It happened in Sydney and I was helping prepare food for the birthday party of a golfing chum when Christine walked into the kitchen and into my life. She was there as the guest of a mutual friend, an Irish writer who also knew my golfing friend.

That Christine was in Sydney at all was a coincidence.She had migrated there as a teenager with her parents and had recently returned to Australia after a year-long stay in England, a stay she had initially intended to be permanent. More, she had met my Irish colleague only a few days earlier and had come to the birthday party at the last moment.

In recent months, I’ve frequently pondered what might have happened had either of us made a different choice that night or, somewhere down the years, taken another route in life. Thus, I’m convinced our union was written in the stars. It was meant to be.

Doubtless other couples could tell a similar tale but this wasn’t simply a chain of linked events. The fickle finger of fate had been pointing to the other side of the world, where we were waiting for each other.
***
The first time I saw Christine she was wearing a figure hugging red dress, long-sleeved, low-cut and ankle length. It was quite beautiful, an adornment. It still hangs in her wardrobe, when all else has gone.

She had long hair the colour of autumn leaves and her sea green eyes were a counterpoint to her finely chiselled features. She could have been a fashion model, but no fashion model could have carried a figure that was just shy of being voluptuous but proportioned to perfection. More than alluring, was my first reaction to her. She was magnetic and I was magnetised.

The crown of her head came to my nose and her green eyes were sparkling. “Hello,” she said, her face inches from mine. “I’m Christine.” “Hello: I’m Barry. It’s lovely to see you here for Ray’s birthday.”

I was hooked, sold, the contract drawn up, signed, sealed and delivered. I was bewitched. It was 4 September 1972. I was a divorcee a month away from my fortieth birthday; she was twenty-six. It was the luckiest day of my life and the date became an anniversary because it was love at first sight. From the moment we met we were inseparable and we married the following July. That’s mid-winter in Sydney, but the wedding party lunched joyfully under a cloudless sky on an open terrace overlooking the cobalt blue water of Watson’s Bay.

The portents didn’t disappoint. Our union was blissful and blessed. Our life together was one of laughter and delight and mutual interests. She filled my days with joy and wonder. Four decades later I was still smitten: she too, as she never ceased telling me.

In Sydney, we were part of a happy circle of friends and had an active social life and interests that included horse riding, golf, the theatre, concerts, books and exploring Australia. Ostensibly, life could not have been sweeter but for various reasons, mainly family, we decided that Sydney was not for us. We sold up and returned to England in 1979.

Via Worthing and Southport, Christine’s home town and where our two sons were born, we moved to Rutland in 2006 and settled in Oakham. Here, as before, she gathered a multitude of loving friends; her colleagues at the county council, the needy ex-servicemen, the elderly frail and the vulnerable, all the folk she helped in her post as the council’s financial benefits officer, a position similar to the one she had held in Southport.

Christine delighted in unravelling the red tape and overcoming the barriers that affected their quality of life. She saved many folk from a miserable penury, and they loved her for her compassion and unfailing dedication to their cause.

It didn’t end there. When she reached the age of retirement, six years later, she started anew as the volunteer project development officer for the Rutland Community Spirit charity organisation and also for the Royal Air Force Association, of which she was the honorary welfare officer for Rutland. Her retirement years frequently brought forty hour weeks, much of it unpaid work driven by her compassion and inordinate generosity of spirit.

But there was still time aplenty to share romantic pleasures and joyous gatherings with friends and family. From Rutland we could reach central London by rail in ninety minutes so we visited the capital frequently, to see our sons and enjoy the delights of the city.

The whole of England was our oyster and each year we made a point of celebrating our anniversary at somewhere historically romantic: the enchanting Bovey Castle in Devon, for instance; the gracious, fifteenth-century Manor House at Castle Coombe near Bath; the stunning Barnsley House in the Cotswolds, or the homely Brudenell Hotel at Aldeburgh, and just about anywhere in Norfolk or Suffolk, where we would walk the coastal path for miles before catching a bus back to the hotel after lunching at a village pub. They were unforgettable times.

After several years as travel editor of a national golf magazine, I was now operating my own online magazine, a website devoted to golfing holidays and resorts. As before, it required considerable travel, to review resorts around the world, and whenever her professional duties and family commitments permitted Christine would accompany me.

She was an intrepid explorer and while I was working she would wander off to see the sights of the nearest city that could have been anywhere between Charleston and Casablanca, Venice and Singapore. A taxi was unnecessary: a bus would do the trick for her, or a ferry. She was fearless and unfussy and above all adventurous, a real traveller.

Christine was also a gifted artist in water colours and when she’d had her fill of the city she would find a quiet spot somewhere with agreeable scenery, a hotel garden perhaps, or the beach, and paint away, an occasional chilled white wine at her elbow, awaiting my return.

With her alongside me each trip was a landmark in my life, exciting and unforgettable. Some of us are simply born lucky.