I met him at the airport. A stranger on an escalator. He stared. I stared back.

I should have let the Laotian with the ‘International Students’ sign take me to campus along with the other confused foreigners. I didn’t. Instead, I stayed to chat with tall, dark and handsome and thought about putting my postgraduate degree on hold for a while…to flirt.

He was a Cheshire boy. A photographer trying his hand in computers and design. He had a dog named Amber, a flat down south, and a scruffy leather jacket that he wore with an electric yellow tie. He said he only spoke to Top Totties and wasn’t I the most American looking thing he’d ever seen. (Something about the tan, shorts and fraternity sweater in the Manchester Fall.) I told him he looked like Bo Brady from DOOL and ‘boy he was hot’. (Subtlety’s a time waster.)

Three hours later, in a car full of cameras, ladders and hounds tooth, we swung by campus and picked up the keys to my new $1,000 a month room in a shared Didsbury cottage ( ‘The House of Broken English’).

The stranger kissed me, here and there, (gotta love those Euro kisses), left me to my Libyan and Finnish housemates and promised to visit me the next day.

He did.

Over dinner that weekend he told me he had a girlfriend.

Two weeks later, I didn’t care.

You see, the thing about girlfriends, even long haul ones, is they’re not wives. All is fair……