Yesterday was d's birthday. We woke up in our own time, and thankfully, her toe was moderately less swollen than it had been at midnight, so we pretty much resumed a version of our original, loose-fitting plan. Got up, had a hotel breakfast that, frankly, was about three meals in one, and went in to Cardiff. I wanted to get d some stuff...as plans go, it didn't entirely work - she ended up getting me a Bose iPod dock that had been gloriously marked down in John Lewis. I love birthdays. Especially those where the people whose birthday it is end up giving me stuff! Not sure I understand how that works, but...Re-freakin'-sult!
Oh, there was a ring...thing, too. Long time ago, pretty much about the time I started this experiment in fact, d got a hankering for sparkly things, for pretty much the first time in our marriage. She pointed out a ring in the local Samuels jewellers, and the woman who worked there gave me the details, and her ring size.
Naturally of course, being a bloke, I 'lost' the details pretty quickly...as in 'lost them into my wallet'...and a couple of weeks before we took off from London, I went and bought her the ring, and got it sized for her. The very day she buggered off to Wales with all our furniture, I was in that store when it opened. I've been holding on to the ring ever since, hiding it since we got to Wales.
She cried. Re-freakin'-sult!
So anyway - did the day in Cardiff (with d seeking out every spotlight or store light she could find, and glittering). Then, with a little help from a couple of frantic texts to people who've been telling us about it for months now, we found a place called the New York Deli for hot-dog lunch. Re-freakin'-sult number three!
Came back, swam some more, and d got into a very special outfit for dinner. It was the outfit she was in eight years ago for her first birthday in London, when she was over on her first visit to see me (when, ironically enough, she was hugely lurgied), and I'd managed to surprise her with tickets to Phantom of the Opera...ahem, row 1 - looking right up the Phantom's nose and getting a chandelier dropped on our heads. Eight years on, she still rocked that outfit. I mean, she looked goooooood. We went to dinner. Yum.
Finished the evening with a great call to Lori, d's 'sister' in the States, and a bottle of fizzy pink sparkling wine (s'kind of our signature). And then...
Well, then it was today.
Now, I should have mentioned. When we arrived, since it was a spa, we toyed with the idea of actually...y'know...doing spa treatments. So today, we checked out, and went over to the spa. We'd been booked into the Couples' Room. d was getting a back, head and facial massage, and we added a leg and foot massage just for fun. Me? Well, I defied a thousand years of Valleys Bloke evolution and had a 'Holistic back, neck, head and facial', and joined her with the leg and foot...thing. We got very gooey, courtesy of Lucia (small, young, answered almost every statement with a drawl of "Ohhhh wooooowwww," or "Ohhhhh my goooooood") and Sue (older, whitish sci-fi-bobbed hair, sheep's voice, stern demeanour, blinking tic).
Now, it's fair to say, this represented progress for us both. A handful of years ago, I actually got d a spa day as a Christmas present. Her face didn't fall, cos she's good at hiding her disappointment, but I knew I'd reeeeeallly blown it. She's always hated the idea of strangers touching her. And for me...it was an extension of a thing I learned yesterday. Being 'the fat kid', I've never been remotely comfortable in communal changing rooms. Longer-term readers will remember that even in Croatia, surrounded by don't-give-a-fuck Europeans of varying attractiveness-levels, I couldn't take off my T-shirt and get in the pool. But yesterday...I stopped caring. I was me, getting in, doing things, not giving a damn. And that was also, pretty much, how I approached getting gooey today. I wanted to share the experience with my wife, so nehh - here you go, this is my body, this is our money...handle me!
d said something similar too - she's over the whole 'strangers touching her' thing, I think. So that was the culmination of our day, getting gooey together...
Except it wasn't, quite. They had a special on deep hair conditioning, and so I went to the Relaxation Room for a while. When she came out, she was not only gorgeous, she was amazing, straight-haired, fantastically gorgeous.
Sooooo...yeah. Great day.
Not expecting to break the five stone barrier this Tuesday. Not even really expecting to maintain last week's result, because this has been a calorifically heavy couple of days. But - getting together with Ma (and our mutual pal's dog, apparently) for big walking on Sunday. So who knows?
Back home now though, so back to the office for box-unpacking tomorrow probably - and Monday, I start the one-day-a-week early-as-fuck London commuting. Never a dull moment, eh?
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