindReader gestures beyond my shoulder and I turn around and look up.

A Parisian woman in a pale grey trench coat, Jackie-O sunglasses over her eyes, is watering the plants on her balcony which overlooks the square. I look at her, imagining what her life is like, feeling the pleasant cooling water mist my shoulders.

I look back at MindReader, his features harder to make out in the quickly-darkening light. He smiles.

The French woman is picked up, a few minutes later, by a lanky, dark-haired Parisian on a vespa. But only once she’d watered her plants.

“Sorry I turned the light out on you,” MindReader’s mum says. I smile. Apparently the French prefer to have their light switches on the outside of the bathroom.

“That’s okay,” I say. “I thought I’d gone blind though! I had just put my hair under the water and everything went dark.”

“Your hair?”

“Oh yes,” MindReader interjects. “She lies in the bath with everything under the water except her face. Like a hippo.” I look sharply at him. “Oh, sorry,” he says.

“Urgh,” I say, dropping my work bag on the floor and rubbing my hips. “I am still not over this flu.”

I had the flu a week ago. I took an entire week off work; my first time off work since I started my career. Everybody was ill – sniffling at their desks, looking pale at the photocopier, and I was no more ill than anybody else, really.

“Always before a holiday,” MindReader says.

I catch his eye and smile. It’s true. We’re off to Normandy and Paris tomorrow.

“If we’re gallivanting around Paris all weekend do you think I can just have one day lounging around in Normandy?”

“Billygean,” MindReader says.

“Hm?”

“Lots of people do nothing more than lie down and read books on holiday.”

“Even inside?” I say, for Normandy is not going to be bikini weather.

“Yep. Besides,” he says, glancing at the clock. “It’s nine o’clock! Anyone would be tired.”

I concede this point, reluctantly. I have just worked more than a 12-hour day. I do, though, want to chip in with Before and Afters. I am well now – I never really think about being ill anymore, certainly don’t talk and write about it like I used to (i.e. all the time). I think nothing of 9pm at my desk, or meeting for a 7.30am breakfast meeting, or anything, really.

But there are, still, Befores and Afters. It is - I am - not how it was before. My hips did not hurt after a long day, before. My eyes did not go weird. I was not tired like this.

“You aren’t ill anymore,” MindReader says.

I stop fiddling with the threads on our sofa and look at him. I’m surprised to see his eyes are full of pity.

“I don’t trust my body,” I say. “You don’t know what that’s like.” I don’t even know how to articulate how a lack of trust within one’s own body feels.

MindReader nods, runs his hand through his hair. “True. But…” He makes a kind of funny gesture. A kind of weighing scales movement with his hands, and I see what he means immediately. Part of recovering, for me, was trusting my body despite what it told me. Part of recovery was expecting the best, or at least something in the middle, not the worst-case scenario, or even a scenario which I, with some mad logic, expected. I try to remember the times I tested those thoughts; how untrue they were. How sometimes I felt better for having done something, not worse.

“Are you having a bit of a wobble?” MindReader says.

“A bit,” I say. “I cannot get ill. I have too much…” I think of my job, where I am always (expected to be) highly-functioning, think of those days, years ago, when everything as rubbish and it felt as if my life had become derailed and ended up in a nightmare.

“Why would you get ill, when you are well? I cannot get ill either.”

I sit down on the sofa and MindReader paints me a picture. He talks of long hours worked. Of all our walking (and giggling) we did in Barcelona, the strange humid October air clammy on our arms. Of our Estepona-coma, where we slept so well in our sea-scented bedroom, the mosquitoes clinging to the patio doors, and both still woke up sleepy. Of our hundreds of lunch dates, my body strong and healthy as I marched across Birmingham City Centre in my skirt suit. Of our miles-long walks in the snow in January. That time I got up at five and drove to Nottingham, to  Derby, to Macclesfield, to London. Of the oh-so-many days spent worrying about my career and my deadlines and my finances, not my health. That we have had a cat for 18 months – for 18 months – and he has never, until last week, witnessed me being ill: proof that it must have been ages ago, as surely Benny has been with us forever. That things are different now. I sit still on our sofa and wonder why those images and thoughts and bad memories are so strong for me that I forget the last 700 days of well-ness, sometimes.

Thank you,” I say.

“But I am sure you can read your book for a rest day on holiday,” he says.

“Thank you.”

“Look at him,” I say to MindReader. This is a sentence I say a lot.

Benny bleats at us to be let out. MindReader moves to go and open the back door and Benny sprints towards it, his legs darting out behind him.

“Look at his little daft run,” I say. “He doesn’t know how to run correctly.”

“He gets that from his mum,” says MindReader.

“What’re we going to eat?” MindReader says.

“I don’t know,” I say, shrugging. I never know. I couldn’t honestly tell you, internet, where the baked beans are kept. Or if we even have any.

I look across at MadFather. “I’ve invited you for dinner and it’s already 8 o’clock,” I say sheepishly.

“Let’s get takeaway,” MadFather says.

