I have made a new friend on a new dating/hookup app. I’ll call him Calpurnius. He’s into Star Trek and food and board games – all things that I am very interested in, however games I have not been able ot play because its a bit difficult to play many games with onky one other person.

He is a mountain of a man and makes me feel tiny. He’s also a little neurosparkly. Knowing that from the outset made it easier to calibrate my own expectations rather than wondering whether I’d somehow got things wrong. We both seem to understand that sometimes brains simply do brain things.

We met first for a drink and a pizza. He can make me laugh, which is a plus. And he’s from a region in Southern Spain, interesting since I have not long returned from Spain and straight away bumped into a native sepaker here in the UK.

The next time we met he came to my house, passed the pooch test with flying colours – he said hello and didn’t object to her bouncing at him. She calmed down once she had gotten a good smell and realised that this was an OK human. We got a takeaway and watched Star Trek: First Contact while he flopped against me, which I rather liked.

Then I helped him with a littkle of his house move.

And last night we went to the pictures together to watch The Odyssey. Afterwards we went to a bar near his flat and talked about the film and other stuff. It was a very noisy bar and I was feeling a bit out of sorts.

I was missing my husband.

My ex-husband.

He would have hated The Odyssey because it was such a long film.

But sometimes you just want somebody even if you know that they’d just grumble at you!

Sitting in the dark, absent-mindedly shovelling popcorn into my mouth, I realised I felt like crying.

Clearly, I am not ready to move on.

Which means I need to be fair to Calpurnius. I like him. I enjoy spending time with him. But if he’s hoping this is going somewhere, I need to tell him that I’m not ready for a relationship. Not because of anything he’s done, but because I’m still carrying more of my old life than I’d realised.