Tom had certainty. He loved glaciers so much that he couldn’t not study them. The whole trajectory of his life was marked out right there in front of him: Ph.D, post-doctoral work, publish in journals, spend as much time as possible in cold countries wearing crampons, go to conferences with lots of bearded men, maybe write a book one day, teach, retire. Love was a side dish for Tom – it was very important to him, and he put a lot of himself into his relationship to me, but any relationship would only ever be supplementary to his work. I recognised this and I didn’t resent it. In fact, it made me feel quite comfortable: a man whose greatest love is a massive chunk of ice is a lot easier to deal with than one whose greatest love is another woman, or drink, or himself.

I was in awe of Tom’s certainty, envious of it. I questioned him at length about it. When had he realised? How did it feel to be so sure? Had he never wanted to do anything else? Did he never want to drop it all and go be a lion tamer, or an accountant? These questions seemed daft to him. My inability to settle on a subject of interest or decide on a career path was as incomprehensible to him as his determination was to me.

I spent a year with Tom, and it was one of the happiest relationships I have had. He took me on wonderful little holidays to special places in the Lake District and the Scottish Islands. He fueled my love of landscape, introduced me to things I still love and appreciate. One day he mentioned that he might want to go and work in the wilds of Canada. I was perturbed for several days and ended up crying on his sofa: ‘What about us?’ I assumed that he would leave me behind if he left for Canada, and was quite taken aback when he gently suggested I could come too.

I was happy for a few days, but then, pretty much without my realising it was happening, my attitude towards him changed. I began to see myself in the map of his life: envisage the eventual proposal and marriage, my role as the wife of an academic, a comfortable life of travel, discussion, poring over maps, growing old.

Within a month or so I had taken up with a radical firebrand Marxist, whose greatest love, he told me off the bat, was alcohol. I left Tom, hurting him badly in the process, and then hurting myself when he almost immediately took up with a girl in his department, whom I suspect he has now married.

Tom represents the certainty that I crave, creep towards and then flee from the moment it threatens to consume me. I am not at all sure why I am this way but there it is. I cannot cope with the knowledge of what comes next, but equally, I fear the chaos of ever shifting sands.

When I think of Tom these days I imagine him sitting contentedly on a glacier somewhere in central Iceland, scratching observations in a neat little black notebook while the sky blazes pink and red.