Subject: Come One! Come All!
Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2001 13:27:51 -0000

Yes, this Sunday our charming colonial cousins will be playing the
American Football Superbowl!!!!!!!

If you’re anything like me you can contain your excitement at the thought
of watching a bunch of Yanks try to play rugby while dressed up like nancy
boys… but come anyway – there’s gonna be beer and nachos… LOTS of
beer… MANY nachos…

So, yeah, Sunday 28 Jan our place some time in the evening. Come or we’ll
cross you off our Christmas Card list. Ooooh – aren’t you scared?

Terry & Stoive
RSVP!

To explain… I was at university and sharing a house with my mate, Stoive. I can’t say that either of us really liked American Football, but it seemed like a good excuse for a party. We invited everyone we knew. Specifically – single girls. More specifically, one single girl.

As it turned out, we never got to see SuperBowl XXXV. It was shown only on Pay-per-view. Our cable provider (NTL, I think) had a delightfully British attitude to making money. We rang them on the Sunday morning, only to be told “Sorry, you can’t order pay-per-view at the weekends. The staff only work week-days.” I’m told that customer service hasn’t much improved in the land of cable.

So our “Superbowl” party became just another student party. The beer quickly ran out only to be replaced by honey vodka and Goldschläger. With the TV off, we were forced – horror of horror – into conversations.

I don’t really know how I wrangled it, but I ended up sat next to the girl I had invited. She was talking, I was talking. But we weren’t talking to each other. I was trying to work up the courage to talk to her. Stoive was cautioning me against eating too much spicy salsa; “Not if you want to get lucky tonight, mate!”

There was a brief lull in the conversations. I turned to her, about to say something which in my head sounded urbane when…

She kissed me.

She. Kissed. Me.

She kissed me.

She kissed me.

Nope. No matter how many permutations I try, I still don’t understand it. I know it happened – I’m still slightly at a loss to explain it.

One thing I do know is that, seven years later, she kissed me again. And we’ve still never watched a Super Bowl.