Wedded to an idea
Keep this to yourselves, but I am secretly planning to ask Michele to marry me.
It’s probably about time. It will be 25 years in May since we began living as man and wife, so it is obviously more than a little late in the piece to be seeking to make an honest woman of her. But she deserves to be an honest woman.
I am, however, somewhat vexed as to how to offer her my hand in matrimony until death or divorce do us part. Michele is not one to stand on ceremony; she prefers to sit down on it and then ignore it. There is also the problem that, when I have raised the “m” word with her in the past, she has looked at me as though I was threequarters mad.
So, I will need to make my approach carefully. As she seems more interested in sheep than me these days, I have wondered whether I ought to dress myself as one before going down on one knee in the apple-tree paddock and asking, “Will you take this ram to be your lawfully wedded husband …”
That we are still together after a quarter of a century astonishes me, not least because our first meeting, all those years ago, was hardly propitious.
At the time, we were both heavy smokers working for the same newspaper. In those far-off days, smoking was still allowed inside offices. One could not smoke at one’s desk or in open-plan areas, of course, but one could still puff away like a Victorian factory chimney in something called a “smoking room”, which was a special space set aside so that we reprobates could shorten our lives through tobacco. It beggars belief now that such places were allowed. The past really is another fuggy country.
Anyway, so there I was, over a quarter of a century ago, sitting on a cigaretteburn-covered couch in a tiny room with nicotine-stained walls, cheerfully puff, puff, puffing away, and what should I see when all the smoke parted? Michele!
She had not long joined the paper. So, we made our introductions before she said she’d been hoping to bump into me because she’d read some of my stuff – I was writing about television for the paper – and was interested to meet the sort of person who “writes like that”. At the time, I took this as a compliment. In retrospect, I think she was already thinking I was threequarters mad.
Our relationship blossomed from there – though it was somewhat complicated by the fact that we both already had a significant other – and now, 25 years later, here we are still unmarried, but still happily shacked up.
As it happens, 2022 is a year of significant anniversaries for me. In April, we will mark five years at Lush Places, our quarter-gallon, 12-acre pavlova paradise. Fleeing the city for rural Wairarapa is possibly the bravest thing I’ve ever done. Thank goodness it has been worth it.
And, finally, in December, I will mark 30 years in journalism, a shabby business that pays worse than most, but is at least better than working.
Hopefully, by the time I do get up the gumption to ask for Michele’s hand, I will be styling myself as “His Royal Highness”, or perhaps “Commodore-inChief of the Fleet Air Arm”.
The fall from grace of Prince Andrew, a man accused of awful things that he denies, has, I fancy, presented some of the rest of us with an opportunity to go up in the world.
By my count, he has been stripped of 13 British and overseas honorary military titles, including Colonel-inChief of the Royal New Zealand Army Logistic Regiment.
Presumably, this means all these titles are now available to more deserving sorts, such as me. If ever there was a man needing an imaginary job, it is me. But how does one apply? ▮
Fleeing the city for rural Wairarapa is possibly the bravest thing I’ve ever done.