Our wedding took place on a blustery midwinter day. The fifteenth of January 2000. Yet the sun shone through the clouds brightly.
Shara’s father, Brian, who so sadly was suffering with multiple sclerosis, gave her away from his wheelchair in the church.
Brian cried. Shara cried. Everyone cried.
We left the church to our friends singing a cappella versions of “Hey, Hey, We’re the Monkees” and “I’m a Believer.”
I was the happiest I had ever been.
Right decisions make you feel like that.
We then danced to a Peruvian street band that Trucker had come across, and ate bangers and mash at long tables. The day was above all, love-filled.
We were both among the first, and youngest, of our group of friends to be married, which made it feel even more special. (A wedding was novel for all of us in those days.) And Charlie and Trucker made everyone cry some more with their best-men speeches.
Several months earlier Shara and I had bought a home together. Well, to be more accurate it was a barge, moored on the Thames in central London.
Neil had spotted it for us, and we looked around it straight away. I instantly loved it.
We had previously been quite close to putting in an offer on a tiny, poky studio flat in London—but deep down I was concerned.
For a start, I couldn’t really afford it. Dad had offered to help me secure a mortgage if I could make the repayments, but I knew it would be a stretch to make those every month.
The barge, on the other hand, was less than half the price—and way cooler.
It was pretty sparse, cold, and damp when we looked around it, and Shara and her family were definitely a little tentative at first.
But I got to work on the PR front.
“Hey, it will be fun. We can do it up together—it will be a challenge. We can then make it all cozy and a home.”
Shara tilted her head at me in her way.
“I’m a little nervous about the ‘challenge’ bit. Can we focus on the homely and cozy part of the plan instead, sweetheart?” she replied, still looking concerned.
(Sure enough, she totally changed after we got to live on our barge for a while, and nowadays, wild horses couldn’t force her to sell the boat. I love that in her. Shara always takes such a lot of convincing, and then once she makes something “hers,” it is hers forever. Me included.)
We spent two months doing up the boat with our good friend Rob Cranham. He was amazing. He lived on board and worked tirelessly to help us make it a home. Rob converted it to just how we had envisaged. This included an old bathtub mounted on the deck and a captain’s cabinet bed in the “dungeon”!*
We lowered Shara’s granny’s old sofa and chest of drawers in through the roof, and painted and varnished furiously. By the time of the wedding, all was done.
The marital bed was neatly made, Shara’s nightie was carefully laid out on the pillow, and all was set for when we would return from honeymoon, ready to spend our first night together there.
I couldn’t wait.
The day after our wedding, we flew off on honeymoon. I had recklessly waited until two days before our wedding to book the holiday, in the hope that I would get some great last-minute deal somewhere.
Always a dangerous tactic.
I pretended to Shara that it was a surprise.
But, predictably, those “great deals” were a bit thin on the ground that week. The best I could find was a one-star package holiday, at a resort near Cancun in Mexico.
It was bliss being together, but there was no hiding the fact that the hotel sucked. We got put in a room right next to the sewer outlet—which gave us a cracking smell to enjoy every evening as we sat looking out at the … maintenance shed opposite.
As lunch wasn’t included in the one-star package, we started stockpiling the breakfasts. A couple of rolls down the jersey sleeve, and a yogurt and banana in Shara’s handbag. Then back to the hammock for books, kissing, and another whiff of sewage.
When we returned to the UK it was a freezing cold January day. Shara was tired, but we were both excited to get onto our nice, warm, centrally heated barge.
It was to be our first night in our own home.
I had asked Annabel, Shara’s sister, to put the heating on before we arrived, and some food in the fridge. She had done so perfectly.
What she didn’t know, though, was that the boiler packed in soon after she left.
By the time Shara and I made it to the quayside on the Thames, it was dark. Our breath was coming out as clouds of vapor in the freezing air. I picked Shara up and carried her up the steps onto the boat.
We opened the door and looked at each other. Surprised.
It was literally like stepping into a deep freeze. Old iron boats are like that in winter. The cold water around them means that, without heating, they are Baltically cold. We fumbled our way, still all wrapped up, into the bowels of the boat and the boiler room.
Shara looked at me, then at the silent, cold boiler.
No doubt she questioned how smart both choices had really been.
So there we were.
No money, and freezing cold—but happy and together.
That night, all wrapped up in blankets, I made a simple promise to Shara: I would love her and look after her, every day of our life together—and along the way we would have one hell of an adventure.
Little did either of us realize, but this was really just the beginning.