Our first anniversary

Today exactly a year ago we left London for Havana, tired, cross with each other, worried about what we were leaving behind and hardly thinking about what was lying ahead.

Here in Jaiselmer, Rajasthan's golden desert city, over a glass of beer, then a lemon soda and finally a masala chai we perform the necessary toasts to each country we've visited and are yet to visit, with a special double-salute to India and all her touts. We'll be sad to leave in just over a week.

We congratulate ourselves on spending nearly every hour of the past 365 days in each other's company without too much unnecessary scarring. And every now and then the inevitable "can't believe it's already been a year" slips out. Because we can't believe it has already been a year.

We wonder whether we'll ever do another full year, whereupon Amanda's "maybe when we're sixty" makes me reach nervously for an empty beer glass.

We talk of all the places we'd still like to go - from London to Beijing by train, the rest of South and Central America, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan etc. We need much more than a year and can't wait until we're sixty.

We finish the evening by buying a skin-and-bone cow six cauliflower heads and 5 tomatoes while turbaned men wrapped in shawls hasten home in the wintry desert night. Near our hotel, a lone camel is parked outside a house, much like a black cab outside a driver's house in Hackney.

It has been a good year for us, and - give or take a few hundred typhoid antigens - we are very grateful to have been so fortunate.