This time a year ago...

...life was a little bit different for this girl.

I was not long back from this holiday and after an amazing 2 weeks filled with enough funny stories to keep me going for a lifetime, I arrived back in England, sad to be home and wondering when I would ever get back to see my friends again but also pleased to be back and looking desperately forward to seeing my boyfriend.

He hadn't come with me on the trip and whilst I was away he had been sending me e-mails and texting me, telling me how much he missed me and couldn't wait to see me.

Luckily I didn't have long to wait. I got home on the Thursday and he was going to be coming over to Hull on the Saturday so I had plenty of time to unpack and shake off my jetlag in time to see him again.

He broke up with me on the Friday.

On the phone.

Without ever really explaining why.

I was a total wreck - not only because I wondered what I'd been doing with my life for the last year and a half, not only because I'd never had my heart broken before and didn't realise how much it hurt but because I'd just left my best friend in America, because he ruined my life at a point when I couldn't have been happier - I never got a chance to talk to anyone about my America trip properly because everything got consumed with talking about the break-up.

At times like this there are few things a girl could rely on, one of which is her friends. Mine failed miserably at this task. There could be many reasons for this which I won't go into now but I soon realised that if I didn't want to sink into a pit of despair I had to go out and make my own fun.

First on the agenda was an old school friend's hen weekend. We had sort of stayed in touch after school but not massively but I knew a weekend away from myself was what was in order.

The morning we were travelling down to Cardiff we stopped off at her parents' house. This was hen party central and in the kitchen my friend's older brother was packing up the goody bags for all the hens.

Obviously I knew him from way back but purely as my friend's older brother. I thought of him in the same way I might have considered my friend's shoes - just something sort of "belonging" to her. I knew who he was but never really registered him, he was just there in the background. Especially as he was 6 years older than me - he was totally off the radar.

Anyway. Back to the hen party.

There he was again. I said hello and that was that. Off we went to Cardiff to heal my broken heart amongst 15 loud drunk women.

Imagine my surprise then when I got a message on Facebook (obviously - this is a 21st century tale after all!) from him, asking if I wanted to go out for a drink. I hestitated. I definitely wasn't ready for something new. I'd only been broken up with my boyfriend for a month, now wasn't the time.

But I had nothing else to do and didn't want to sit in on my own being depressed so in the spirit of going out and keeping busy I said yes.

And here we are.

1 year on (tomorrow)

Life's a funny old thing isn't it?