MindReader crosses his legs. “And is it?”

“Hm, I don’t know,” I say. “He says, ‘It is quite a lot for a day trip, so I would suggest a night in Tarifa and getting the early fast ferry which takes an hour and a half. Morocco is usually two hours behind Spain so you actually arrive before you leave,’” I read.

I turn to stare at MindReader, bewildered.

He pushes his hair back with his hands. “I’m not…”

“I can’t do that,” I say.

“Fine by me.”

There is a comparable moment which usually takes place in November or sometimes October. When OldestFriend and I were growing up, we called this The Christmas Moment. Any combination of dark early-evenings, lit-up shops displaying twinkling lights, mulled wine, gingerbread lattes, being able to see your breath clouding the air in front of you and lighting a candle and curling up to read a book could induce The Christmas Feeling.

The May Moment is more elusive, but it always comes in the end. I have been blogging for seven Mays, and I remember such May Moments well. In 2006, I picked up a pre-release of questions for an exam on Hardy and Wilde and took myself off to walk in a bluebell wood, as a way of saying, I have the pre-release for my last exam, therefore, they’re almost over. I had my May Moment when some blossom petals sprinkled down onto my be-flipflopped feet. It was a message: summer’s almost here, and here’s a preview.

In 2007, the sun came out for one day’s learning cases in the garden. My Moment came over a pot of coffee as a breeze gently lifted the hair off my neck.

In 2008, I spent most of May in the garden, too unwell to do anything else. Thomas Hardy must mean May to me, because I quoted him when I wrote about my May Moment here. In 2009, I experienced my May Moment on the way home from my first shift at BathShop, sleepless and smelling of bathbombs, getting stuck in the middle of the gay pride march and almost fainting from the exhaustion and the heat.

In 2010, we whiled away an absolutely perfect afternoon at MindReader’s niece’s first birthday party. He drank non-alcoholic beer (for I couldn’t drive) and I burnt my shoulders in the sun. In 2011, we were due to host our leg of a mock-Come Dine With Me and I drank too much white wine in the garden, fell asleep and burnt the shape of my sunglasses over my eyes.

This May, the weather is shit. Abysmal. It’s not only overcast and rainy, but also COLD. Eight degrees cold. Every morning, I check the weather, looking for my May Moment, and every morning it rains as we wait for our train to work.

MindReader is turning 30 on Sunday, and we’re going on a long-planned raucous night out on the Saturday. I’m wearing a cream dress, so last night I decided to slather myself in my trusted Clarins fake tan. One thing led to another, though, as I was primping myself.

I ran a bath with a blue bathbomb, filled with seaweed, that’s supposed to smell of the beach. I lit some candles and slipped into the bright blue bath. I bought some shampoo and conditioner (with my Advantage card points, budget-aware readers) that smell of camomile and lemon balm and sunshine. I used a coconut soap. And I had the world’s most decadent, beach-themed bath, and when I got out, I was suntanned.

I’m not sure if this counts as a May Moment, May. I’m still waiting.

“Mmm?” I say, settling down next to him in my pyjamas.

“Put this password into this website,” MindReader says.

“Er, okay,” I say, handing my scone to him.

“It’s for Olympic tickets,” he says. “The temporary password doesn’t work. I must’ve tried it ten times.”

“The lowercase “L” is actually a capital “I”,” I say. We log in first time.

“Thanks,” MindReader says. “I knew you’d do it. That’s your thing.”

“Hm?” I say, taking my scone back.

“You can log into websites really well.”

“You fed to sleep until you were at least a year old,” Mum says.

DoctorSister puts her paintbrush down and raises her eyebrows. We’re painting pots, for no reason at all, really. I’ve painted a teapot bright orange and drawn Benny’s face on one side and printed EarlyNiece’s feet on the other. A classic design.

“Great,” DoctorSister says. EarlyNiece is eight months old. DoctorSister goes back to doctoring at the end of the summer; EarlyNiece is on a sleep deadline (the worst thing for insomniacs, which she definitely is).

“Whereas you,” Mum says, turning to me, “were so independent. When you wanted to go to sleep you just didn’t want to know. You just wanted to be on your own.”

I smile. “That’s funny,” I say. “I’m not really like that now.”

“Yes,” DoctorSister says. “And most of the time, I don’t need feeding to sleep, either.”

Historically, I haven’t been very good at doing things on my own. I don’t mean spending time on my own; I’m very good at that. I mean, doing things alone. If I needed to buy a new TV, I would ask everybody in my immediate family what they thought. Career decisions would be agonised over with MindReader listening patiently. I would arrange to meet friends prior to going out for drinks, so I wouldn’t be going there alone.

I don’t really know why I did these things. I read something once which really resonated with me:

“For her, the taste of the ice cream, the red of the sunset, the humor in the movie must be shared to be.” – Elizabeth Berg

This is definitely how I used to feel about the world, why I have always, always, lived with somebody. I may spend a reasonable amount of time on my own, but I tell a lot of people (my parents, MindReader, DoctorSister and BestFriend always, but often more people) about the things I have done on my own.

I was always slightly in awe of people who got on with things on their own. MindReader is one such person. He could board a train to somewhere strange, stay in random hotels, and when I called him, he would answer his phone and tell me that he was fine, that there was nothing to report. A few months ago, I would’ve told him about the smell of the train, about the ticket barrier not letting me through, about how I like the idea of hotels but not the reality (yes, I was boring). The idea of buying a car, and telling my family I had bought a car, not that I was going to buy a car oddly thrills me.

