^†This also makes it the one year anniversary of my camera and my bicycle.

Not this year though. I think it would be safe to say that it was thoroughly grey and miserable, and latterly, wet. Not that I had any worse a day for it. Emma came over for lunch. We laughed at my attempts at making Vietnamese rice bread (congealed wallpaper paste really, or baked flour and water – I’m not sure which sounds the more enticing… sic.) and had a nice lunch anyway.

Then we went into Oxford, to visit the Pitt Rivers Museum. In the end, after getting there, we decided there wasn’t time enough to devour its pleasures and so we would come back tomorrow. Instead we went into town, did a bit of pottering, bought a few things and returned home to get ready for our anniversary meal out.

It’s one year on Monday since our first date, and so tonight we went out to dinner, not to Pizza Express (as then), but to The Mole and Chicken, where we ate well – very well – and exchanged gifts. I gave Emma a couple of cds of classical music that she wanted, and she gave me a framed picture of the two of us.

I left work promptly to get home and start cooking a special meal for Emma (skiving off band in the process). I was going to cook a three course meal but in the end decided that the timings were just too complicated in the time available, so skipped out of cooking my polenta and mushrooms recipe. I made a rather delicious potato and asparagus tart from my Jamie Oliver, and we finished off with a Gu chocolate desert (well, you’ve got to have chocolate on Valentine’s day). Then Emma and I exchanged presents and enjoyed a nice evening together.

Emma’s just left now to go home in order to get to bed to get to work tomorrow. I never really like it when we have to part, but tonight has been particularly bad. Maybe soon, we won’t have to say these goodbyes?

We actually walk a very long way. I don’t realise it at the time but I end up with a blister on the side of one of my little toes that is as big as the toe itself. Ouch!

London Orbs
Originally uploaded by shepline on 1 Jan ’08, 10.00pm GMT PST.

Angel Gabriel
Originally uploaded by shepline on 1 Jan ’08, 10.13pm GMT PST.

Buck House
Originally uploaded by shepline on 1 Jan ’08, 10.16pm GMT PST.

From Buckingham Palace we walk down Birdcage Walk, but do not get as far as Parliament Square as, by half past ten, it, along with the embankment and bridges that follow it are full already. We turnabout and head back to Buckingham Palace, reassured by a sign that says that if you can see the London Eye then you will see the fireworks…

The Eye
Originally uploaded by shepline on 1 Jan ’08, 9.52pm GMT PST.

Explosive
Originally uploaded by shepline on 1 Jan ’08, 9.55pm GMT PST.

And what a display! Simply awesome! And it was kind of a romantic environment to ask the question. Between rain showers with hoods pulled tight over our heads I gave a ring to Emma and asked her if she would marry me. At first she clutched me tight – tighter than she’s ever clutched me – and cried, and said yes.

Happy Couple
Originally uploaded by shepline on 1 Jan ’08, 10.03pm GMT PST.

The Ring
Originally uploaded by shepline on 1 Jan ’08, 9.50pm GMT PST.

Edit: Apparently my Dad guessed that I might have been going to do such a thing, or at least he wouldn’t be surprised if I did. Everyone is very happy!

This evening I have been making my already eclectic music collection a little bit more cool by ripping some of Emma’s collection to my computer. Whilst I do this on one side of the dining room table, Emma has been sorting through 2006 era photos ready for having them printed. Even though we were doing separate things, I found the whole evening just so romantic and lovely.

I guess really, I ought to think about making my way home…

This morning, we went into Bicester. Emma has decided that she wants a new bike so that, a) she can use it to keep herself nice and fit, and b) so we can go for rides together. Umm… they had just the right kind of bike in the shop, and so, the deal was done and we left with a new bike. Actually we left with two bikes, as mine needed a new pedal fitted, and we drove back off home with my bike on the bike rack, and Emma’s kind of uneasily bungied to my bike. In a curious addendum to this tale, exactly 6 monts ago I bought my new bike from Broadribbs, just hours before my first date with Emma. On the day of our anniversary, Emma buys a bike from the same shop just hours before a celebration meal in Oxford.

