ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

Shannon had been asking me to write something a little more personal, and so this anniversary gives me the opportunity to keep her entertained, and hopefully tell the rest of you a little bit more about me. Unfortunately, it’s not a ‘Dad’ post, which Paul has been asking for more of, but you can’t have everything…

Thursday 7th June 2001 was a very significant date. For most people in the UK, it is probably best known (if at all) as the date when Tony Blair won his second general election, again with a landslide majority. For myself, it was significant for another reason.

I was very close friends with a colleague from work. Let’s call her ‘Ms X’ for now. We’d visited the Hancock Museum and the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle together earlier in the year (although another colleague was supposed to have come, but had cancelled at the last minute). We’d been close friends for a couple of years — pretty much since I started working for mumble mumble in January 1999, as she had started only a couple of months earlier.

But things really began to change in May 2001.

Firstly, we attended an ‘Introduction to Web Design’ course earlier in the year (along with some other colleagues). This particular course was somewhat infamous because several of us went out to Newcastle’s Quayside with the trainer on the thursday night. At about 11 o’clock, only about five of us were left: me, the trainer, a colleague who had been trained by him previously, and two female colleagues. As it seemed like a good idea at the time, we decided to go clubbing, regardless of the fact that we still had to do a day’s training the next morning.

So me and Ms X and the other three people were in this club, with lots of music going on, but I can’t really remember talking much to anyone else other than Ms X, with her telling me about a family wedding coming up later on in the year, and for some reason me apparently volunteering to go as her ‘date’. I’m fairly certain at the time that the intention behind this was more to prevent anyone asking her ’so when are you going to …’ than anything else, but you know, once the seeds have been planted…

So we continued drinking, and drinking, and drinking and then it was time to go home: the trainer and I shared a taxi (dropping him off at his hotel), Ms X and Ms Y went back to stay at Ms Y’s house, and presumably my other colleague found his way home as well.

When I woke up the next morning I felt a teensy bit under the weather. In the sense that my mouth felt like a small animal had died in it, there were apparently a team of gnomes mining inside my skull and my stomach kept telling me under no circumstances whatsover was I to attempt to move quickly unless I wanted to be ill. And of course, it was 9:08 and I needed to be at work by about… 9:00.

I am an expert in the ancient British martial art of ‘ooyafuckamlate’ and was showered, dressed, and standing at the bus stop, still feeling like death warmed up by about quarter past nine. Because I lived right next to a major bus route, I was actually at work before 9:30, but was still the last person to turn up on the training course that day — although I was in only five minutes later than the trainer, who looked as rough as I was, and actually moved less than me during the day.

On a slightly sour note for him, he didn’t get asked back to do any more training for us (precisely for that reason) but he didn’t hold it against us and I’ve been out for a drink with him on a few occasions since (although not for a while: I must get around to sorting out another one…).

Then for some reason (possibly because I was starting to become aware of the fact that my feelings for Ms X were developing from ‘close friend’ into something different), I asked her to come to the cinema with me. We went twice, both nominally as friends (no kissing or holding hands!) to see both Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and The Mummy Returns. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin might be seen as the more romantic of the films, and it was okay (with some spectacular scenery — but that’s the Greek islands for you) but to be honest I think we both preferred The Mummy Returns.

And then — because I think we were both aware of where this was going (indeed, I believe many other people, including her sister and our colleague from work who had ducked out of the art gallery thing were aware before us) — she told me that she felt we needed to talk.

Now I don’t know about you, but in the very early days of any relationship, when you’re feeling a bit emotionally vulnerable, being told “we need to talk” is not what you want to hear. You tend to assume it means something along the lines of “leave me alone you moron”. She said that she wasn’t sure whether this was a good idea, as it could spoil what was already a good friendship, that it could potentially make things awkward at work and so on. So we agreed to go out for a meal and discuss it.

And this was where we came in: 7th June 2001.

We went to a pizzeria called ‘Rumpolis’, which at the time was one we frequented regularly with work. We ordered food but — and this is something which is definitely not like me — I was just picking at it because I was too nervous and didn’t have much of an appetite. Also, unbeknownst to me, the staff had obviously picked up on the tension and presumably thought a proposal was in the offing as I found out later they were all stood in a row behind me, watching us.

I was incredibly nervous: obviously I had feelings for Ms X; she’d been my friend for a long time, and closer than that: I geniunely missed her when she wasn’t at work, but also I did acknowledge that she might well have a point in saying that it’s not necessarily a good idea to have a relationship with someone you work with, because it could get incredibly messy if it didn’t work out, not to mention that we’d no doubt have messed up what was a good friendship.

But I nonetheless told her that I would like to give ‘it’ a try … (incidentally, why is it generally assumed that it’s always the bloke who has to do all of the hard work in all of these awkward conversations? I’m not particularly good at them — flirting comes easily enough, but when real feelings get involved, it gets more complicated — and obviously when you’re trying to impress someone you can’t have eight pints of Dutch courage as a ’stiffener’.

But I told her that I’d like to give it a try: she reached her hand across the table and said that she’d like to give it a try too. And that, we’ve always taken as the official start of our relationship: seven years now; the last five and a half of which have been as husband and wife.

So there you go. Something a bit more personal.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 12:26 am and is filed under Life, The Pickards. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is not allowed.