HOME HUNTING PART 1: THE IN-BETWEENERS

I felt like I started a huge story arc in my life today. You get these moments: meeting someone and knowing your lives will be forever intertwined; starting a job that opens into exciting new opportunities; finding a hobby that clicks into your personality like a neatly cut jigsaw piece. You get to the end of those days and you realise that life might not ever be the same.

I've started looking for a house. It's been daunting, depressing, exciting and fun... all at once. Emmie, who specialises in proactivity and taking the bull by the horns, took me round to eight different properties today (each with their own delightful estate agent) just so that I'd get a feel of what it is that I'm looking for. We had a lot of poignant fun, zipping across Tilehurst, poking our noses into other people's old-fashioned houses and figuring out what could be done.

"How are you going to write about this?" she said at the end of the day. I'm still not sure I know. At certain points this afternoon, I felt quite scared and yes, more than a little bit sad. I can't help it: see, I'd always imagined this moment in my life; I'd always imagined I'd be sitting in an estate agent's office with, well, with my fiancée; that we'd be dreaming and planning together about the kind of home that we wanted to create, the kind of place that we would fill with love and hope and family. That is how it's supposed to go isn't it? We're supposed to leave our parents and cleave to our wives and our husbands... aren't we? There's no in-between.

Only there is an in-between for some of us and it's a gaping chasm of uncertainty. You know that you have to leave, but there's no-one to cleave to. There's only you, standing alone at the edge of the grand canyon with no-one to hold on to. And if I may be honest, that makes me feel like a massive failure.

My friend Emmie was awesome today. She herself is in the process of buying a place and seems to have worked out exactly what to do before fearlessly going and doing it. She helped me decipher what I needed and I got a few good ideas about what I'm looking for. I hadn't really appreciated, for example, that I need a lot of sunlight and a garden. I need a great spot to put a piano too, and a quiet street for the cat who will one day keep me company.

So, with a melancholy mixture of past failures, present worries and future hope, I guess I got the ball rolling; the story arc that will one day see me at my own housewarming party has begun. What's more, you're all welcome round mine for a cuppa. When the time comes.