Emma on her new bike
Originally uploaded by shepline on 21 Oct ’07, 5.55pm BST PST.

Six months to the day I bought my new bike and had my first date with Emma. Today, Emma bought a new bike (from the same shop) – early birthday and Christmas present combined – and we celebrated our six months anniversary…

Through a sunlit garden
Originally uploaded by shepline on 21 Oct ’07, 6.21pm BST PST.

We headed back through an Oxford, lit in the warmth and richness of a setting sun on sandstone against the clearest of blue skies. Stopping off briefly at Debenhams I bought myself some new duck feather pillows at the bargain price of £25 for 4! and we wandered up the road under an avenue of Plain Trees to the cute charm of Little Clarendon Street and our meal at the newly opened Strada restaurant. Emma loved the earings (now reveled), and the whole night just felt right.

Mine. All mine!
Originally uploaded by shepline on 21 Oct ’07, 6.14pm BST PST.

Emma, at our six month anniversary meal

It felt very right to come home from work to be greeted by my girlfriend and to talk about our days in the same room. It was also a curiously natural feeling to say goodbye to Emma as I loaded my bike onto to back of the car to go to work. I look forward to the day when this sort of thing might become the norm…

2. Today is my 5 Month Anniversary being with Emma. It’s funny to think how we’ve been going out for a whole summer season. It’s not been the summer I would ever have imagined I would have, but it has been one of the coolest…

3. I have another interview lined up for next week. Back at T&F this time it’s for an eProduction Editor job – basically some kind of quasi print and online position. Nice thing about this one is that its one where they approached me.

4. I’m on the cusp of completing the revisions to chapter 12 of That Novel, thanks to some productive lunchtimes. If I remember the rest of the story from then on it, then I should begin to pick up speed again. I always knew that Part Two was going to take some work (ie. there was some absolutely atrocious stuff there!)

5. One more week and I’m holiday (at last). To be precise, I’m currently working my last Friday in September (now that’s got make one feel good). Tomorrow, I shall head into town to pick up the last remaining bits and bobs for The Return to Wasdale: 10 years on…

My parent’s arrived on Friday night, and on Saturday we went for a walk with Barney dog at Stowe Landscape Gardens near Buckingham (one of the Capability Brown constructed estates – there’s also a private school in the house, which I keep on thinking I might use as the location for a spinoff drama series from my first novel, ‘Flyht’). At about 4.30 Emma joined us and met my parents and they got on really well together.

Actually, during that and a meal in Oxford a bit later they all three ganged up on me to tease me… :- We went to see Hamlet then, which was warmer and sunnier than last time I went, and had definitely improved still further during the run. As the second half was about to begin, the sky was cast with this fantastic red hue set off by the Norman tower infront. Emma and I huddled up closer under our rugs and linked arms and ‘enjoyed’ the tragedy unfolding before us…

Afterwards, my mum and dad, said Emma was lovely and they were so happy for me, and Emma really liked them too. Sorry, am I getting all soppy and gushing? Normal service will resume shortly I promise.

After the incessant rains of the last – umm – month or more, the was shining and it was warm but not uncomfortably hot, and dry, and in a way, perfect moving

Last week, during one of the hottest weekends this Spring I helped Emma move house. Next month, after she gets back from a holiday in Cornwall with her family, I have to help her move again. Why the moves? Emma had been living in her Grannie’s house, but this now has to be sold so that Grannie can sell it to buy someone else due to having her having to move out of her late-partner’s house – don’t ask – its complicated – but this Grannie, being the other woman in marriage, sounds like quite a character…), and so last weekend I helped move into The World’s Smallest House^TM (ie. not even a grannie-annexe). Being the world’s smallest house though prompted a discussion with the vet she was working for last week, and the opportunity arose to move into a country cottage near Maidenhead/Windsor.

