Warming Up

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Tomorrow it will be ten years since I fell in love with my wife. Though she wasn’t my wife then.

I had met my wife before. And she wasn’t my wife then either. I mean, it’s unlikely (though possible) that she would be. She had made an impression on me, though I had barely spoken to her in person. I had seen her do stand up and we were hanging around after the gig. She’d been standing near me and I liked the feeling of her being there, but when I looked up she was gone. She was a ghost of my future and she vaguely and peripherally haunted me over the next ten months. We chatted a bit on myspace. She said she’d come to a gig in Edinburgh and again I thought I’d seen her come in as I watched for her through the door at the back. But she wasn’t there. Just the ghost of the future her haunting me. 

I got the chance to see her again and ten years tomorrow I took that chance. Even though she was with someone else. Even though it was the someone else that had given me the chance to see her. But ten years tomorrow I realised what the living ghost of my future wife had been trying to tell me and I tumbled into love with her. And now look at us.

Lucky for Phoebe and Ernie. Or not. Depending how you look at things.

I think lucky for them. But luckiest for me.

It’s not quite our tenth anniversary, as things took a while to unravel and then entwine differently and it wasn’t until January that I asked her to be my girl and she replied, “What would that involve?”

But ten years tomorrow she said to me, “I want to be bum-raped by some men,” and I knew. I knew. 

And I knew that Phoebe and Ernie would roll up at some point too. 

Tomorrow we can’t get a baby sitter, so tonight we went out to celebrate out ten years of being in love (because somehow something happened in her brain to make her think that I was worth loving too - fall in love in haste and repent at leisure). 

So we weren’t celebrating the day that we threw ourselves into a whirlwind to see where it would take us, we were celebrating the night before. Now any reasonable person wouldn’t remember what they were doing the night before a significant event that happened a decade before. I certainly don’t. But I have a long account of what I was doing. Because I have written a blog for almost exactly 15 years. This is what I was doing. It’s an involved and intricate blog about events I have no recall of whatsoever. I would have written it the next day. The day that I knew. (or possibly the one after, but I knew even more by then). So that blog has my love for my future wife all over it. 

We went to see a film and we discussed how weird it is that ten years have happened. And how even weirder it is that I have been with my wife for two-thirds of this blog. It seemed like I had been single or nearly single for a lot longer than I have been with Catie. It felt like there had been decades of bloggage about whether I’d ever be happy or meet the one. But only five years of non-Catie Warming Up and ten years with her. Time expands and folds in over itself like iron melting in a furnace.

I am so tired because of the success of our union and its fruits that I fell asleep in the film. Or at least was awake enough to take in some of the dialogue, but asleep enough to realise that the pictures that accompanied them were invented in my head. But sleep was better than the film. Sleep was better than any film.

We went for a curry in a nearby village. A young man at the next table was celebrating his 21st birthday with his family. They talked about gender fluidity. In a curry house in a tiny Hertfordshire village. The world is a wonderful place.

I have had such extraordinary good fortune. If I travelled back ten years tonight and told myself about it, I wonder what I’d say. I think, “Thank fucking God for that."

If I travelled ten years into the future? If you're catching up with all this post 21/11/27 then you can skip forward and have a look.

What do you mean there's nothing there?

... I probably just stopped blogging.

I probably just stopped blogging.

Christmas Emergency Questions books for kickstarter backers are finally in the post (and should be with you by the end of the week if you’re in the UK) and so they’re now available to buy on gofasterstripe. 

The perfect Christmas gift/game for all the family

And I’ve done an extra hundred signed and numbered ones with rude snowmen inside 

RHLSTP with Jan Ravens is now up in audio

The video version is here youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiht5tILdiM