Ten years ago a woman told me to get out of her way at a gig, and I have basically been doing what she says ever since.
That was 2016. She asked me to move so she could see the band. I moved. Then she talked to me for four hours. I don't remember much about the gig. I remember every minute of the four hours.
I want to say I knew straight away. I didn't, not really. What I knew was that I didn't want to stop talking to her, and ten years on I still don't, which either says something lovely about Sarah or something worrying about my ability to end a conversation. I'll let you decide.
I proposed on the beach at Whitstable. It poured with rain. Actual, proper rain, the kind that soaks through everything you're wearing and most things you're carrying. I had a ring in my pocket and a day booked off work, and I had decided, weeks before, that this was the day. Sarah, sensibly, suggested we might want to wait for better weather. I said no. Not out of romance, if I'm honest. Out of stubbornness. I'd booked the day off and I wasn't wasting it. So we stood on a wet beach in Whitstable and got engaged anyway, and somehow it's one of my favourite things that has ever happened to me.
That's the thing about Sarah. She's the one who thinks things through, and I'm the one who's already decided, and somehow between the two of us it works.
She's shown that same patience in smaller ways too. Before my first day at a new job, I was too nervous to go in. Properly stuck. So Sarah sat with me in the car park for an hour, not saying I had to go in, just sitting there until I was ready to. That's not a big dramatic story. It's just an hour in a car park. But if you want to know who she is, that's who she is. She'll sit with you in the car park for as long as it takes.
I should say something about the room while I'm up here. Linda made every single one of the table decorations you're sitting at today, by hand. Every one. I'm not sure the scale of that has fully landed on people yet, but it should, because it's the reason this room looks the way it does.
And Paul, my best man, once drove four hours to help me move a sofa and wouldn't take a penny for petrol. Four hours there, presumably four hours back, for a sofa. I still don't fully understand it. I'm just grateful for it, in the way you're grateful for things you know you don't deserve.
So that's the two of them, really, side by side. People who turn up. People who help without being asked twice, and don't need thanks for it, though I'm going to give it anyway.
Sarah, I moved out of your way at that gig without knowing what I was moving into. Best instruction anyone's ever given me.
To my wife.