A few weeks ago, I had to travel for work to a big city I’ve never been to. Some of my other colleagues were travelling from Birmingham, too, but I wanted to drive. So I drove there, found the place myself, parked the car, walked to the building, and went on a night out, stay over someplace foreign, and drove back alone the next day, with nothing but my music and the hum of the car keeping me company. Totally normal. Nothing special. Except it was.

This freedom, this alone-ness has infiltrated every area of my life. I like to do things sometimes at lunch on my own. Often, i meet friends or MindReader, but recently I’ve been doing other things. Going to the library, going on a walk to Chinatown or finding some fountains to gawk at. And I’ve been not telling anyone. Sometimes, the people in my life who I telephone all the time (the above list) will call me, and I will say, “oh, I’ve just been in Brindley Place,” – like, I was free to talk, but I decided to do something all by myself, for me.

This is new.

And now for the videos:

Valerie’s blog and twitter.

Kate’s twitter.

My twitter.

Nathan’s blog, twitter and website.

Jacki’s blog and twitter.

Looking at my bank statement, I have spent the following (I’m not going to list my rent and phone bills and food, etc. Just the things I don’t need):

£16 meal out in Shrewsbury. I went to watch MindReader play football. Everybody went for Italian. It was my first meal out since I started this. Luckily, I had budgeted for it, but it still wrote home to me how much £16 is, and how disproportionate spending can feel. It takes me a lot of effort to save £16. But it takes half an hour, a risotto and a few drinks to spend it.

£3 lunch. This was my only lunch in the working week for a month. I thought I had a meeting with lunch provided, but it got cancelled. I was tempted to go hungry, but I felt that was a little extreme. And then I was late and I had to spend £3 to put money on a card. Le sigh.

£2 library fines. No excuse.

I’ve also spend quite a lot on MindReader’s birthday but that was so well budgeted for, I got none of the guilt and the shock and the tense checking of bank accounts after I bought it. It just felt nice.

I feel the above is a bit biased, though, and doesn’t acknowledge that on about 27 of the days this month, I spent absolutely nothing.

But what is amazing about this is that in just one month (two pay days) I have gone from living hand to mouth to having leeway. I am now £300 away from my overdraft limit. I try not to think that I could just go over the month’s budget and nothing would happen, but it’s true. If something happened – if my car blew up, or if Benny got sick, I could deal with it. Getting out of debt has already given me more rewards than cardigans and lunches out ever did.

And if I needed any concrete evidence, my monthly interest has gone down by £4. Not a lot. But it’s a couple of lattes, and it’s like HSBC, in my own romantic world view, saying “carry on.”

“I don’t really know about Public Enemy,” I say. “Who are they?”

“Like a rap group.”

“Are they related to ‘Public Enemy Number One’?” I say, making finger quotes.

MindReader smiles, uncrossing his legs. “No. That’s not… That’s not a band.”

“What is it?”

“It’s kind of a phrase.”

“Oh I see. Like, ‘Hitler is Public Enemy Number One’?”

“Yes.”

“I understand.”

“Or, next week, Gordon Brown might be Public Enemy Number One,” MindReader says.

“Oh. I don’t understand.”

“So whoever’s unpopular at the time.”

“Okay,” I say. “So who is considered to be number two – on the whole?”

According to MindReader, he looks like “one of those seventeenth century portraits of the women with the big guts”.

5 June 2007

I wake up in a strange bed. It’s a double bed, with a single duvet, and my foot sticks out the side. It takes a few minutes to remember the previous night. My last exam. Walking out of the exam room and leaving my pen and my bottle of water in there; talismans of the exam season which I wanted to leave behind.

My mind works its way through the rest of yesterday. Going to my old house – the one I lived in with Mike – to collect some of my things. Asking to have a bath there, having saved a post-exams bathbomb up for months and having nowhere to use it. Seeing Mike along the street as he left the house for an hour, feeling too much, evidently, to even be in the same house as me. Feeling pain in my heart and not enjoying my bath. Heading to a beer garden. Ordering a pitcher of Pimms, the bright fruits bobbing in the liquid. On to a club. MindReader wore a striped jumper. MindReader.

I roll over in bed, pat down my snarled hair. I don’t have to revise anymore. I can do anything I want today. I lean down to pick up my phone off the floor when I must have left it last night. I dash off a text to MindReader and he replies immediately.

The friend I’m staying with must have heard me stirring (or it’s ridiculously late in the morning), as he brings a cup of tea in to me.

“MindReader, eh?” is all he says. I blush. I never wanted to be that girl, snogging in a club.

“Mmm,” I say.

“What’re you doing today, before the barbecue?”

“Something private,” I say.

I take a shower and contemplate what to wear. In the end, I put on a yellow vest top, the colour of summer, and put a bright pink flower in my hair. I wear no make up, for our first date. MindReader won’t mind. There is no hair straightening. I leave it wet.

It’s a beautiful day; easily the hottest of the year. The sky is such a deep blue it is almost navy, the sun blisteringly hot on my shoulders, drying and curling my hair almost instantly. I pull out my MP3 player and select Private Universe by Crowded House. The beat seems to match the thrum of the sun on my skin, the nervous/excited beat of my heart.

MindReader is staying just down the road, at another friend’s. I turn a corner and I can see the house, white against blue. As I walk up the path, I feel something magical. It it probably just a combination of sunny weather and having finished exams, but I feel as if my future is blooming in front of me; not as a flower blooms, but as hot air blooms into cold, filling every gap.

MindReader is mine. I’ve got another degree, and a job lined up too. The weather is beautiful. We have an entire summer in front of us.

Crowded House finish singing. MindReader answers the door before I knock.

“Hi,” he says.

And so began the happiest day of my life. It will take some beating.