A Life More Ordinary

Saturday, August 6th, 1994.
 
The date was set. After four turbulent years away from Plymouth, I’d made the decision to move back to Devon, where my Dad had a spare room waiting. Still working at McDonalds, a transfer had been arranged, my bags were packed and I had said most of my goodbyes. Still not the most outgoing of souls, I’d been invited to show my face at a friend’s party just around the corner from where I’d been living and I figured it would be the last chance I would have to say a few last farewells to some people I’d not managed to see previously. I was happy with my decision and it was entirely possible that it was at least partly in response to what had happened with Amanda – it wasn’t my main motivation but it’s fair to say that I hadn’t been the luckiest in love in Sussex. A couple of brief flings had done little to tempt me to stay and I’d reached the point where I felt it was better for me to walk away.
 
I remember very little about the early hours of the party. I suspect that much of it was spent people watching and I wasn’t really a drinker at this point. This was still at the stage where I’d had a little provisional interest in some of my writing and this would have inevitably formed most of the conversations that I was involved in. At some point after midnight, as the numbers began to dwindle, I found myself talking to a blonde woman a couple of years older than me about life, the universe and everything in between.
 
Her name was Louise, she was a gymnastics coach and in her own words (more or less), she’d recently come out of a long-term, shitty relationship with someone who was a bit too preoccupied with themselves. She was shorter than me with an athletic build and a warm personality. We chatted a little more, sat on the lawn while looking up at the stars and I pointed out the interesting ones before time seemed to slow and what probably passes for fate took control of the situation. A little after two o’clock in the morning, we bundled into her white, VW Golf and ended up on the Sussex Downs, overlooking Storrington as the sun came up and things happened.
 
A few hours later, we were back at her flat in Lower Beeding. These were the days when things could happen more often and afterwards, as we lay in each other’s arms, I decided that I wasn’t going to move back to Plymouth after all. Talk about a leap of faith, but from a very early age I have always trusted my instincts and they were telling me that this was IT. The one. The showstopper, the moment I’d been searching for in all of my twenty-plus years. I made a very difficult phone call to my father then called in at the Horsham McDonalds, where the manager, Mark, managed to cancel my transfer and re-employ me. Within a week, I had moved in with Louise and although moving at a frightening pace, we were happy with our decisions.
 
As with most things in my life, nothing was straightforward. Louise’s ex-boyfriend, was essentially an enormous cock, following us around in his car that appeared to have the accelerator directly linked to a microscopic penis. He clearly suffered from small man syndrome, with his bulging biceps working overtime to compensate and an Ewok-like strut that made his attempts to intimidate us laughable. The situation was made more difficult as he worked in the same building where she coached gymnastics and whenever I was there he made damn sure that we felt his presence, staring over the balcony at us and trying to give me evil looks that frankly just made him look a little constipated.
 
I also found travel to Horsham from Lower Beeding challenging and in the early days of our relationship, I would often have to walk to or from work – just the four miles, which gave me flashbacks to my time in Ideford and the essential trips to Teignmouth! All things considered, we were pretty happy though and soon enough our conversations turned towards our long-term future and in keeping with the pace of our relationship so far, she agreed to my marriage proposal with a date set for August 5th, 1995. Strangely, I don’t recall the actual details of the proposal. Normally something like that would be etched into my memory, but I suppose that time and tide and a head full of memories has inevitably squeezed some stuff into the furthest corners of my mind or out of my ears. I think that I asked her father’s ‘permission’, which has always struck me as an odd thing to have to do, but it was still very much ‘the done thing’ even back in the mid-nineties. To be fair, Louise’s parents, Clive and Marti, were lovely and never made me feel anything other than loved and part of the family.
 
In the early autumn we moved into a mobile home at a farm in Colgate, owned by the parents of one of the girls that Louise coached. It was a snug, two-bedroom affair in beautiful surroundings and more importantly, somewhere that we felt was ours and we were instantly happy there. For the first time in my life, I felt properly loved and reasonably happy with who I was. I was still painfully insecure and I hadn’t quite shrugged off my jealous streak, but I believed that Louise loved me and the fact that we were engaged did give me some sort of security. We enjoyed a very passionate first few months together and I felt that we were equals in our relationship, not necessarily something that I was accustomed to experiencing. I even started helping out with coaching gymnastics when I wasn’t working and found that I enjoyed working with young athletes, something that would shape my later career choices.

I let my guard down and allowed myself to believe that life was good.
 
And then…it wasn’t.

Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2026.