I COUNTED and she'd used 75 candles in all. Tea lights, mainly.
All those flickering points of light to spell out a simple message: I love you.
Yes, my betrothed, Posh Boots, arranged those candles on her dining room table, for me, just before I called at her flat last Saturday.
Now, as I write, it is exactly one year (to the hour!) that Posh Boots and I first met.
We hit it off immediately and within days became inseperable.
About half an hour from now ... we will go out for a celebratory drink and a curry. Hurrah!
But first, back to the events of last Saturday (19 July 2008). When I arrived at Posh Boots' flat she asked me to wait outside the room while unbeknown to me she lit each one of the candles. Then she bade me enter, whereupon I beheld the lovely sight.
I was touched. I was moved to tears actually. No-one has ever done anything as beautiful as that for me before.
Though I must say, there was a touch of recipricocity about her act of tenderness - because hours earlier I had spent 13 quid I couldn't afford on several bunches of flowers to spread around her newly decorated dining room. Ahhh..
Now, I don't want to make any of you long-suffering readers cringe at my public revelations of lovey-doveyness.
But, honestly, I just feel I'm a lucky man to have found a life-partner as gorgeous and kind as Posh Boots. There is no way I deserve her but I sure am glad to be with her.
Every day I tell her she is beautiful.
And often I tell her I wished I'd known her all the years of her life - instead of for just a year.
We met when I was aged 50 and she 49. We'd been introduced to each other by friends that night. It wasn't your usual, desperate, sweaty, New Brighton chat-up scenario.
Anyway, after nearly 20 years of being a singleton (excluding the very occasional brief, fumbling romance), I am now engaged, eventually, to be married.
You often read in local papers and parish mags etc.,about people who've been married for 50 years or more. Theirs is the real achievement, not ours.
But meeting someone in your youth and sticking with that person through thick and thin, for decade after decade, isn't always how it works - and certainly not these days.
It didn't work that way for me and it hasn't worked that way for countless millions of others.
But if the story of me and Posh Boots means anything at all, it means this... that love can come calling even when you least expect it.
And if a top quality lass such as Posh Boots can find something to love in a disgruntled, messy old vagabond like me, then there is hope for everybody.
I often ask myself: how the hell did it all go right?
Of course, even in maturity, and even for us, the Posh'n'Specs of Wallasey, the path of love rarely runs smoothly.
There are arguments; there are tantrums; you just have to battle though them.
So if anyone is reading this as a single person (perhaps divorced, perhaps bereaved, maybe confused, maybe lonely) I say this: you are not alone. Everywhere, in increasing numbers, people are in similar circumstances.
And, of course, some people are quite content to be single.
Our society needs to recognise that being single is a valid, and in some ways heroic, way of living.
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Smokehouse wrote...
Steve you lucky thing. I took in every word and agreed. What was most touching, for me at least, was the recognition that single people (hands up and by choice) do indeed live a valid life. it is being single and not wanting to be that is hard.
Your story is an inspiration to all the Eeanor Rigbys and Father McKinley's out there, that they do not have to be that way if they do not want to.
Granted not all men are going to find some young sylph-like nymphomaniac who runs a pub and not all women are going to find Richard Gere with endless pockets. But as Mick and Keith once said "You cant always get what you want but if you try sometimes you get what you need".
Cheers to the pair of you. *hic*
REGAN REPLIES: Ah, thanks very much for those nice words, Smokehouse. Now, are you coming to the next Bards of New Brighton meeting at the Magazine pub on Monday 11 August, starting at 8pm?
Posted by: Smokehouse | July 23, 2008 5:21 PM