Happy New Year!!

It's been a busy old time. Susan arrived in August, we got married in October and then into the festive season. Not had much time for anything else, but I have been feeling guilty about leaving Dodophobia alone, so here's a post.

On 19th August, myself, my mother and my two sisters headed out to the airport, clad in Susan's favourite colour, purple, to meet her plane. She was flying in from Iceland, but I found out just before leaving that they were landing first in Manchester, so we headed for Domestic Arrivals, bought a coffee at Starbucks and sat down. I immediately got up to have a look at the arrivals board and Susan's flight was listed as "landed". So I stood and waited. And waited. People came through, but no Susan, must be a different flight, so I kept waiting. And waiting. After about three quarters of an hour I was getting truly worried and started texting her; half way through my text, my phone rang. It was Susan, with a panicked "WHERE ARE YOU!?!?!?!?"  For some reason, her plane had landed at International Arrivals despite having just flown from Manchester, so I warned the troops and headed more rapidly than I have walked for a long time to the other end of the airport. There was my Susan. We hugged. And hugged. And hugged. Susan hugged the three others and they hugged her. I held Susan and she held me. Then we all headed for my sister Karen's car and drove to our flat. My other sister, Lesley, had put a Welcome Home banner across the door, so I handed Susan the keys and she broke that and opened the door. She loved the place, OUR place, and tripped jollily from room to room. After a diplomatic five minutes, Karen left and we were alone in our home. To tell you the truth, it had felt to me like Our Home from the moment I first saw it, and I had made sure the choice of colours and furniture and so on was a joint effort between Susan and me to make it even more so for both of us. But now it was whole. And that's how it has remained.

The wedding was in October, but that's a post all of its own, which I will be writing in the next few days. There is going to be a bit of a rush of posts in the next wee while, and I hope to keep up a more regular flow after that than I have done recently.

Welcome back, me!

Things are getting exciting.

Oh yes they are! Susan is, as previously noted, coming home, and it's getting more real by the day. She has her flight booked for 18th August, arrives here on the nineteenth, and the wedding is booked for 14th October, which will give us a week of married life before the world ends, if Harold Camping's calculations are correct. The reception's booked too, food dude and disco dude are re-engaged and it's all systems go.

We have a new flat to go with our new status; I will have moved in before she gets here but it is OURS, and we are making decisions jointly regarding decor and so on. It's one bus stop from where I am now and is in an ideal location for us, AND it's rented from the local council, so we have a secure tenancy, no problems with repairs etc, and a better flat than we could have got for the same money renting privately, not to mention central heating and laundry facilities including driers in the building. I have been out just today and bought us a suite for the living room, with couch-bed and easy chair. I will make a phone call tomorrow to arrange delivery of that, and also expect to speak to a painter and decorator about our walls. I'm feeling more married every day, and it is absolutely wonderful.

And then, if all that weren't enough, this week came the exciting news from Albany that New York state has passed a marriage equality law: all our gay friends there will now have the same right to marry as we would if we were there. As that includes at least one couple who have been together for over thirty years, this is in truth merely correcting a nonsense that has existed until now, is just putting right a long-standing social wrong, but it is also another sign that we are in the middle of a civil rights revolution that matches the great victories of Martin Luther King and his allies in the US in the fifties and sixties. Of course it also means that Anthony and Bob might now be married before Susan and I are, but hey, you can't have everything, and it would mean they were dancing at our wedding as husbands legally and officially as well as in reality.

Well, anyway, I just felt I had to get that lot off my chest. And besides, it's been a while and I've been neglecting my dodophobiacs.