Happy Birthday, Steve - and a role for Dame Judi

Steve's birthday today and we went out for lunch and then round past Rachel and Stephen's to see the boys. Finn and Ollie had got him a cake and Finn helped blow out the candles - and did a lot of drooling down his t-shirt whilst eating it.

Last Saturday there was a feature on Radio 4 about people who had met on a train. Steve and I met on the Aberdeen/Glasgow inter-city in June 1976. Steve was on his way to a conference in Glasgow but his son had not returned in time with the car so he had to get a later train. I'd been visiting my cousins in Brechin and Myra was also running late and so dropped me at Arbroath rather than the planned Montrose. Thus we ended up sitting across the passage from each other and he offered me his Observer to read. We were both going to the West end and so shared a taxi. While waiting in the queue he said there had been a terrible accident in the family in the past week and his wife had been killed in a car accident. I was going on holiday the next month to a part of France that he said he and his wife had loved. All I knew about Steve was his name and the village where he lived but I sent a postcard hoping that things would work out for him. I was going out with someone else and after the postcard didn't give the meeting much thought. However in September I got a phone call at work in the BBC and I immediately recognised his lovely accent, (although from Peterhead he'd spent some of his childhood in Stornoway). All he knew about me was my name and where I worked. The rest is history and we were married the following April. I'm sure it was difficult for his first wife's mum, Nell, who lived next door. She didn't come to the wedding but wrote my parents a lovely note and became a surrogate mum and granny when my own mother died. Steve and I went on to have four children and when Nell died her coffin was carried by her two grandsons from her daughter and our two boys. It was very moving and I think she would have been really proud. Well, going back to last Saturday, we thought our story was at least as interesting as the others featured. I joked that if I wrote in maybe they'd make a film of our lives - and we agreed that the only person who could play the indomitable Nell would be Judi Dench! I'm not saying who we'd want to play us incase our friends laugh!