If I ruled the world.......

every day would be the first day of spring! Today is technically the first day of spring (although no-one appears to have told the wind and the hail that it is time to bugger off and let the sun have a go. In fact, it has just started snowing.) More importantly today is Husband's birthday, which explains why he has always liked that song. Husband and I are the same age but for the next couple of months, I get to pretend to be younger and wind him up about the grey hairs and the failing memory before I catch him up and he retaliates with interest.

Husband and I met at University as fresh-faced law students. I don't actually remember being introduced to him - we were just part of a loose group of people who hung around together, drinking the truly appalling Chambers Street Union coffee and playing endless games of "Gauntlet" instead of studying. I allegedly told him he didn't look like he had gone to public school, which I would have meant as a compliment, and I think he took it as such. That would have been some time in 1985 or early 1986 at the latest. That year I went to a party in his flat along with lots of other people and left behind some cans of lager (cheap lager at that!). Months later he and his flatmate had another party and he had found some miniature cans of the same kind of lager as I had brought along the first time which he presented to me, claiming the cans I had left behind had shrunk. I found this very funny.

He took a gang of us along to see Tam White and the Dexters (a local blues band) and spent part of the evening teaching the blues virgins amongst us how to do a convincing blues "shoulder twitch" to demonstrate our appreciation for the music. He agreed to let me have a copy of his Tam White album but refused to lend me the album to tape as he was (and remains) anal about such things and was worried I would damage the album (vinyl! we are so old!) as he didn't know what kind of piece of junk music equipment I owned. (He was right to worry. It was a crappy Philips music centre of stunning awfulness.) I gave him a cassette to tape the album and he was sufficiently nosy to listen to what was on the other side. It was a copy of Mick Karn's solo album and if you have no idea what that is, you are in the vast majority. Suffice it to say that there was a lot of instrumental fretless bass and oboe on it. And yet he still spoke to me when he saw me the next day without backing away nervously. He later told me he was mildly pleasantly surprised that it was not either Talking Heads or Paul Simon's Graceland which everyone was listening to at the time. I hated Graceland. So did he. Still does.

As I think I have mentioned before, I went to a record fair with another friend of mine and bought a copy of a single I liked, but already owned, for no other reason than I thought Husband would like it. And he did. It is now the closest thing we have to "our song".

It took almost a year of vaguely knowing each other as friends in the group and another six months of being pretty good friends before we starting going out. (How that came about is another story entirely) That was the 28th February/1 March 1987. We moved into a shared student flat with four other people in the autumn of that year (which had been decided on and arranged before we started going out) and we have been together ever since.

So we have now been partners for over half of our lives, yet it just doesn't feel that long. The evidence of our strapping 10 year old son confirms that we are, indeed, grownups, but on the rare occasions when we get to be alone, just the two of us, it still feels to me like I am a student who got lucky and started going out with her best friend. Happy Birthday Husband.

PS: Hee! Hee! You're old!