I try not to mention Mrs W too often in these musings. After all, it’s my blog and as she’s generally a private person, I don’t think she would take too kindly to having her life broadcast all over t’interweb.
However, this week marks an occasion which can’t be allowed to pass without some form of recognition. Wednesday October 24 2012 marks the 25th anniversary of our first date; the first time that Martin Philip Warrillow and Carmel Mary Gallagher, as she then was, set eyes on each other.
And this was no ordinary first date. It seems extraordinary to recount the tale a quarter-of-a-century later, but this was a blind date.
We were set up - and set up in a manner that still makes people go ‘aaahhh.....’ when the story is told.
My best friend (with whom I worked) and her best friend (with whom she worked) had recently started seeing each other. And they had decided that we, two lonesome and relatively private souls who would often have trouble saying ‘boo’ to a goose, were made for each other.
Photographs were exchanged and, to be fair, arms were put behind backs to a certain degree before we both agreed to meet each other. After all, nothing was going to come of it and one of us probably wouldn’t turn up anyway.
But both of us did turn up. As Cilla Black’s Blind Date was broadcast on ITV (I swear I haven’t made that up, by the way...) we met under a street light next to a telephone box on a housing estate in Tamworth.
We went for a few drinks in various Tamworth hostelries which no longer exist (Corvettes and Manhattans, anyone?), I introduced her to the intricacies of supporting Tamworth FC, drove her home at the end of the evening and that was that.
Except that I rang her the following evening....and the following evening.......and we decided to meet again the next weekend.
Which we did - and if my mind doesn’t play tricks on me after all these years, it wasn’t long before we went out for the evening with the couple who had set us up.
It also wasn’t long before Carmel was spending most evenings and weekends at my grotty bedsit in Tamworth town centre, which we still recall as ‘The Hammer House of Horror.’ We acquired a kitten, a story which deserves a blog post in itself, then began to realise that we had an astonishing amount in common.
So much so that it was no particular surprise to either of us when, in the spring of 1989, I asked her to marry me. That great event took place on July 21 1990 at St John’s RC Church in Tamworth, with the couple who had brought us together acting as best man and chief bridesmaid. An extra twist to the tale is that they, too, became husband and wife, being married in September 1990.
In the 22 years since our wedding day, we have climbed waterfalls in Jamaica; had a knife pulled on us in Morocco; lost each other for three hours in the deserts of Fuerteventura; enjoyed the holiday of a lifetime in South Africa; lost the aforementioned kitten in the half-built roof of the apartment complex in which we lived at the time (we found her safe and well and she died of old age in 2007); helped each other through various illnesses and spent rather too long in hospitals; enjoyed wonderful holidays at my father’s house in Spain and with Carmel’s Irish relatives in County Leitrim; argued, bickered, smiled, laughed, cried, shouted, screamed, agreed, disagreed; acquired another cat; had some fabulous meals and some dreadful ones; both got tattoos; become ardent naturists; moved house only once (believe me, that was enough); attended too many funerals and too few weddings; suffered through the gloom of job loss and still come out safely at the other side; been as near to penniless as we ever want to get; watched me set up my own business.
In short, done everything that couples who have known each other for 25 years can expect to do.
And we’re still here. We believe firmly in marriage as a force for good and that all that stuff about ‘for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health’ actually means something.
Who knows whether we’ll make it to 26 years, never mind 30, or 40, or 50? But as we come to mark the anniversary of the most important date in our lives with a quiet meal in a local Indian restaurant, I know we can look back and say that we both did the right thing when we decided to meet under that street light on that Tamworth housing estate.