You still with me? Good, because it goes on…

I went to see House #3 yesterday and I am so, so, so very jealous. It’s a self-contained flat next to a house owned by the vet – and you’ll like this detail – he can’t get planning permission where his practice is to build a practice so he has an X-Files inspired JuggerVet^TM where he does his operations (you remember the train that they used to have where they conducted alien autopsies…?). Well Mr Cook, the vet, has a house which is converted barns/dairy parlours and such like. Next to which he has a separate flat which he doesn’t use and has offered Emma the use of at a very cheap rent – and I mean cheap – if it were a commercial rent you’d probably looking at about £1k a month! (vet nurses earn less than publishing by the way, so that’s how cheap). Big lounge, and dining room, okay, the kitchen is tiny, but okay, nice bathroom, two big bedrooms, and a third one with en-suite kennels(?!!!). There’s a secluded courtyard out one side and French windows out the other onto a sun-filled patio, buttercup meadow beyond with hares and Windsor Castle somewhere out beyond.

Did I mention the pair of rescued Tawny Owls in the summer house and the Jackdaw? Oh, and that the barn next to the flat used to be home to a bull that was a record-breaking semen producer for, well you know, services lady cows…

So yes, truth. It is stranger than fiction.

After sorting out a few bits and bobs, I headed into town on my bike, picked up my prescription and then dropped my bike at the shop to have its mudguards fitted. Whilst that was happening I did a bit of shopping, looked around some shops, and posted off Battlestar Galactica, episode 18, to Louise.

Getting home, I discovered that Sophos had responded to my email. I have been unnsuccessful for both. Whaaaatttttt????!!!!!!! I’ve phoned them of course, and they say they are going to get feedback sorted for me. This, I really, wasn’t expecting. And its the kind of news to really put a downer on my day. And a downer on my day, it did put.

Thankfully Emma was able to lighten my mood when she dropped in for the evening after work. We went for a wander in the park, and I cooked her tea of grilled vegetables and pasta, in an olive oil, oregano and balsamic vinegar dressing, and the sun shone it was lovely.

I guess subconsiously I knew what I was doing. I’ve long known that my journal has become ‘cult’ reading – just why I’m nto sure – in Blackwell. Indeed for a while it was so much a cult that it was websensed. I should have not therefore been surprised, when at lunch I was asked who Emma was.

The expression on their faces as I said simply, with a smile on my face, she’s my girlfriend was priceless, and their expressions of surprise (and possibly bewilderment) is something I will remember for a while. Of course what followed was an hour of questing to the third degree, which as an odd mixture of both awkwardness and enjoyability.

Later on at the restaurant, when quizzed if I had any pictures I did reveal, if eventually, a few on my new camera. By the end of the evening I found myself reflecting that in some kind of weird, unplanned way the chances and circumstances of my lif had come toegether in unison with my creative side to provide the perfect season cliffhanger episode.

After seven years one of the favourite and perennial characters finally gets the girl. How can the writers end it there?

For the past three weeks I have been emailing, daily, a girl – a girl called Emma. Last night I met her for the first time. She *winked* at me on match.com and I reviewed her profile and *winked* back, and thus started the daily emails, each with individual subject lines but with a word association like connection to the preceeding one. In a scene, reminiscent of when I was 16 (with the exception that I never met girls when I was 16 but I did ride my bike alot) I rode my new bike through the streets of Bicester to the market square to meet Emma. We recognised each other immediately – she from inside her car where she had driven over from Amersham as I cycled past, and me from across the street as she came to approach me.

We headed across the square and found our table at Pizza Express, and over wine, and mozerella and tomato salad, and pizza, and lemon sorbet, we talked and chatted and laughed and joked. It all seemed incredibly natural, and not a bit as strange or uncomfortable as we had both feared. We’d got on well by email, but how were we to know what it would be like in person?

After the pizza, we went for a walk through old-town Bicester – and she showed me where her sister was christened, and she went to school (she grew up in the town), and during our walk we joined hands. And all the time, we talked some more, talked our way past midnight on a park bench out near Bicester Village (where an odd and decidingly unromantic smell lingered), not that we really noticed as we kissed and cuddled … and talked some more…

…and now, it seems I have a girlfriend.

I’m not sure where this is all going to go, and right now, I don’t really mind. I’m just going to enjoy the moment. I’m going to enjoy have a special someone and of being someone’s special somebody.