The last of this year's tales of Valentine's Day comes from Lyn McCulloch...
My husband and I have been best friends since I was twelve and he was thirteen.
There’s a complicated story of my first marriage and divorce and a whole load of history, before we finally got together as a couple. By then, trying to be romantic would just have seemed silly. He considers romance a load of nonsense and Valentine’s Day only of interest to card-making companies.
Many years ago, we had a very busy year when he moved jobs to join an old colleague who was just setting up a company – literally a three men and a dog set-up which meant he worked very long hours. As we'd also just moved house, life was more than a little fraught.
Given his cynicism, you can imagine my amazement, and delight, when, on Valentine’s Day 1991, I received an enormous and very beautiful bouquet, together with the requisite slightly slushy card. Surprised? No, I was astounded.
He blushed prettily when he came home and was suitably self-deprecating, but it earned him lots of brownie points. Several days later, he admitted that his boss, a family man with a paternalistic attitude to his employees, had ordered flowers for his own wife, and while he was at it, had included those of the two guys who were slaving away building a new company with him. “A happy company needs happy wives,” was his explanation.
For ten years, this charade continued. Oddly enough, when my husband left the company and we moved to start a whole new life as hoteliers, the bouquets stopped – a gesture never to be repeated.
Lyn and Kate's Moonwalk: www.walkthewalkfundraising.org/team_limes
