The first time I met Sarah, she shook my hand in a pub in Leeds and asked me three questions about myself before I'd got my coat off. I hadn't sat down. I hadn't even ordered a pint. I remember thinking, this one's going to keep him on his toes. I was right, and I mean that as the highest compliment I know how to give.
James has always been like this, actually. Certain. When he was seven he got sent home from school for correcting his teacher. I want to be clear about something, because it matters to the story: he was right. Seven years old, and already unwilling to let a wrong fact sit there unchallenged in the world. I don't know what that says about him. I don't know what it says about me, that I was quietly proud of my son for getting sent home.
He saved up for a year once. A whole year, for a telescope. Pocket money, birthday money, whatever he could find down the side of the sofa, I imagine. He got it, finally, this thing he'd wanted for months and months. And then he gave it to his cousin. Just handed it over. I never got a straight answer as to why, and I've stopped asking, because I think the answer is simply that he wanted his cousin to have it more than he wanted to keep it. That's not a virtue you can teach somebody. You either raise a boy who does that or you don't, and I'm still not entirely sure which one of us did the raising.
There was a period when I wasn't well. James drove to Cardiff every weekend. Every single weekend. He never once mentioned it. Not to me, not to anyone that I'm aware of, he just did it, like it was nothing, like it was the sort of thing you'd expect anybody's son to do without being asked twice. I found out how regular it had been almost by accident, much later. That's James all over. He doesn't announce the good stuff. He just turns up.
Now, I should balance this out, because I can hear him telling me to, so. This is also a man who reversed a hire van into a bollard in front of eleven people and then blamed the bollard. Eleven witnesses. He held his ground on this. I don't know where that confidence comes from, but I have a suspicion it's the same thing that got him sent home aged seven. He is, if nothing else, consistent.
What I keep coming back to, watching the two of them, is that Sarah asked me three questions before I'd sat down, and James has spent his whole life being the sort of person worth asking about. He gave away the telescope. He drove to Cardiff without telling a soul. He is stubborn, and generous, and occasionally wrong about bollards, and he has found someone who, from everything I've seen, matches him on every count including the stubborn part.
So would you all raise a glass. To James, who is usually right, and to Sarah, who asked all the right questions from the very start.
To James and Sarah.