The wedding was off: I needed a long walk far from home...

Instead of a romantic honeymoon, Greg Dickinson found himself stepping out on his own in Turkey – and becoming philosophical about being single again

Iwas miles from the nearest village in the foothills of Turkey’s Taurus Mountains when the heavens opened. A nearby pine tree offered as much protection as an umbrella pierced with 1,000 pin holes, but it was better than total saturation. So I stood beneath it, closed my eyes and drank in the sweet smell of drenched earth.

Heavy raindrops gathered on branches and thwacked comically on to my hood. This wasn’t forecast. But then again, going on a long-distance walk on my own wasn’t how I thought I would be spending my honeymoon. Sometimes, things don’t work out quite as you expect.

My backpack was becoming increasingly drenched, so I opened the front pocket to check that my new passport, recently given its maiden stamp by a surly Turkish immigration officer, wasn’t getting soaked. Exactly 10 years before, an equally surly Moroccan immigration officer stamped my previous passport for the first time

on entering the port city of Tangiers. I had hitchhiked there with a girl from university and in the decade that followed we would get many more stamps together. We would graduate, move to London, and on a winter’s night in Budapest decide to get married.

But two months before the wedding, the storm clouds gathered. With hindsight, I suppose the break-up wasn’t entirely out of the blue. My fiancée had spent three of the previous 12 months working in New York, the longest spell that we’d ever spent apart. And having just turned 30 she was reassessing a lot of things in her life. At 28, I struggled to relate.

There was a quiet, lingering feeling that something wasn’t quite right, but I thought perhaps that was just the pressure of organising a wedding. So life went on. But then in February this year she told me how she truly felt and life temporarily stopped going on. Our low-key spring wedding was cancelled. Uninvitations were distributed, which was as excruciating as it