SPELLBINDING LOVE
AUSSIE SINGER FIONA HORNE IS ENGAGED TO A MAN SHE FIRST DATED 30 YEARS AGO!
Not even a witch can always predict the strange turns that life will take. Dancing under the full moon beside a luminous sea, newly engaged to a man she first dated three decades earlier, Fiona Horne was taken by surprise.
Finding love in her 50s, in the middle of a global pandemic, was the last thing on the former Def FX singer’s mind.
“But you never can tell,” jokes Fiona, a multitalented musician, bestselling author, white witch, fire dancer and commercial pilot. “I feel like sometimes I’m just along for my own ride.”
At the beginning of last year, Fiona, 54, was happily single and had said farewell to the Caribbean – her home for the past four years. There, she was flying for a small charter airline.
Packing her bags, Fiona relocated to California for an exciting job opportunity.
Suddenly, COVID-19 struck and the day after meeting her new boss, the state was in lockdown.
Fiona was grounded for the foreseeable future. A lesser woman might have been crushed. Not Fiona!
“As a witch, I truly believe life is not random, that we are presented with these obstacles – not to show us how weak we are – but how strong and resourceful we can be,” she tells New Idea.
As a baby, Fiona was put up for adoption. She then endured sexual abuse and bullying growing up.
Later in life, celebrity, divorce and alcoholism left the star broken before her reinvention as a pilot.
So navigating COVID-19 would be no different – she simply had to figure out her next step.
Then, via Instagram, she received a message from a mystery man named ‘Spiff ’.
The same person contacted her a year earlier during Def FX’S farewell tour of Australia in 2019, but she didn’t realise who he was at the time.
Finally, the penny dropped. ‘Spiff ’ was the nickname of David Hopkins, a handsome surfer guitarist who was a member of the late 1980s punk band, Hellmenn.
Fiona and Spiff had previously met at Sydney gigs, studied natural medicine together and even dated briefly 30 years ago.
He used to perform in an unforgettable pair of flares emblazoned with the Coca-cola logo. Suddenly, Fiona was staring at those trousers again, featured on his Instagram page!
“I pay attention to signs and messages and serendipity,” smiles Fiona, who has just published her 14th book,
Teen Magick: Witchcraft for a New Generation.
Having recently renewed her expiring Australian passport, Fiona believes that her biological father’s spirit was telling her that everything she was running away from, and hoping to find, was back in Australia.
But for any man who wooed Fiona, there was a specific set of criteria. He must be age appropriate, self-sufficient, a non-smoker, vegetarian and preferably a non-drinker.
If divorced, he must have a good relationship with his ex and with his grown-up children.
“I was quite specific,” laughs Fiona. “It had to be someone who wouldn’t be intimidated by my extraordinary past. Someone who understood me and would just enjoy me as I would accept and enjoy them…”
Reconnecting online through hours of long-distance conversation, Fiona and David, now a naturopath living in Margaret River, WA, realised they had to be together.
If that took a COVID repatriation flight from the US, two weeks of hotel quarantine and a road trip from Melbourne to Margaret River, with state borders shutting behind them, so be it.
Today the “soulmates” are blissfully happy, sharing their lives and making sweet music through their popular duo, Spiff & Fifi. They also recently formed rock band, Seawitch.
Last August, 56-yearold David proposed during a sun-drenched holiday at Ningaloo Reef on WA’S coast.
At first, Fiona refused. “It was all too much, I couldn’t accept,” she recalls.
But that night under the light of the full moon, music playing softly in the distance, swaying with their arms around each other, she changed her mind.
David slipped his mother’s ring on her finger and Fiona plighted her troth in the traditional witch’s way, a spellbinding ceremony of handfasting for a year and a day.
“We hope our love story inspires people to know that even in really difficult times, good things can happen – and it’s never too late to fall in love with your soulmate,” says Fiona. “We just want to share the message that, even with all its challenges, life is a miracle and magic is real. It does happen.”