The only other woman I had felt that deeply about was a few years before. Again, that was a magic moment in an evening class. Chance throwing strangers together (there’s that screech again).

She, too, was going out with someone (should have learnt a lesson here), but we were very intimate friends. She left the UK to work abroad, came back unexpectedly, rang me up, took me out for a drink and in an esoteric way which only women can create and decipher told me she had broken up with the guy, was back in the UK and very single. I did not want to rush things, she had been through a lot of upheaval and she was travelling the world with her job, enjoying the sense of being single for the first time in her life and was using the opportunity to find herself without being with someone else. I held back and supported her choices. I received a phone call one evening, she had rung me up to tell me she was pregnant, not by me, I never got to enjoy that particular pleasure with her, no, with a bloke she had met on a plane taking her back to her work. I lost touch with her, deliberately.

In my first year of university I altered a few modules around and missed some early tutorials. I was advised to attend two groups instead of one for a few weeks to catch up. The module was a different department, so the first group were all new faces to me and as I walked into the second group that week more new faces to me, all except one. There was a girl there, she was the absolute double of Miss Pregnant, she even had the same laugh.

Was this life giving me a second bite at the cherry?.....(screech)

Coincidences like that can not be meaningless, surely?

I shared another module with her that was about to be split into smaller workgroups. I seized the moment, pushing my chair in and sitting down in a spot that insured I would be in her group. I got to know her quite well, attempted to chat her up in her room one day. We had chatted about relationships, I remember her commenting on the fact that someone must have really hurt me at some point. I sat there thinking, yes, and she looked exactly like you. It never worked out, we were friends and when in the second year I had returned to meet someone and get M.E. she used to tell my girlfriend every time she met her how luck she was to be going out with me. Odd, because she could have gone out with me.

At the very end of the degree I jumped out of a cab because I had seen this girl walking up the hill alone. We ended up in her kitchen drinking coffee. She told me about the love between her parents and how she wanted her lovelife to be like that, to meet Mr Right and live happy ever after: I hope she found him. That was why she had turned people down throughout the degree. I recall saying something like one or two good guys had tried to go out with her and she leaned across, squeezed my knee, and said “I know”.

So much for lucky, hand of fate, magic moment meetings, coincidence and “meant to be’s”. I did not even mention the two pairs of girls called Nadia I met in two blocks some six years apart. The one who just said “I’ve got to go now” turned and walked away halfway through a museum visit, or the one who went to Belgium and promised to bring me back a present, she came back but never got back in touch with me. Then the one who modelled and I treated rather stupidly, I had a few problems and I allowed them to ruin something that could have been good. She was a sweet and gentle person and I regret ending our meetings. I regret losing touch with all three but especially her, (though the French one was absolutely gorgeous). If the museum escapee Nadia followed her dream she is flying helicopters and singing with fruit on her head like Carmen Miranda.