After years of pulling in decent dough, Kate and Steve had both lost their jobs at the same publishing house in June 2001.

Everything was looking good until their jobs took over. And then disappeared.

Publishing was going into recession and editor's jobs were few so Steve was stumped.

Kate fared better. She landed a well-paying job. Pity she hated it.

Night after night Kate came home and told him about her day. Boy, was she down.

Steve bit the bullet and went into a warehouse, moving boxes around.

The stress told. The doctor diagnosed depression and gave him Prozac. But it worked. He flushed the pills and decided to get his head together.

Then, one Friday night Kate came home in tears.

A voice said: "Look, Love, if it's that bad, chuck it."

Turned out to be Steve’s voice. The idea surprised him too.

With few funds to replace his company car, he’d bought a big BMW motorbike.

He said: “We can always rent out the house, jump on the bike and tour Europe until things pick up."

Kate said: "Do you think we could?"

Her eyes said it all. And, sadly, since they’d no children, they could.

They booked a ferry from Portsmouth to Bilbao, smack in the middle of winter.

They turned right at Bilbao and hugged the coastline to the toe of Italy. They caught a ferry to Sicily then Malta and Gozo then rode the Adriatic coast into Austria, Switzerland, Germany France and home. Took them six months. But they’d made a few decisions.

They sold the house and bought a motorhome and drove it to Barcelona. Steve was planning to teach English and they’d work for food, drink, fuel and each other instead of big businesses.

Then one morning Steve found himself with a bottle of wine in one hand and a positive pregnancy test in the other.

And so, back to Scotland it was, where Steve decided it was a roundabout way to start a family so he’d better document it. He’d flipped out a notebook a few times on the way. His book includes the biographies of an Elvis impersonator on the run from the police, a Colombian on the run from the cartels and a Morris Dancer simply on the run.

Twenty years later, their daughter is studying law.

Funny how things turn out.