Just Like Fred Astaire

I never won anything in my life. Until the day I won everything.

The day I found love.

May 4th 1986.

It was a hot sunny day, a bank holiday and I was bored… So fucking bored.

London had lost its lustre as far as I could see. I'd been knocking around in the pubs and clubs since I left school in 1984 and standing outside them since I was old enough to remember.

I was working in north London, and I'd finally sorted a proper place to live, and I was working, had money in my pocket. I had girlfriends here and there and a bunch of mates to tear up the town with, but something was missing.

Hot days always felt full of promise back then. Especially bank holidays. You'd wake up convinced something brilliant was bound to happen just because the sun was out and nobody had to go to work. Looking back now, most of them were exactly the same as every other day. Too much hanging about. Too much wandering. Too much trying to create memories instead of living them.

That day started no differently.

My mate Paul said something about going to see his uncle who ran a pub/community centre type place called The Hyde somewhere, some little village called Welwyn Garden City.

This was before sat nav, before mobile phones, before everybody knew where everybody else was every second of the day. You just pointed yourself in a direction and hoped for the best. By late afternoon I remember feeling oddly flat. Not unhappy exactly. Just… done. Like I'd wrung all the fun out of life for one day and there was still evening left.

Then somehow we ended up outside another pub in Welwyn garden City called The Hollybush.

I'd never heard of Welwyn Garden City in my life. Couldn't have pointed at it on a map if somebody offered me a grand. To me it may as well have been another country. Just another pub, another stop, another pint before heading back to King's Cross.

But no… oh no, not this time.

Because if somebody had pulled eighteen-year-old me aside in that car park and said, "Right son, pay attention now. The next hour is going to decide the rest of your life," I'd have laughed in their face and gone inside looking for the jukebox.

Instead I walked in covered in half a day's worth of sunshine, boredom and whatever mud I'd collected on the way… and there she was.

The most beautiful girl I'd ever seen in my life.

Well and truly out of my league, but it was a bank holiday, and no one knew me here, so why not? I went and said hello.

And apparently, I made a reasonable first impression.

Because forty years later, she's downstairs while I'm sitting here writing about her.

A lot happened in between.

We got married. We had children. The children grew up and had children of their own. We bought things, lost things, worried about money, argued about complete bollocks and occasionally about things that actually mattered.

We laughed. We cried. We buried people we loved.

We got older.

Somewhere along the way my hair fucked off, my knees followed a few years later, and the eighteen-year-old who thought he could take on the world discovered that the world was considerably bigger than he thought.

Back then, I genuinely believed Alison and I had the world at our feet.

Looking back now, we didn't.

We had each other.

But believe me, that was worth so much more.

Because the thing about having the world at your feet is that eventually your feet stop fucking working.

Mine certainly have.

At eighteen I could walk all over London without giving it a thought. I worked, danced, climbed stairs, ran for buses and stood at bars for hours. My legs were just there. I never thanked them. Why would I? You don't think about your knees when you're eighteen.

I'm fifty-eight now and I think about the bastards all the time.

My health has slowly taken things away from me. Some small, some much bigger. Walking isn't something I do without thinking anymore. Stairs have become an obstacle. Work, something that has been part of who I am for most of my adult life, is coming to an end sooner than I ever imagined.

That's been a strange one to get my head around.

I always thought I'd decide when I was finished with work.

Apparently my body had already held the meeting and forgot to invite me.

There are things I thought would always be there that aren't anymore. Strength. Independence. The certainty that if I wanted to go somewhere, I could just get up and fucking go.

And I won't pretend I've accepted all of that gracefully.

I haven't.

But there's one thing I've never had to sit down and reconsider.

Her.

Not once.

Not for a second.

There has never been a morning when I've looked at Alison and wondered if I chose the right person. Never some great middle-aged revelation that perhaps we'd grown apart or wanted different lives.

Of course we've pissed each other off. We've been married nearly forty years. If you can achieve that without occasionally wanting to launch your other half through a window, you're probably not speaking to each other.

But doubt?

No.

Never.

And maybe that's why I understand that eighteen-year-old boy better now than I did when I was him.

He thought he was walking across a pub to try his luck with a beautiful girl.

Cocky little fucker probably thought the achievement was getting her to talk to him.

He had absolutely no idea what he'd just done.

Even now, when Alison and I go somewhere nice, I still get a ridiculous little kick out of walking in with her.

I still like taking her out.

I still like showing her off.

That's my wife.

I know what the mirror says. I know we're not eighteen anymore. Christ, my knees make bloody sure I don't forget it.

But occasionally I look at her, and forty years just disappear.

There's the girl from the Hollybush.

And somewhere underneath the bald head, the walking stick, the aches, the scars and forty years of wear and tear, there's still that eighteen-year-old boy who can't quite believe she's talking to him.

We didn't have the world at our feet.

We never did.

But she always made me feel like the bloke at the end of an old-fashioned film, the guy who got his girl.

End of.

No more needed saying, nothing else in this life mattered.

And now that my feet aren't particularly interested in having much of anything underneath them, I can finally see how little that mattered.

Because I'm still here.

She's still here.

And we're still going out together.

In my head, at least, I straighten my back, pull on the top hat and tails, take my wife by the hand...

and I'm just like Fred Astaire.