.png)
I remember meeting Paul for the first time like it was yesterday. At the Paraportiani Church wall on Mykonos, I was sat looking out to see on my very first day there and he sat down next to me. And he started talking. We went to dinner - at a restaurant that was on a steep slope slope. So steep that it the chairs had shorter front legs than back ones if you were facing, as I was, uphill, and short back legs, on his chair facing down it! We hadn't really had much to drink but when we came to leave, he fell backwards over his chair and I fell backwards over mine. We never stopped laughing. We spent hours talking that night with a full moon shining through palm trees. The next two weeks were like nothing else I had ever experienced.
You might think these things just stopped, I mean he went back to Saudi Arabia, I went back to England. But he wrote, and I wrote week in, week out for months to come. At Christmas he flew to England to see me as part of his tour. We kept in touch on and off until we didn't. Then in late 2019 or early 2020, we found each other on Facebook. I wrote him a message and didn't hear back, but so much was going on here in April and I'm not a FB user much, that it slipped. Then this morning I found this box of photograph albums, and found these photos of him. I was going to send them to him so we could laugh about old we'd gotten! That's when I found out. I'm just stunned. We were planning on meeting up next year when I come to DC. I am so glad that we had the few months of chats and messages that we did. He changed my life, and I was able to tell him that, because I had wanted to for so long. For nearly 40 years he always had - and he always will have a place in my heart.
