Fate, and other accidents

How I met my husband, making rash decisions that might not be so rash after all, and a recipe for Chicken with hazelnut and Comté crumble.

Almost exactly twenty-six years ago, I went to a wedding. One Friday night in November, my friend Clare and I left from Marylebone Station for a village in the Cotswolds in a set up that couldn’t be more Richard Curtis if it tried. But try, it did. Saturday took a look at Friday and said, “You think that’s romantic? Hold my champagne.”

The next day, I sat at a round table in a marquee in a field trying to catch the attention of the man sitting opposite me. Well, it worked because six weeks later, on New Year’s Eve in a pub car park in Langton Herring, Dorset, he asked me to marry him and I said yes. What I actually said was, “Really?” but you get the idea.

A couple of weeks later, I was skimming Séan’s bookshelves for something to read and found a biography of his great grandfather, the archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler. As I knew practically nothing about my pub-car-park betrothed, other than this slightly strange situation felt surprisingly fine, I thought I’d read the book to find out something about his family. Imagine my surprise, friends, when I get to page 38 and discover Sir MM’s mother-in-law was one Annie Kilburn, from Bishop Auckland, Country Durham, the small market town in the North East of England where I grew up. As far as I knew (which admittedly, was not very far at all), all of Séan’s family came from the South of England and Ireland.