I'm going to enjoy writing today's entry. I've been thinking about it for days, saving up for this one day.

Today is the 29th day of October, a day I could call "Things Keep Happening To Me In Life Connected To October 29th Day", but "October 29th" will do.

Today is, you may not know, Winona Ryder's birthday. I've always liked Winona Ryder; something about dark hair, that elfin face and eyes with character. This has nothing to do with my tale for today... just thought I'd mention Winona Ryder. Mmmmmm...(!)

Sorry. On with the blog entry.

The first time the date entered into my personal life was in 1990. I was working in London and had a relationship (short, but sweet) with an Australian called Mary. She told me her birthday: it's on October 29th. It hardly constitutes a major event, because we all have to have a birthday, but it will all come together once you get into the "embittered first marriage" section of today's log entry.

This is the embittered first marriage bit. A year later, I lost contact with Mary (for reasons that will be explained later) and met Heidi. In the great scheme of things, her birthday was also on October 29th. She became Mrs. Seabrook #1, a marriage that ended a few years later after it became apparent that she was still dating. Oh, and those little giveaway things she would say in her sleep that made me suspicious (like "ugh, get your hands off me, you're not like J**** was last night"). Life's like that if you spend it with a woman that won't let her marriage stand in the way of screwing her boyfriend, but I digress. Heidi and I separated in 1996 prior to our 1997 divorce.

During the separation in the autumn of 1996, Mary came back on the scene after six years of living her life in Western Australia and she called me. I was at work at the time and it was a moment I'll never forget... or go into detail. We met, went to a nightclub in South London and we had a very good time indeed for the next few months. Her 27th birthday in 1996, you know the date, passed for her in rainy old London before the prospect of December in the sun called her back to her homeland. I had totally forgotten about her birthdate first time around (when I met Heidi in 1991), which means I had two relationships with people that share a birthday but never made that connection until after the second relationship was over. Obviously, you can work out the chances of that happening are one in 365. More if you count February the 29th.

We went our separate ways, Mary and I, but that relationship was a good one and it made me wonder what it would be like to travel a bit further afield. I'd been to a few places in Europe, but I'd never braved the hassle of really seeing the world. That changed, obviously. After all, if you had a fun time with someone that liked you enough to track you down after six years, YOU'D want to see what their part of the world looked like too.

The old marital home was sold and money was split 50-50. I booked myself a little trip with my share of the profit. Hong Kong/Kowloon/a little bit of China for just under a week, Sydney to track down my two uncles (I managed to find one, and he's a genuine bloke is my Uncle Brian), Western Australia with a hire car (Mary once sent me a postcard with six scenes from the state... I'm pleased to say that I saw five of them first hand), Harare in Zimbabwe and Victoria Falls on the Zimbabwe-Zambia border. It just so happened that the time period I was to spend in Western Australia (and Fremantle in particular) included October 29th. OK, it didn't "just happen". It was an obvious gesture.

I also posted a few bits about myself on a penpal web site, hoping that someone in the places I was visiting would offer to be a tourist guide for the price of a few beers. Nobody did, but this will become integral to the story soon enough.

I'm going off on a tangent for a little while, and returning to the idea of hoping to 'accidentally' bump into Mary, because I know what some of you are thinking. "Hey, she came over to Britain for you after six years... you went over there for her, right? Knight in shining armour?" Well; I'm not the possesive type, but it would be a lie if I hadn't thought of the possibility of the two of us holding hands as the sun set over the clear blue Indian Ocean on a hot October evening (and the chance that she wasn't seeing anyone did make me think). As it turns out, I never saw her again. I met her parents and delivered her a birthday card, care of their address on her 29th birthday, but I never caught up with her. I was told she had a boyfriend and she was nuts about him, so I'd like to take the opportunity that cyberspace allows to wish her the best of luck: best of luck. Mary Seman, wherever you may be and whatever you're doing. Oh, and happy 33rd for today.

Some of you may have noticed the African places on my itinerary. So what happened on the safari and the waterfall rafting expeditions and all that stuff? I never got to them. Four days after October 29th, the hire car I was driving (a rather nice Holden Commodore) skidded off the road between Wave Rock and Perth. I suffered compression of the vertebrae, bruising on my back that ached for three months and minor glass lacerations on my right arm and leg that look like I was scratched by a cat and these little scars still show. I remember going around a corner on a dusty Outback road but don't even recall heading for the ditch. Either the impact erased my short-term memory (it can do that, you know, because short-term memories are stored electrically in the brain) or I fell asleep at the wheel for a moment. I guess I'll never know.

So I flew back via Singapore on a mixture of 10mg Valium and Bailey's Irish Cream. I was off work for nearly two months, but mine was a union job so I got full pay for watching "Aliens: The Director's Cut" on video and playing computer games on the PC.

Oh yeah, the PC. I'd posted my details on that penpal web site. Well, I checked and I got a lot of answers. Quite a lot were from companies that wanted to take money from my credit card so that women would ask me how big my pee-pee was (didn't answer those). There were a few from genuinely interesting people but those emails eventually died a typical email death... long email, short email, forwarded jokes, nothing. You know what I mean.

There was also one from Beth in the USA.

We started talking. Infrequent emails became frequent emails. She called me, I called her, we stared calling each other with increased frequency until we were speaking verbally twice a day and sending emails every day that grew and grew and grew into seperate 150 Kilobytes monster emails with lines of chevrons. I still have the bulk of those emails on a CD-R. Eventually, we decided to meet. A friend and I had planned to visit Florida for two weeks, and I took a third week off work to meet her. JFK Airport in New York was chosen as the meeting place. The Yankees had just beaten the Atlanta Braves 4-0 in the best of seven game World Series (baseball, non-Americans) and The City That Never Sleeps was in a party mood.

The day: Friday. The year: 1999. The date: oh, you probably guessed already. October 29th.

It's now the third anniversary of that meeting. Beth and I have been married for fifteen months, which meant I sold up everything I couldn't bring with me to be with her in the States. It seems October the 29th is the same wherever I may be. It's the day when things keep happening to me, and I'm pretty glad they did.

Listen: Fool's Gold (Grooverider's Mix)- The Stone Roses.