ALICE: The Romantic Dream Life is a pilgrimage. It is a pilgrimage to health. It is also a pilgrimage of health. We have it on our journey, always partially, always imperfectly, always with an admixture of that illness which is its opposite or the mark of its imperfections. CHRISTOPHER HAMEL COOKE 'Health and Illness, Pastoral Aspects,' an entry in A Dictionary of Pastoral Care 1 We all have our favourite addictions to which we turn when we are under stress. For you it is food, while for others it can range from chemical substances to spending money or constant contact with others in order to avoid alone-ness. GARETH TUCKWELL AND DAVID FLAGG A Question of Healing I I can remember exactly when the miracles began. It was when I first met Nicholas Darrow and fell in love with him. Can I write that and avoid sounding like a romantic schoolgirl? No, so I must start again. I'm not a schoolgirl and being romantic is pointless. What had romance ever done for me, I often asked myself, and the answer was always the same: zilch. So let me reject any statement which reeks of romance and write instead: I can remember exactly when my life began to change out of all recognition. It was when I first saw Nicholas Darrow and glimpsed a life-style I had never encountered before. That's better. That's more truthful, and truth matters. I suppose in the end it's all a question of integrity. The meeting with Nicholas was quite unplanned. No doubt religious people would speak of divine providence, but I wasn't religious--not after slogging my guts out to look after Aunt. What had God ever done for me, I might have asked myself, and the answer would always have been the same: zilch. It was the March of 1988. I was trying to get a permanent job because I needed extra money to pay for more nursing, but I'd messed around with temporary work for so many months that all the shine had been stripped from my curriculum vitae, and when I explained about Aunt I could see my would-be employers thinking: family problems, unreliable, forget her. However, if Aunt was to stay out of the geriatric ward she had to be cared for by a rota of nurses from a private agency, and I had to earn the largest possible salary to--no, not to make ends meet, that was impossible, since the nursing care was so expensive, but at least I could postpone the evil day when Aunt's savings finally ran out and I had no choice but to consign her to one of the National Health dumping-grounds. On that particular morning in March I had unsuccessfully tried to flim-flam my way through an interview with a personnel officer who had behaved like a sadist. Trudging away from the hideous office block which housed her, I felt in a mood to jump off Tower Bridge. I was in the City, that square mile of London's financial district which always seems a world away from what I call Tourist London: the grand West End streets crammed with monuments of our Imperial past, and the grand department stores crammed with frenzied shoppers. On London Wall, that wide, bleak highway just south of the Barbican, I paused to work out which was my nearest tube station but by that time I was so overpowered by the desire to binge on a high-calorie lunch (mushroom quiche, chocolate-chip cookies, rum raisin ice cream) that I was incapable of coherent thought. To make matters worse the heavens then opened, the rain bucketed down and I realised I'd left my umbrella in the office of the sadist. In disgust I looked around for shelter, but there were no shops to be seen, only office blocks, and no buses, only taxis which I couldn't afford. I hurried...