If you could relive one day from your past, which day would it be and why?
I’d choose 2 May 1990.
After five months of hesitant, arms-length courting, the girl I loved finally said “yes” — we could go out together. In fourteen years of one-off relationships, nobody had ever kept me at arm’s length for so long and still kept me so interested.
I popped the question over breakfast in a café in the French ski resort of Tignes. The season was over and we seasoniers were enjoying a final week on the slopes. So, suddenly, as “boyfriend and girlfriend”, we went out and had what I remember as a perfect day skiing off the Grande Motte.
I was beside myself with happiness. We were already close, already friends. And the skiing was amazing. She skied well. We could go anywhere. We’d been on the slopes for the best part of six months and we were ridiculously fit.
Spring had arrived in the mountains. Meltwater streams were bursting through the snow, and near the flat in Val Claret a pond of water had formed across the slope.
Someone invented the “sport” of trying to ski straight across it without sinking. Of course I joined in. It was exhilarating.
Later we ate in the flat, then sat together under a rug on the east-facing balcony, listening to music as the light faded over the mountains.
Within a few days I knew I wanted to marry her. She made me put that question on pause but I asked for real on 22 May. She said “yes”.
Getting married was another day I would happily live again — a day that began in England and ended on the ski slopes of the French Tarentaise — and, of course, I would relive the days our children were born. We have of course taken them skiing!
There are additional days that rank highly – all from our first five years of marriage. But if I had to choose just one, it would be the day it all began – May 1990: the day everything came together after so many years of hope. Her she was ‘the one’. We were already friends, already close, already sharing the life we loved. She had simply said yes to something more.
And in a way, I can relive this exact day and all the others I cherish (or would prefer to forget) as I’ve kept a diary for most of my life.
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