As I pushed my trolley around Aldi looking for the cheapest rice and pasta I could find to feed the family, I thought wistfully, of my first love, Rupert.
My husband and I spent our last holiday in rainy Wales. My ex, on the other hand, has just returned from a sailing trip in Greece I met Rupert on my first day at university in the late 1990s. He was that tall, dark and handsome cliché, beautifully dressed in a Ralph Lauren shirt and preppy chinos. I plucked up the courage to chat to him and, later that night, we ended up kissing.I didn’t realise at first how rich he was. He casually mentioned a flat in Chelsea and then, one weekend, took me back to his parent’s house, a huge Tudor pile with wooden panelling in the hall, in an affluent enclave of Surrey.
That’s pretty much the opposite of my quiet, reserved frugal, husband, a grammar school boy from the North. He is a saver rather than a spender and everything, even a day trip with the children, has to be planned weeks in advance.