Merlot is off the menu

Merlot is off the menu.

Imagine your best first date. What would it involve? A quiet glass of Merlot in the brand new and very fashionable wine bar? A steak dinner? Wearing that little black dress or may be something glittery and clingy borrowed from a friend? A night at the disco? A beach picnic? Even an hour or so at the bowling alley. Any of these could be fun and romantic.

It is not what happens all the time though. You don’t always have a choice. You weren’t planning a date at all – it just happened. You didn’t even get to choose who it would be with. Fate takes care of that. Fate and matchmakers.

I think of the hike through the Himalayas. About 10,000 feet up. Thirty or so people had been invited, and most of them signed up. We were all studying local languages in summer-school. Some people I knew already, but they were in the minority. Others were complete strangers, and a few I had seen but never spoken to. The hike was to take several hours, but we were assured that there was a café part way along our route.

We were meeting at the end of the market. I was there early it seemed. There was only one other person waiting, a lad I had seen at the other end of the dining table once or twice. Not bad looking, but not so handsome that he would turn heads either. He was wearing a brick coloured shalwar chemise with an ink stain over his heart – a leaky biro, and he wore a baseball cap. He looked too thin and a bit solemn. He didn’t say anything at first except ‘Hello’ . Was that a Yorkshire accent? Then, when it was a good twenty minutes after the suggested starting time he finally spoke.’ You haven’t got a hat. The sun is going to get very strong.’ He then walked up to the nearest stall, picked a wide brimmed straw hat, turned to me and mouth ‘O.K.’ and I mouthed back ‘O.K.’ - why were we doing that? I laughed, accepted the hat and we set off.

So I hadn’t got a hat and he hadn’t got a bottle opener. The path led upwards towards the viewing place ’Kashmir Point’. He pulled two bottles of coke from his back pack and used the top of the stone wall to wedge under the caps and open them. That worked well – both bottles ended up with sharp glass at the necks and we could only drink by pouring the warmish fluid like those Spanish films we had seen.- with half split and a lot of laughing.

Gradually he opened up, telling me something of his life before the Himalayas – childhood in Yorkshire, then college. Later he had travelled to Malawi where he had worked as an engineer. He had finished that stint by travelling up Africa to Israel and then across Europe and home. Now he was teaching in a college about five hours north of the clinic I was running in the Punjab.

We talked and we walked. It wasn’t a date was it? We were just two people who had turned up in the same place at the same time. That didn’t mean we were not enjoying ourselves. Most of the time all we could see were the trees around us – then suddenly amazing vistas and butterflies in thousands making good use of the thermals rising up from the city so far below that clouds intervened partly blocking the view.

Walking – that was awkward. Although not so much taller than me, John had a long loping stride. I hadn’t been up at the height for long so hadn’t had enough time to adjust. He walked easily. I puffed. Every now and again he would pause, allowing me to catch up, and tried really hard to match his steps to mine. But it was a case of two of his to three of mine, and two minutes later there he would be yards ahead – but we continued in this rather haphazard way round the ridge, mile after mile.

Clouds – we hadn’t seen any for weeks. It was the very end of May. Then I shivered. The temperature had dropped quite suddenly, and the sky grew dark. My thin cotton clothing was designed for the heat wave we had been experiencing. We were almost half way on our circular route so decided to carry on. Then my foot slipped – mud. We turned and looked behind us. Our path was actually a dry stream bed – except it wasn’t dry anymore. A thin trickle of water was coming down the mountain. In a couple of minutes it was twice as wide. Then wider still. We looked up – a wall of water was heading our way.

We could see smoke rising from the from the promised café and set off at a run. By the time we got there rain was coming down in stair-rods – no gaps between drops, but solid columns of water - the monsoon had broken several weeks early. My hat was a floppy mess of sodden straw, and you could have got a pint of water if you’d wrung out our clothes.

The café was packed – not with hikers, but with the tree fellers who would normally be working in the forests around us. The room was warm and steam rose from everyone. They were polite, but shy, not used to having ‘Engrezi’ visitors. Tea was brewed over an open fire in old paint pots with the colours still clearly to be seen on the outside. I remember ours came from one with a bright turquoise rim of paint which had dripped long ago. Working on the principle that all that boiling probably meant things were sterile, and the paint long baked on, we drank warm rather than hot, very milky, very sugary tea - just the way I don’t like it, from cracked white bowls. Water boils at 93 degrees so high up. There was no food to be had – the workman had already eaten it. I searched my pockets and found a couple of wine gums – that was lunch then.

We couldn’t get any wetter, so we pushed on with our trek – there was no other choice. If we’d waited for the rain to stop that would be may be another five or six hours, by which time it would be dark – and that mountain dropped very suddenly five thousand feet on one side , with no fencing and no lights.

Two hours later, safely back and dried off, we found a lot of people asking questions. ‘How was it?’ ‘Do you like him, he’s a lovely lad isn’t he?’ Too many people asking the same questions.

We later discovered it had all been a set up. Everyone else decided we’d make the perfect couple, especially after I had pushed my soup bowl in John’s direction and he finished it off. And this had happened not once , but twice. They had planned it. All those other people had had no intention of turning up.

So, not the perfect first date –imperfect yet perfect in its own way – the first of many. We got engaged ten weeks later. He still walks as fast, and I’m still trying to catch up.