1. Firstly, grow up on the opposite side of a white picket fence to your prospective partner. Have photos of the two of you painting each other’s naked four-year-old bodies. When you are in your early teens, you must catch fish together and hang upside down in an oak tree, discussing awkward crushes. This sort of love bakes slowly. Check it yearly to make sure it is rising. When it is ready, you’ll know. The film will just peel back from your eyes and you’ll be in each others arms on a dance floor somewhere. To decorate, carve a heart into the bark of the oak tree. It will feel like it was always meant to be there.

2. This falling in love is best done in London. Firstly, walk in one direction, and have your future partner walk in another direction that intersects with yours. Then, run into each other. Be as dramatic as you like. It is essential you drop your coffee on his suit. He must allow his briefcase to fling open, papers blowing everywhere. Your bright red umbrella must go flying across a stream of traffic. He retrieves it and takes you out for lunch and by the end of your spaghetti salad you cant imagine life without each other.

3. To begin, enter a hot air ballooning race, preferably across the Atlantic Ocean. Quickly develop nemesis status with an attractive but secretly insecure competitor. Bring mutual loathing to a boil, then race across the Atlantic. As you both take increasingly dangerous risks in order to beat one another you should find that you  both become wrecked on a deserted island. Once this happens, create a line down the center of the land mass and refuse to communicate. Eventually necessity will draw you together. Hate and love are eerily similar emotions, and it only takes a deserted island to transform one to the other. When the timing is right, consummate your relationship underneath the coco palms. For best effect, add live media coverage of your rescue and pronounce your love across national television.

*This post it for Luke Carbis. I hope this satisfies you.

(what would I do without those people who believe in me more than I do myself?)