I arrived home yesterday evening to find a box of roses on the doorstep. Not the chocolate kind, the flower kind. Apparently they come in boxes as well as bunches and they are delivered by couriers who leave them under doormats.
My first thought was that Mrs Left-Handed Tea Drinker had a secret admirer. Like any sane man, I quickly devised a strategy to take out an advert in the Spurtle for a hitman. Thankfully, it didn’t come to that as my second thought was to check the address label.
Sure enough, it had been delivered to the wrong place. I decided to do the right thing: quickly remove the label and disguise the gift as my own. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time and Mrs LHTD arrived back to be greeted with a box of roses that weren’t for her.
‘Well who do you think?’ I replied.
I wish I hadn’t bothered asking as she began spooling off a list of potential suitors, friends, admirers, acquaintances and colleagues who might have bought her flowers, none of them me.
‘Actually, they were delivered to the wrong address,’ I responded smugly. ‘And I’m going to deliver them.’
‘Delivering flowers to another woman,’ she said. ‘How romantic.’
I was glad she’d noticed my good deed, but as I set off to deliver the box it was impossible not to think about how badly this could all end up.
First of all: What if a man answered the door and I had to explain that I was delivering a box of roses to his other half and he wasn't the one who'd sent them? What if the person who was receiving the flowers didn’t actually want them? They could have been from a stalker or an ex-lover she was trying to forget.
I decided to leave it to fate. I arrived at the door, rang the bell and ran as fast as I could. When I got home, I tried to make amends with Mrs LHTD. I presented her with a handmade Valentine card that the Little LHTD had brought back from nursery. She opened it and quickly discarded it, saying ‘It’s not even from our child’.
Who said romance in Broughton is dead?
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