Lucy Robinson

“How do you feel about going on a date with me? I'm abroad for another two weeks; you've got plenty of time to prepare yourself. It will be the best night of your life, of course.”

“I am back in London in a couple of days and looking forward to Sunday. Here is what we are doing. 1. Going to see my favourite mad transgender folk singer at the Roundhouse. 2. Then I am going to feed you tapas in a little place by Mornington Crescent. 3. Then we will go home in opposite directions and I will stare at my silent phone for weeks, wondering what happened. Or we will go for a dirty hump on Primrose Hill. Or maybe we will just have an awkward kiss/hug loaded with the promise of more next time.  ”

“Dear FranI'm watching you sleep. You are sucking your thumb. (We're going to need to talk about this.) I can't pretend you look like a delicately slumbering princess, because you don't. Apart from the thumb business you are twitching around like a ferret and about ten minutes ago you pulled the entire duvet over yourself and left me with nothing. But I've never loved you more than I do right now. I love you so much. I hope we can have a life together. There's so much I want to say to you. Please wake up soon.Freddy x”

“You are the most ludicrous excuse for a man I've ever known - but there isn't a centimetre of you that I don't think is perfect.”

“Well, he's history. You're free to meet the man of your dreams now.”

“Whoever you end up with, you shouldn't be changing a thing for them. Nothing. Don't be with anyone if you can't be you. Because you're bang on just as you are. ”

“Anger had arrived and it was riding a big furious don't-fuck-with-me horse.”

“I want you to be with someone who really, really loves you. A wild love! A crazy love! I want yours to be the greatest love story of all time!”

“Well then that's our date confirmed. I am excited! Most girls want to know if I have long term plans to start a family; you want to know if I like 80s rap. I think I'm in love with you. Actually, I'm not you have a foul mouth and terrible taste in men by all accounts.”

“I'm eating a massive pastrami sandwich. It's so beautiful I might cry. Just so you know.”

“I was going to write a sharp witty email full of devastating one-liners but I suspect you want something nicer than that”

“He was what the egotistical part of me had always longed for: danger, sexiness, popularity, style, unpredictability. The kind of man who'd always keep me guessing. Just one night with him and i'd already started to wonder if perhaps i'd spent the last two years in a comfortable coma.”

“It was the sexual chemistry I wanted more of. It was electric. I'd forgotten what it was like to be with someone who excited you in every sense of the word, who thrilled and frightened you in equal measure.”

“Having a man this good looking begging me for sex was the best therapy I could ask for.”

“Do you have any idea how attractive you are?Well, I'm better than roseanne Barr, I suppose.”

“He was nice. And he was hot. And he didn't seem to mind that I was borderline mental.”

“I'd woken up this morning and nearly crapped my pants with fear. Whoever invented Internet dating deserved to be strung up: it was a terrible idea.”

“I was at Gatwick and I was a mess: breathlessly excited, horribly nervous and hoping, praying, that this might be it. That the man who was belted up preparing for touchdown would be the man I would spend the next sixty years picking up from airports, missing him, loving him, feeding him and, all things going well, having a fair bit of sex with him.”

“I didn't know his age or how he liked his tea, I was wearing a terrible coat and I was drunk as a stoat - but this moment felt like it. The one I'd been waiting patiently for since I was a little girl. I'd worked so hard, for so long, at being ok with being single, but all of the things I'd told myself about independence were disappearing rapidly into the cold night. Right now, he felt like the only person who mattered in the whole world.”

“He walked towards me. My heart was pounding like a nineties warehouse rave.”

“I wondered if perhaps I'd gone mad. I had known this man less than twenty-four hours and already I wanted to raise his children.”