When I moved to the Algarve in southern Portugal I had my future mapped out. I was going to meet a Portuguese or British girl – for some reason I thought the latter would be more likely – and her name would be Claire. I would be walking my dog along the ocean on a beautifully mild winter’s day, passing one of those whitewashed villas with a kidney-shaped swimming pool and a garden decorated in purple bougainvillea.

Inside the garden would be an English rose-type reading The Times, a divorcee sojourning in Albufeira to recover from her break-up. She would invite me in to share her Earl Grey tea. We would wax lyrical over the general decaying state of the UK, two kindred spirits disillusioned by the rat race. Soon I’d be chopping wood to make a log fire every evening. (That must show you what an incurable romantic I am because, as many people will attest, I’m the least practical person in the world!)

Getting real
Time to wake up! Needless to say, "Claire" never happened and would remain forever in the realm of fantasy. The only British girls I actually met in the Algarve were tattooed overweight drunken "Sharons" in pubs.

My partner, of course, turned out to be neither British nor Portuguese, but Bulgarian. I first met Dessislava at Lisbon University in 2001. When she told me she was from Bulgaria I did that momentary double take which I now recognise as the habitual reaction of the ignorant Westerner when greeted with the "B" word for the first time, kind of wracking one’s head for an apposite comment but not finding one.

Dessi was attractive and intellectually curious. Unlike so many British girls she was untainted by dead-end consumerism and the cynicism that comes with it. Tall and statuesque, she has a marvellous complexion, like so many Bulgarian women. When did I fall for her? Perhaps a seminal moment came on January 31 2002. All the students in our language class attended a party at the apartment of the Venezuelan charge d’affaires in Portugal. We took the tram on what seemed like an interminable journey up and down the labyrinthine streets of the Portuguese capital. Dessi felt a little ill and I was concerned about her.

A really spacious, swanky building in Lisbon’s Belem district, the penthouse had magnificent terraces that overlooked the River Tejo. In the distance, on that wonderful late winter night shimmering under the stars, you could see the Monument of Discoveries and the 25 Abril Bridge and the Belem Tower. Dessi and I were chatting outside and then rejoining the others but somehow we kept drifting back to each other. And somewhere along the line the "others" ceased to exist for me on that particular evening.

Practical problems
First, however, we had a practical problem to solve. Dessi was not technically legal in Portugal. It was pre-EU accession and she couldn’t work in Lisbon. To address this, we came up with a convoluted plan based on the advice of a friend who had been through a similar situation. We were told to advertise for a "domestica interna" (a live-in home help), stipulate impossibly stringent criteria (a 60-hour week of hard labour for a minimum salary) to which nobody, naturally, in their right mind would reply. Then and only then – when no Portuguese candidate was forthcoming – would I be able to "hire" Dessi from abroad. Yet the authorities, perhaps detecting a ruse, clamped down on this activity before Dessi could become my domestic servant.

By then we had decided to marry anyway. Gibraltar seemed to be the ideal place – "in the footsteps of John Lennon and Sean Connery" – as our taxi driver told us on the way to the Caleta Palace Hotel. Gibraltar was, in fact, Dessi’s first taste of the UK – in the far south of Spain surrounded by monkeys!

Much harder was settling in a country - Portugal - which, ultimately, was home to neither of us. We knew nothing of the ins and outs of the healthcare system, for example, leading to a maze of complexity when our daughter arrived in 2005. In many cases it was the blind leading the blind or, in this case, Dessi, with her great gift for languages, was the queen with one eye. Yet something was missing. After many fits and starts, we found ourselves moving inexorably towards Sofia where we have been since 2006. In the end it’s always easier when one of you is in your own country.