LOVE, SEX and A TABLECLOTH DRESS

Sophia Money-Coutts, author of The Wish List

My 18-year-old self wasn’t my best self. I was nearly 6ft, my hair was orange after a DIY dyeing accident when

I tried to go blonde, and I was carrying a bit of toast weight, having spent my final school year skipping PE to eat bacon sandwiches. And I’d been at an all-girls’ boarding school for seven years, which meant that my physical insecurities were compounded by boys remaining an alien species. I’d kissed a few but not much more than that.

There was one who seemed less untouchable than others, but only because of proximity. He lived near my mum and we hung out when I was at home for the holidays. Harry was three years older than me and deeply glamorous: he had floppy hair, smoked, wanted to be a fighter pilot and lived in a gothic castle. We watched films and he played music: The Beatles, Bowie.

I’d only half-listen, because I was too busy dreaming about being his wife. I was convinced that we were destined to be together and I merely had to bide my time before he realised it, too.

When an invitation for his 21st birthday party arrived (dress code: white tie), I spent months deliberating what to wear.

My mum made me a skirt in the end. Run up on her sewing machine and fashioned from raspberry-coloured gingham, it pouffed around my legs like a ballgown. Up top: a strappy white top from Oasis and a strapless bra that dug into my back. It was only later I realised I went to the party dressed as a tablecloth.

On the night, I was terrified. The party was on the lawn in front of the castle, with a hot-air balloon ferrying guests over it as a ride, plus a marquee in which all 300 guests sat for dinner. The first disappointment was being seated far away from Harry with no one I knew, increasingly uncomfortable in my bra. The second was that Harry seemed to be getting on suspiciously well with the blonde he was sitting beside. She was an It girl

I’d seen in Tatler, wearing a slinky black dress that looked like a negligee. I wasn’t even sure there was a bra underneath it. She had the hair of Rapunzel and the body of a Greek nymph.

As they continued to draw closer at their table, and then on the dance floor, I became steadily more miserable, drank too much wine and sought solace in Harry’s friend, Edmund. An hour later, I ended up snogging him in retaliation, only to be discovered by Harry’s mother, my hand fighting to get under Edmund’s kilt. The humiliation was complete.

Harry teased me about Edmund for years. But I remain grateful for that diabolical evening. It taught me that love can be brutal and, just because I’d dreamed of something happening, in that moony way of teenage girls, it didn’t mean it would in real life. Luckily, my friendship with Harry has endured in a way it may not have if we’d done something as fumbling teenagers. Love can take many forms, after all.

(I also learned to think harder about party outfits.)

The Wish List is out 22 July