Despite having had takeaway on Friday night, then spent the weekend alone and eaten a combination of takeaway leftovers and crisps, I nod. Sunday nights are lazy. Everybody knows that.

“I’ll drive though,” I say, standing and picking up my car keys.

MindReader stays at home and warms up some plates. MadFather and I head out into the strangely warm April evening, the sky a lit-up baby pink.

I drive towards a roundabout. I can feel MadFather’s eyes on mine. I make a very big show of checking all of my mirrors. As we approach our exit, MadFather makes a kind of clucking sound. I realise after a second that he is indicating. I flick my indicator on and roll my eyes. “There’s no one behind me anyway.”

“Good habits…” MadFather says.

We order the food and sit on the red wooden benches to wait. I draw my knees to my chest. “Uh oh,” MadFather says.

“Hm?”

He nods towards the car park. A sleek Mercedes has just parked RIGHT BEHIND MY CAR. I am hemmed in either side by taxis.

“Ah.”

Our food arrives on the counter; warm, sweet-smelling food in a white plastic bag and I smell it as I walk out into the warm night.

“How am I going to do this, then?” I say.

MadFather looks at me. “You can get out there,” he says, pointing to a car-sized gap just behind the Mercedes. I raise my eyebrows and decide against saying that a) I have no idea as to the size of my car and b) I have no control over the steering.

“Great, yes,” I say, nodding. I graduated from the MadFather school of driving almost three years ago (what the fuck?). If I can’t get out of a car park that will be horribly embarrassing. Right?

I get in and dump the Chinese on MadFather’s lap.

“Check your blind spot,” he says quietly.

I turn the wheel to the left and inch out. My wing mirror brushes the taxi to my right and the driver looks up sharply at me. I turn the wheel to the right and drive back to where I started. I then do the same thing again, three times.

I look at MadFather, whose face is arrange impassively. And then I say a sentence I said in every single driving lesson I ever had: “I want to cry.”

I am ashamed to say, I have been using hotel shampoo for the last four months. That is, Hotel H10 Estepona shampoo, brought home from our holiday in Spain last year.

Life on a kind-of budget makes you do funny things. Sure, I might buy a bottle of wine in a restaurant, and indeed I am off to Normandy and Paris a week today, but, for some reason, I am Very Bad at buying the following:

• Shampoo and conditioner
• Contact lens fluid
• Deoderant
• Cotton wool pads

I will buy endless amounts of nail polish and lattes and pretty pairs of pants, but I do not, as a general rule, buy Things That I Need.

John Frieda approached me last week to review some of their products. HURRAH, I thought, because although I don’t like to buy shampoo, I very much like to use it.

I fetched the parcel from the Post Office (because, of course, having a job means I am never in to receive parcels), and asked very nicely for them to give me my parcel despite the fact that I could not provide them with ID for “Billygean”.

I ran a bath and lit some candles, slapped a facemask on. I need absolutely no encouragement to have a pamper evening.

And then I used the shampoo and conditioner:

I went to bed with wet hair (as usual. Is this bad, or is it actually better for my hair than blow drying it mercilessly every morning?) and woke up to NICE HAIR. 

My hair is usually fluffy and frizzy and I either curl or straighten it every morning. That morning, it was… nice! Wavy!

I used the shampoo and conditioner again the next night and, as I had an important meeting, straightened it after using the blow dry balm and then gave it a spritz of hairspray. The only downside to the hairspray is that it does leave hair rather tacky, but that might be because it’s firm hold.

My hair stayed like this all day. I’m in love!

John Frieda sent me the above samples in exchange for an honest  review. I was not paid for this post.

Benny came in the other night and we all went to bed together. So far, so normal (much to MindReader’s disgust that this is now the norm).

However, the following morning, in my skirt suit, giving Benny a cursory stroke before leaving for work, I noticed a very strange welt on his neck. There was, pretty much, a hole, with a lot of blood and gunge surrounding it. My first thought, I am embarrassed to admit, was that he might have been shot (what?).

I sent MindReader a text message photograph of Benny’s wound AND THEN WENT UPSTAIRS to speak to him about it.

“Benny is wounded!” I said.

MindReader looked at me, putting his toothbrush down. “What?”

“I sent you a photo!”

“What? Why?”

“He has to go to the vets,” I said.

And that was that. MindReader, fully immersed in his fleeting role as stay-at-home-Dad, wrestled Benny into the cat carrier, smirked as the vet overreacted to such a ‘big lad’ emerging from the cat carrier, and watched Benny BREAK an entire syringe worth of antibiotics and be injected with a second. The vet thinks Benny was bitten by a fox or a cat. He apparently pulled a piece of dead skin out of Benny’s wound, which MindReader, for one horrible moment, feared was a tooth.

“Let’s keep him in for now,” I said to MindReader the other night.

MindReader gave me a Look. Benny immediately began his usual routine which he employes when not in recipt of what he would like: he walked along the patio doors meowing every five seconds. He will do this for hours.

“Well, that’s annoying,” I said, as Benny let out a particularly loud howl.

“This sort of behaviour,” MindReader said, “is why I bit him.”