What Time Is Love? (22/4/13)

So, when they finally get this time travel business sorted out I know where I'm going first. Other than Anfield at 4.50 PM yesterday with a brief message - 'Luis, in about fifteen minutes you might get the urge to do something a bit, well, weird. Do us a favour. Don't do it. Ta' (He'd bitten somebody, hadn't he? Again.)

Yes, you could make an argument for the usual stuff, birth of Christ, building of the Pyramids, Beatles at The Cavern .......and I'm sure that I'll get round to them all but the first one, the important one?

Liverpool. A Saturday night in early 1987. The State. Best nightclub ever. Elegant old ballroom playing indie. Our choice of night out in our early days. And that's where I'll find us, dancing slightly drunkenly in the aisle to the side of the dance floor, cans of Breaker (always The State tipple of choice) on the table by our sides. I'm wearing a black suit with a black and white thick striped shirt that J bought me for Christmas, our first Christmas. J is wearing a black skirt and a white blouse. Both of us have very eighties hair. And there's a moment. A moment when J takes both my arms and moves me round, moves me to where she was dancing so that she could dance where I was.

"Why'd you do that?"

"That girl was eyeing you up."

I had no idea who was eyeing me up, I had never considered the idea that girls would eye me up. As far as I knew it wasn't a thing that happened. It hadn't before. All of a sudden I had become attractive? I didn't care, I didn't want to be attractive to anybody but the girl that I was dancing with.

And that's what I want to see. I want to watch us falling in love, I want to watch our life starting.

I'm not saying that I want to live my life over again, I love my life, I'm happy in any given moment, I'd just like to watch slices of it again as they happened, see how we were.

And I could move onto our first holiday. Majorca 1987, our first time away together, a hotel on a beach. Minorca 1988, the long walk from our hotel to the nearest beach, sat there together dressed for a night out on the last night of our holidays, going home to separate homes, four months away from being engaged, desperate just to be together.

Running back to our hotel in York one afternoon through a downpour, absolutely saturated. Cyprus in the mid 90s. Ayia Napa before it went all dance music and gangs, listening to nothing but 70s Stones and the Doo Wop collection that I've got on my iPod right now.

Our wedding. We didn't have a video, we've only seen the photos. To see it happen, to see everybody together, to see those that we've lost in the years since.

Our first home in Hull, a two up two down with a collapsing bedroom ceiling and a kitchen ceiling that ended up on the floor one night while we were in bed. Moving into the back bedroom because the front was too cold to be habitable.

Our second home. Leeds. Four years, us and two cats, our little garden, married life, new friends.

So, when they finally get this time travel business sorted out these are the moments that I'll choose to go to, the little moments that make your life what it is, the little moments that shine through. H.G. Wells used it to go to the end of the world and fight Morlocks, Captain Kirk went back to 1,000 years before he was born so he could fall in love with Joan Collins and she could die to save the world - all in fifty minutes, Dr Who uses it on a weekly basis to rescue the universe from fantastic foes.

Me? I'm going to use it for the important stuff.

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