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arms round her. ‘And what was your highlight?’
    ‘Oh, that’s easy,’ she replied. Without another word she took his hand and led him upstairs to their bedroom.

One day in Rob’s life
    It was three minutes past nine on the one-month anniversary of Rob’s arrival in Manchester, and he was already swearing at his computer. It wasn’t that it had crashed. It wasn’t that it was no longer letting him do an important task. It wasn’t even that he had accidentally deleted the last half-hour’s work. He was swearing at his computer because he had just checked his email to discover that someone called Galactica2345 had outbid him on eBay, by a measly fifty pence, for a twelve-inch tall, boxed, fully jointed and posable Mr T doll.
    He had intended it to be the jewel in the crown of the constantly evolving collection of items he had bought from eBay in the previous weeks. Before the move he had never had time to browse on eBay, but since he’d been in Manchester he’d become addicted to it. At first he couldn’t think of anything he wanted but after he had come across an entry for a mint condition 1982 Action Man, he had decided that his ‘thing’ would be to collect toys from his youth. His hoard of what Ashley privately referred to as ‘Rob’s treasure trove of crap’ now filled several shelves in his office. Rob looked forlornly at the space he’d cleared between his Six Million Dollar Man Transport and Repair Station (a bargain at £34.77) and his fully working Commodore 64 computer (not quite such a bargain at £122.98), then returned to his screen, deleted the offending email and opened up Dreamweaver.
    It had not escaped his attention that there might be a direct correlation between the volume of items he was buying off eBay and the length of time he’d been without friends in Manchester. In fact, it had occurred to him that if he didn’t acquire a social life soon there was a strong chance that he would end up owning absolutely everything he’d ever wanted in his life. And what would he do then? Why would he get out of bed in the mornings? How would he keep it together? eBay took his mind off how lonely he was. For the short period of time that he was logged on to the site he could forget his lack of friends and someone to talk to during the day and focus on things he could do something about: bidding against other socially challenged Internet geeks who, because they, too, were bidding in the middle of the day, must also work from home.
    And that was Rob’s main problem.
    Working from home.
    Other than fielding occasional work-related calls and emails from Phil, Rob was left to his own devices, which was the opposite of how his working day had been in London. In Wandsworth, Rob had spent his day taking calls from friends and arranging nights out for the week, holding meetings with Phil at the pub across the road from their office, occasionally dealing with a midday drop-in from Woodsy, looking for a companion and a lunchtime pint, as well as an awful lot of work. Now, however, his London friends weren’t calling to arrange nights out, meetings were happening mostly over the phone. Woodsy was having his lunchtime pint alone and, with no interruptions, Rob was getting more work done than he’d ever done before.
    Bad as things were, Rob took some consolation from the knowledge that at the end of the day he would be with Ashley. There were times when he felt as if it was only when she returned home that he could start living. So, when he wanted to go to the pub, he went with Ashley. When he wanted to go to the cinema, he went with Ashley. In fact, when he wanted to do anything outside the house but didn’t want to do it alone, Ashley came with him. It wasn’t just that Ashley gave Rob access to a social life, she was his social life.
    As much as Rob hated to admit that he needed anything (until this point he had scoffed at the idea that ‘no man is an island’) the truth was that he did. And while