More on the Strange Girl

As I mentioned, I first started talking to my girlfriend online in 2005. My username was "Spoffin" and hers was "Skoffin", and we talked long into the night, many nights, for many months. In the main, I was a right little sex pest and I'm not proud - I would not recommend a policy of badgering a 15 year old girl over the internet as a path to romance. Fortunately however, feelings went both ways and hers were expressed through the time-honoured manner of getting someone else to find out if he LIKES-me likes-me. Then we stopped talking for a couple of years.

But then we started again. I told her about my current non-relationships and made her jealous. She told me about her current relationships and made me think that nothing could happen. Then around June 2008, pending her dumping an emotionally abusive boyfriend, we made plans for her to come to England to visit me. And in August, after a fist fight with an American under the Eifiel Tower over a girl I'd been flirting with on holiday, I proposed to Bronwyn that we be exclusive, and not see anyone else for the next six months until we planned to meet. She formally broke up with her boyfriend, and then on the 28th of January 2009, she was being detained by Heathrow immigration, just a couple of dozen minutes away from seeing me for the first time. I'll never forget the first words she spoke out loud to me: "What's with the face?". I lost my virginity to her on Feburary 1st, my 22nd birthday. She stayed in London for about five weeks and then went home at the beginning of March. I'd planned to go to Sydney in June, but before I'd even gotten there we were already arranging for her to come to London in the new year. I stayed for seven weeks with her and her crazy family, and then spent a looonng six months waiting for her to come back to the UK. She lived with me for two years, the length her working holiday visa allowed, and then I moved to Sydney on a one/two year visa and that takes us up to today.

I was writing an entry for this blog, trying to define the elements of a quest so that I could write my challenge around it. Quests involve journeys, trials, and so on. And I realised that there was an essential element of all quests that were too common to leave out, but that I didn't have a way to fit into my challege: The treasure that lies at the end. I thought about it, trying to come up with something appropriate. I could buy myself something if I manage all of this, I was thinking, but I couldn't come up with anything that I wanted enough to be worth all this effort, but that I could wait a year (or longer) to get.

Of course, its only a golden fleece or an ark of the covenant that the hero wins at the end of his quest about half the time. As often as not, the hero's quest is for love.

And an idea came into my head. One that took hold, and wouldn't shake.

And I asked Bron what she thought of it, and her voice went quiet and she said she thought it was pretty cool.

So the prize at the end of Quest Australia is a wedding ring