Unfortunately it appears Gary Barlow has lost his chance as I’m soon to be off the market.
In just under four months I’ll be a married woman. Either that or my relationship will be in tatters. It all depends if I manage to hold the Bridezilla in me at bay. So before it all goes horribly wrong, I thought I’d take part in the meme devised by Super Amazing Mum and Manic Mum and record how I got here. For posterity’s sake and all that.
When myself and the (self proclaimed) Northern Love Machine announced we were “with child” a lot of people assumed it was an accident. How could we have planned a baby when we’d only been together a year and weren’t even married? We didn’t own our own home and I was only 26. Apparently in life you are meant to do things in a certain order, at a certain time.
Well no one told us that. And if they did, we weren’t listening.
We met in the venue of romance that is The After Dark nightclub in Reading. A shared love of sticky floors, cheap booze and rapping bouncers helped us find each other. That and the fact the NLM is six foot five so is hard to miss.
Anyway, we had our first kiss outside the toilets. It went something like this:
NLM (in his soft Rochdale tones): Look, we both know this is inevitable. Come here and give me a snog.
Me: Oh, OK then.
What a picture of romance.
It carried on like that for a couple of months. Kissing outside toilets and getting drunk, with the occasional pub meal thrown in for good measure.
And then came Christmas. We both spent the festive season apart as the NLM went back up North to his Motherland (Rochdale) and I went out west to mine (Bristol). New Year’s Eve arrived and we crossed each other somewhere on the motorway. The NLM drove from the North back down to Reading to celebrate with his friends and I drove up from Bristol to Manchester to celebrate with some of mine.
And then I got drunk again.
I was still swigging sipping champagne at 8am on New Year’s Day and thought it would be a good idea to ring the NLM and wish him a Happy New Year. In my inebriated state I’d forgotten I was meant to be back in Reading that night to go out for a drink with him. When he reminded me, I said the only way I’d be there was if he drove up to Manchester to collect me as I would still be over the limit and couldn’t drive. I was joking. He’d only completed the four hour drive the day before so wasn’t going to drive all the way back just to pick me up for one drink, was he? No one’s that stupid, right?
Wrong.
After collapsing in a heap on the sofa I was woken at 6pm by my friend shaking me awake telling me there was a “tall Northern man outside”. He’d driven all the way from Reading up to Manchester, having only driven from Manchester to Reading the day before.
In a haze I stumbled into his car, completely forgetting my own car was parked just round the corner. And we made the four hour drive back to Reading, with a short stop around two hours into the journey. I’d been sick, you see. All over the interior of the NLM’s brand new car.
We arrived back in Reading after midnight, by which time all the pubs had shut. And I was certainly not in the mood for alcohol. I immediately fell fast asleep only to wake at 7am the following morning remembering I’d left my car in Manchester. So I made the NLM drive me all the way back to collect it. And then we drove back to Reading. Again.
We moved in together a month later. I thought I’d be unlikely to find a man willing to drive eight hundred miles for me in the space of two days. And let me vomit all over his car.
It was exactly a year later, on New Year’s Day (well midnight New Year’s Eve to be precise) that the NLM proposed. The memory of driving back and forth across the country and cleaning up my sick was forever etched in his memory as the day we became “serious”, so he thought it a fitting date to ask me to marry him.
Since that time I’ve managed to avoid throwing up in his car again. And I’ve had a baby. So it looks like he’s stuck with me forever now. Lucky man.
