Having said goodbye to his daughter, Cherie Blair, Steph Booth's husband Tony was ready to get lost en route to a new Irish life

Sometimes I happen to catch the reflection of a middle-aged woman in a shop window. She appears to be following me. Despite knowing this is a common experience, it always gives me a bit of a start when I realise the reflection is mine. My eldest son, Tom, is 26 and it is entirely reasonable that the woman in the glass is me, but how to explain the different, much younger woman who lives in my head?

The only way I can bring myself to accept the advancing years is with the realisation I am turning into my Irish grandmother, Kathleen Buckley, from Co Kerry. All those "wise" sayings and superstitions that drove me crazy when I was an impatient child suddenly begin to make a lot of sense - especially the one about not tempting the fates.

It was that particular one which would not allow me to start packing up in our house in England, despite being given a date for the exchange of contracts, just in case something went wrong at the last minute. This position would, perhaps, have been more understandable had we been the owners of a small bungalow; however, the reality was a fairly large, four-storey, terraced house crammed with the junk and treasures accumulated over years.

Tony and I found the experience of sorting, rejecting and packing our possessions within about 10 days a severe test of our marriage. Our friends who came to help also found it a bit of a trial as they ducked the verbal punches thrown by Tony and me as we argued about whose idea it was to move and do we really need all this stuff - yes, just look at what you want to keep. There was the added stress factor of deciding what should be put into storage for several months while building work was completed on our house in Co Cavan.

So, there were boxes for the stuff we could not do without, boxes for storage and black plastic bags full of the things we were not taking with us. We have since realised we were both sneaking about, when we thought the other was not looking, swapping the contents of the various piles. Somehow, we made it to the Holyhead ferry at the appointed time. As, my grandmother would have said, these things have a habit of working out in the end.

Our plan when we arrived in Dublin was that I would go ahead in my car and Tony would follow me in his. This was eminently sensible as I am a far better navigator than him. The serious flaw in our scheme was the Dublin rush hour, and we soon became separated. An even more serious problem was my dawning and slightly panicky realisation that Tony probably would not remember where our house was - I had done the driving when we were house-hunting.

Sitting in the traffic as it crawled through Dublin, I tried to telephone him, but he had his mobile switched off - being a technophobe, he doesn't know how to switch it on. I decided the best plan would be to drive straight to the house and at least get our three cats and two dogs, which were travelling with me, safely ensconced. It was the journey from hell. As I sped through the dark night our Jack Russell terrier, who suffers from motion sickness, alternated between vomiting and moaning in the most wretched fashion. Just outside Cavan, one of the cats decided he could not take any more and emptied his bowels in the cat box. At that moment I decided I was definitely going to divorce my husband - if I ever found him again.

My assumption that Tony would not find his new home proved to be correct. Leaving the animals in the house with plenty of food and water to help them over their trauma I drove to the bed and breakfast where we had a reservation for two nights. We could not move into the house immediately as the furniture was still making its way from England.

Tony had remembered the name of the village, Blacklion, but not where he was staying, so he called in at the Garda station. The poor man on duty was a little surprised when he opened the door - he was watching one of Tony's old films on the television. Having discussed various possibilities, including Tony having a bed in one of the cells, the garda figured out from a garbled description which bed and breakfast he was looking for - it was just over the road. So, despite poor omens, we were eventually reunited just in time to spend our first night in Ireland in the same bed.

Next Monday: The spirit of rebellion on the Irish roads