Matt and Angie's True Romance

“I had to come all the way from the fields and open sky of Regina, Saskatchewan to find my true love. If you gave me a million years to ponder, I would never have guessed that true romance and a bar on Vancouver’s Granville Street would ever go together. And to this day, the events that followed all still seem like a distant dream …

“Six months after we met, the good times were almost cut short as Matt’s work visa couldn’t be renewed and he had to leave Vancouver, and me, behind. But the fates conspired to release me from my job too. So - selling everything - I followed him to England a few months later. In Richmond-upon-Thames, a year sped by: another job, a leaky roof, good times and bad until, again, we found ourselves at the airport with another expired work visa, about to part and feeling as if it had all been a dream.

“… but the dream was real and was to change our lives forever. I kept asking Matt why our world seemed to be collapsing and things seemed to be getting so shitty. And he wished he'd said - wished, because someone else had, in fact, already said it - ‘That's the way it goes, but don't forget, it goes the other way too.’

“That's the way romance is. Usually, that's the way it goes, but every once in awhile, it goes the other way too. At the end of a long year of immigration paperwork, transatlantic flights and patchy employment, we were together on Boxing Day, 2007. Amid the post-Christmas melancholy of that day, when all I could hear was the rattle of mahjong tiles, and the screaming of the landlord’s grandchildren upstairs, I look back and am amazed that my thoughts were so clear and true, that Matt’s five words went through my mind endlessly, repeating themselves like a broken record: I have diamonds for you, I have diamonds for you, I have diamonds for you.

“We’re engaged! And that is why you are reading all this.

“Sometimes Matt asks me what I would have done if I’d not been laid off from my job in Vancouver, if I hadn’t chosen to move to England. To this, I always smile, as if I'm not going to satisfy him with a response. But I always do. I tell him of how I would want to die, but that the anguish and the want of death would fade like the stars at dawn, and that things would be much as they are now. Perhaps.

“Except maybe I wouldn’t have spent a week in Memphis with someone called, 'Nelvis'…”


With love from Matt and Angie,


On the occasion of their engagement and with help from consummate romantic, Quentin Tarantino.