Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista

boyfriend. I didn’t actually mean to hit him like that. I mean, I meant to hit him, only I didn’t know it was him. If you see what I mean.’ The policeman looked confused, but apparently satisfied that Jake was under no immediate threat from this deranged woman, he let us go.
    Having stopped the bleeding, Jake grabbed my hand.
    ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘we’ve got a train to catch!’
    ‘Have we?’ I asked, confused. ‘I can’t go to Manchester with you, Jake, I’ve promised Celia I’ll go to her place.’
    ‘I’ve spoken to Celia,’ he said, dragging me along. ‘It’s all sorted.’
    ‘We’re going to the wrong way, Jake. The trains to Manchester go from the other end of the station.’
    ‘So they do, but we’re not going to Manchester,’ he replied with a grin. I looked up. We were heading towards the Eurostar terminal.
    Please tell me we’re not going to Brussels .
    We were not going to Brussels. On the train, over coffee and croque monsieurs, Jake told me he’d booked the trip the day after I surprised him at his flat.
    ‘You know, the day after the night you wrecked my living room,’ he said with a charmingly coy smile. He’d spoken to Jude and Ali, confirming that I hadn’t made plans with either of them, and arranged for Jude to deliver my passport to him before she left for Edinburgh. He’d also rung my sister to let her in on the plan.
    He’d booked us a room at L’Hôtel, on the rue des Beaux-Arts on the Left Bank.
    ‘It’s where Oscar Wilde breathed his last,’ Jake told me cheerfully. Our room – thankfully not the one where poor Oscar checked out – was lavishly decorated in deep reds and gold, with an enormous green and gold mural depicting peacocks above the bed. The whole place was dark and opulent and smacked of decadence. Outside it was beautiful and sunny, albeit freezing cold, and we spent hours wandering along the Seine, occasionally popping into brasseries to drink café au lait or red wine we climbed the hill to the Sacre Coeur, we visited the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée Rodin, we ate at La Coupole, we spent hours and hours in bed. It was almost perfect (I say almost because I wasn’t allowed to go shopping – Jude had made Jake promise). It was the best New Year I’d ever had.

20
     
    Cassie Cavanagh feels very grown up
    By early March, New Year’s Eve was a distant memory; it seemed like a different life. Since 3 January, the day I’d got back to work, I’d been under constant pressure. The initial cash injection we received in early December had been followed by another from a second group of investors in January, and the company was expanding its operations at breakneck speed. This was great news, of course, although it did have its drawbacks.
    Peter and Fabio were almost never in the office, and Rupert and Olly decided to take a three-week trip to Australia and New Zealand to meet with potential new suppliers out there. With four of the VO’s seven employees out of the office for long stretches, those of us who remained were left with a crushing workload. I was having to take on more and more of the day-today running of the business and had less time to do the more tedious, menial tasks – but since there was noone else to do them, it simply meant I was working longer and longer hours.
    February had passed in a blur, the only highlight being Valentine’s Day, spent with Jake, a chilly picnic of wine and chocolates on Primrose Hill which was so much more romantic than the wallet-bustingly expensive dinner I’d had at Nobu with Dan last Valentine’s Day. And, unlike Dan, Jake didn’t send an ostentatious show of red roses on the day itself. He sent me irises the day before and bought me an orchid the day after.
    ‘ Everyone gets flowers on Valentine’s Day,’ he explained. ‘You’re special.’
    Outside work I spent almost every spare minute I had either with Jake or with Ali, whose state of mind seemed to be in a constant state of vacillation, from near-hysterical excitement to sheer terror. She was now just nine weeks away from her due date and had decided all of a sudden that there was no way she could stay in her smart, child-unfriendly apartment.
    ‘I have to buy a house,’ she announced over breakfast at Shoreditch House, where she still had her membership. ‘I can’t stay in my flat. It’s totally impractical for a child. He’ll fall off the balcony into the canal. I have to move. And I only have two months in which to