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frizz the rest of the time. Mum always said I should value my best features, my clear skin and greeny-blue eyes, but at five foot two, all any potential boyfriends got to see of me was the top of my head. So I enlisted Callie’s help to prepare me for Suze’s party.
    We’d done our nails and fake tan the night before. Then it had taken Callie three hours to blowdry my hair straight, in those dark days before GHDs, and we’d both slicked on masses of wet-look lip gloss. As soon as we were out of sight of my parents’ house, we pulled down our jeans so our sparkly thongs and my muffin-top showed at the back, and teetered onwards on our platform flip-flops. But within a few seconds of arriving, we realised we’d got it terribly wrong.
    The prevailing aesthetic among Suze’s friends was more Manic Street Preachers than Steps, and we stood out like deeply uncool, French manicured sore thumbs from the black-clad, smudgy-eyelinered crowd. Humbly, I handed over the hash brownies – our only ticket to any sort of credibility – and we armed ourselves with bottles of warm Smirnoff Ice and tried to look like we belonged.
    Callie, of course, had a not-so-secret weapon: her fantastic figure and blonde hair were enough to guarantee that she’d pull, dodgy lip gloss or no dodgy lip gloss, and within about half an hour she was wrapped round Dwayne Roberts on the dance floor, the two of them kissing passionately as they locked pelvises to U2. I leaned despondently against the wall and wondered whether to go and look for another Smirnoff Ice, go and find a bathroom and confirm that my hair was frizzing up again, or head home – I’d already had four drinks in quick succession and was feeling light-headed and furry-toothed.
    I’d actually decided to interrupt Callie’s snog to tell her I was abandoning her (yes, I was as much of a loser as I sound when I was a teenager), when I got the sense I was being watched. I looked up and there, on the other side of the room, was the boy I realised must be Suze’s big brother. He had the same ice-grey eyes as her and the same air of effortless cool. He had shaggy dark hair. He was wearing camo trousers and a faded Iron Maiden T-shirt and smoking a fag. And looking at me. And smiling.
    I felt myself start to blush, and pretended to inspect my fingernails intently. But when I glanced up again, he was coming towards me.
    He didn’t say anything for a bit – not that I would have heard anyway, the music was deafening. But he handed me another drink – a cold one – and stood next to me, and straight away I felt less stupid and out of place. When the music stopped, he smiled again and said, “So, what brings you here?”
    I must have been emboldened by alcopops, because instead of staring at my shoes and blushing and stammering something about how I’d come with my mate, that was her over there, the hot one, I looked up at him and said, “I came to meet you.”
    And that was how it began. For the rest of that night Nick and I talked and danced together. He took my number, and two days later he called and asked me out, and for the next two years we were inseparable, an item, Nick and Pippa, Pippa and Nick. And now we were going to be Mr and Mrs Pickford. Or rather, Mr Pickford and Ms Martin.
    “So, that went well,” said Nick as we boarded the train home. And it had, as I’d known it would. My parents were thrilled, in their slightly muddle-headed way. Mum recited ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment’, and Dad insisted that Nick smoke one of his special-occasion cigars. Nick was still looking faintly green, although that may just have been the after-effects of Mum’s salted caramel chocolate pudding, which was a bit heavy on the salt – I was feeling rather thirsty myself.
    “I knew it would,” I said. “They’re pretty chilled out generally and they’ve always loved you to bits. They’ll be cool about the wedding anyway – they won’t try and take