*sigh*

I’m back after a quite unexpected trip away. The reason being that the RL Mr. Pookes (a phrase borrowed from Ella, and her RL man) popped the question…ooh….about a month ago! 🙂

Now, let me explain. The RL Mr. Pookes and I have been an item for about ten years. We met at university, at the St. Valentine’s Ball. And no, it wasn’t as romantic as it sounds. I drank too much, was sick and must have looked a total mess when he pulled me out of a flower bed and insissted on taking me home.

OK girls…this is the moment where alarm bells, drunk or not, should go off. And I was away past the point of caring, it shames me to say. But I got lucky. Mr. Pookes carted me off home, dumped me on a sofa (which I was sick on) and was gentlemanly enough to let himself out and go home alone. Most men wouldn’t, they’d have taken advantage.

And then called the next day to see if I was OK.

Apart from the hangover…yeah.

What happened next was that I invited him out for dinner, more by way of saying ‘thanks’ than anything else. I didn’t, initially, fancy him or anything. He seemed a bit…geeky! (I know that’s now a cool thing to be, back then it wasn’t. But maybe it was his geekiness that stopped him taking advantage). He wasn’t, I suppose, a ‘hunk’, but my goodness, when you socialised with him, he was hard not to love. A personality for which the word ‘magnetic’ was probably coined. One thing led to another…we dated again, became an item and moved in together about eight years ago. And we’ve been ‘living in sin’, to coin a phrase, ever since! 🙂

So, on St. Valentine’s Day, he popped the question, went down on one knee, gave me a ring and some tickets for a ‘holiday’ in Greece, at a naturist location.

A group nude wedding at the Hedonism resort in Jamaica (more realistically, this was probably more of a renewal of vows than it was first time out for most of these couples)

To cut a long story short, we went out there, were ‘married’ in a naturist wedding ceremony on the beach (outside our favourite beach bar) surrounded by some of our naturist friends in Greece and from England. And while I’m not one for making a crossover between SL & RL, I even invited Ella. (This is true. Like Pookes, I don’t cross-fertilise RL & SL, but I’d have loved to have attended were it not for the short notice and pressure of work. That said, Pookes and I are meeting up in RL later this year: Ella)

One of our friends, who has an online degree to be a pastor in an American church, ‘married’ us, and then we came home to make it official and legal with the authorities in the UK. 🙂

So there we are. I’m now Mrs. Pookes. It doesn’t feel that much different to being Miss Pookes, since we have actually lived together for the best part of a decade, and the ring(s) -engagement to wedding in the space of a week- still look strange on my finger, but I’m really pleased that he’s managed to survive me for a decade without a) killing me and b) caring enough to make a commitment. I know he won’t be reading this -he doesn’t do SL- but ‘I love ya, ya big geek! 🙂

I now need someone to act as a stand-in while we do our SL vows…and get a few pix of our SL nuptials (well, me and a stand-in). I could make jokes about us, me, him all night, but the fact is that he’s been the best thing in my life for a good part of my adult life. I’ll try and get round to doing a few sham ‘naturist wedding’ shots for SLN soon (is there a naturist wedding chapel in SL?), as the RL Mr. Pookes doesn’t do SL.

(Mrs) Pookes 🙂