Get drunk and propose to that nice man of yours

My husband is currently doing a Comic Relief challenge, cycling 1000km for the charity - on a tandem. This is not the first time he’s taken on one of these insane endeavours, shortly after I met him he announced he’d be climbing the 3 highest peaks in the UK and cycling between them. Fine, I thought, hard but doable. And then the winds picked up and the snow started to fall. THE BEAST FROM THE EAST! Every news report was breathless in its reporting about the horrors this unique storm would wreak upon the country. Eighty foot snow drifts, impassable roads, a new ice age where we’d all have to learn how to make fire from scratch, skating as a viable form of travel.

Longtime readers will not be surprised to learn that I panicked at the possibility that my new paramour might soon be entombed in a wall of ice wearing just lycra and a smile. Greg talks a lot about the benefits of resilience (and he’s showing a lot of it right now) but I have none. I couldn’t sleep on Friday because he was away and my parents weren’t in London. Read that again. I’m weaker than that thong you bought from topshop in 2006 and inexplicably still wear when you’re feeling sexy. Bin it! Lace with added sparkle is NOT good for your vaginal health! Your delicate PH balance yearns for organic cotton. You deserve it, be kinder to yourself Sarah.

So resilience, no. Overwhelming fear? Certainly. My brain was flooded with thoughts that he’d fall off his bike and into a ravine and nobody would call me because nobody really knew we were going out. And if he died, I’d go to the funeral and be forced to sit at the back because I’d have no formal place in his life. I’d met his parents a few times by then but they’d be deep in grief and not much interested in this random hysterical woman currently between jobs who kept insisting their son (expired and down a ravine) was her soulmate. The papers would still talk about his glamorous pop star ex, I would not be mentioned even once and I eventually I would become one of those strange and sad characters you see in your local town centre sitting amongst the pigeons, muttering about how I used to have a really wonderful boyfriend who fell down a ravine on a bicycle. 

So what did I do? Well I decided to propose. I didn’t know where to get a ring for a man, briefly wondered about the local Argos just off the Old Street roundabout but realised I didn’t know his ring size and suspected a ring from Argos doesn’t say “marry me so I can mourn you if you die down a ravine.” Or maybe that’s exactly what it says. Then I wondered where to do it. I’d found a gorgeous secret garden near St Paul’s on a run and considered taking him there but I only had a few hours and he was unlikely to want to schlep over there when he was supposed to be packing for his ill-fated trip to the abyss (how it broke my heart). In the end, I did absolutely nothing and we went for dinner round the corner to a middling restaurant which had replica models of its meals which is one step down from those touristy places on holiday which show photos of the food. Only one step down because it shows a kitsch flair I respect, otherwise it would be unforgivable.