‘I bought and renovated a house in Corfu with my best friend’

When we met at school 45 years ago, little did we imagine we’d be buying a Greek holiday home together. But after years of shared holidays and not one argument during that time, my friend Jo McEwan seemed the right person to do it with [says Sarah Longley, 59, who runs a catering company in Manchester].

Nearly every year our families went on holiday together, even though Jo and her family lived miles down the motorway in Dulwich, southeast London. Jo, 59, and her husband, Jed, 62, had two girls and a boy, just like Mark and me. We all grew up together, with kitchen discos, big birthday celebrations and trips to Greece, France and Devon.

We’d been to Corfu four times and