Just start from here... In your own words, no hurry. When you're ready? Okay?

Well, yes, where do I start?

I really have forgotten how to do all this stuff with keyboards and so on. I've been away. Away from the world, away in another place, but not a place you can find on the map, I've been away in a metaphysical sense as well as a geographical translocation.
I've been travelling with the Red Dirt Girl.

Those of my readers who have a history here will know some of our back-story, but it deserves a re-telling. It extends back to just a little before page one of my blog, back at the end of December, 2006.

I'd been blogsurfing, found a writer who'd posted a poem which I liked, wandered into the previous posts, had a fun hour or so of reading, looking at pictures, fascinating diversions. So I left a comment. Only the blog didn't accept anonymous comments, nor, so far as I then understood it, comments from anybody without a Blogger i.d.

What to do? I want to leave a comment to say how neat the blog is, so, I sign up, get a blogger i.d. and leave my comment. Only now I have a blogger account and no idea what that means, nor what to do with it, so I indulge my inner idiot, and invent a blog name and write something, and suddenly we're careering toward the trees with no stabiliser wheels and no brakes. I'm sure the occupants of the interwebs, those folk who were here first, before me, the big kids.... yes, just like that, like your first day at a new school. They're going to stomp on my lunch, ridicule my speech, flush my head down the toilet. But no. they were kind and welcoming, and its now well  over six years, and that blogger whose blog I liked, well, she responded, and we started a dialogue, and about seven months later, she stepped off a plane, thousands of miles from home and gave me a big hug.

I can't imagine really how much courage it took to do that, especially when her dad was warning her what a crazy person she was, going to meet some unknown foreign guy, far away from all that was safe, he was probably a weirdo and a serial killer.

But she did. She made that leap of faith, and, as luck would have it, I may be weird, but I'm no cereal killer. Except for corn-flakes. We'd learned a lot about each other, of course, by then, but even so, it was nerve wracking. After about three days I told her that I planned to marry her. I didn't exactly ask, I just told her. We were sitting in York Minster, in a beam of coloured light from ancient stained-glass windows. She didn't scream. Nor did she run away.

A little later, I persuaded her to sit on the pedestal of a roman column, for a photograph, she was not too sure, thought the romans might arrest her, for despoiling an ancient monument. That's what happens when you grow up in a world where a building from the 1960s is regarded as 'Historic'.

 I think she looks happy?

Here we are, six years later, and we're still both happy.  And I'm packing up my life, ready to move to the U.S. to marry her. 

There's a ring, made specially for her finger, by a craftsman working in a tiny village where there are remains of Roman villas, some 20 miles north of where that picture was taken. And there's a heap of paperwork, grinding slow as a glacier, through the machinery of government, but one day soon, I'll get the piece of paper summoning me to the embassy in London for a 'Fiance Visa' interview.

Once my passport is stamped, I'll be winging my way west to a new life, with the person I should have met twenty years ago.

As I say, I've been travelling. With my best friend, my missing piece, the one who says the word I'm thinking. We're not clones, we're very different, but we fit. We fit like matched gears, like jigsaw pieces, like beats of a heart.

At the moment, we're apart. We speak every day, the phone companies  should love us, but instead just overcharge us with glee. Thank heavens for skype.

Sometimes the internet does good. I wasn't looking for this, I'd no idea this would be the result of one little comment, but I'm very happy it did.

Happy Birthday, Red Dirt Girl!

(More travelling, and pictures to come)