'Crazy. Beautiful. Madness,' and how it all began...

I must have told this story a few thousand times already but hey... I still can’t believe it so it helps to tell it again and again!

For those people that think I’m crazy to just up sticks and move to Mexico to be with a girl you’ve never heard of, consider this:

Jacky – she’s actually call ‘Illiana’ but prefers her middle name of ‘Jacky’ - and I first ‘met’ seven YEARS ago when she sent me a friend request on Myspace.

I didn’t actually understand the whole social networking thing until my girlfriend at the time told me it was ‘the future’, and so set me up with the Myspace account.

Jacky – who is Mexican – stumbled across my profile, thought I sounded interesting, and added me.

For the next seven years we emailed back and forth as friends sometimes several times a day, sometimes weekly and sometimes monthly.
We talked about work, play, friendships, relationships, the sugar in our cafe con leche, the sun in the sky... everything.
We talked about meeting up throughout, and in March this year we did just that.

We’d both come out of relationships and figured it’d be nice to meet, given that we could simply start over as friends and talk about things without any preconceptions about anything!

We’d only ever emailed. We only spoke once on the phone briefly a few weeks before I flew out, and we’d never ever met.

Needless to say as soon as we met on holiday in Playa del Carmen in Mexico, it was immediately obvious that something magical was going on.

She was quite simply the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and when I asked her where she’d been all my life she replied “I’ve been waiting for you”.

I can’t reiterate enough that we met simply as ‘friends’, and nothing more.

There was no agenda or anything. It was simply two people from two very different worlds wanting to take a breather, and meet.

For the record I was actually seeing someone at the time and, as soon as I met Jacky, I had to end that as it was pretty obvious that something crazy was going on!

I was a gentleman throughout, and it wasn’t until Jacky wrote ‘te amo’ (Spanish for ‘I love you’) in the sand that I realised that my feelings for her were mutual.
On that cloudy day in Playa Del Carmen she said I would get a kiss every time the sun came out. I've never wished for sunshine so much in my life. It turned into the sunniest day we've both ever known.
Needless to say there were plenty of tears when the days neared for me to fly home.

Any fear about her not feeling the same as me was however quickly distinguished when she asked me if we have 'pinky promises' in England....
"You have pinky promises in Mexico?!" I asked.
To cut a long story short Jacky simply said "well my pinky promise to you is that now I have met you, I want no-one else. I will wait as long as it takes to be with you..."
After 11 days I flew back to the UK feeling that I had left my right arm in Mexico.

I walked into my house and immediately said to myself ‘I don’t want to be here anymore’.

So... four days after I got back to the UK, I re-booked my flight and flew back out two weeks later to meet her parents to tell them how I felt.

I then spent 11 days in Tijuana with Jacky and her family and we decided that the only way this was going to work was if one of us made some pretty major changes.

Since getting back from Afghan last summer I’d been pretty bored, so we didn’t even discuss her coming here to the UK.

I’d wanted a challenge, and a beautiful girl to love me, so it was perfect.

People always bullsh*t on about “it wasn’t an easy decision” to do this or that, but this was easy.

Having spent 34 years in and around Plymouth, and nearly 13 years at The Herald, the time is right to move on.

Besides, everyone is settling down getting married and having children and I feel like I’ve been sat staring at the clock waiting for each hour to pass hoping that the next day will bring something better than the last.

I’ve done some crazy crazy things at work. But job done, and I’ve got the medal.

So there you have it.

Boy meets girl and girl meets boy, worlds collide and I’m moving to Mexico.

'Crazy. Beautiful. Madness'. That’s what we call it.
Oh, and did I mention we have the same birthday? February 17th. Weird huh?
I'm not that naive to think that things could go wrong but hey, nothing ventured nothing gained.
Sometimes showing your hand is the best way to prove your worth. And I don't want to ever feel like I've missed a chance which fate has given me.
I've never been so sure about anything or anyone in my life.
In fact, the only time I felt 'uncertain' about her was when - an hour away from touching down in Cancun on my way to meet her - an American tourist asked (upon hearing the story)... "you've seen pictures of her right?! Well... you sure she's not a midget?!"
You know I'd pondered a lot of eventualities but, up until that point, I hadn't considered that she might actually be a dwarf-type person.
Thankfully, she wasn't.

Anyhow I thought I’d write this to fill in the gaps for those that don’t know our story.

Over the coming months I’ll update this blog to keep people in the loop about how an English boy settles in Mexico.

I’ll be over there for six months (on a 180-day tourist visa) learning Spanish properly, and simply being a boyfriend. I’m not planning to work just yet, I’m simply looking to take my foot off the gas and relax.

I’ll be back in the UK in December for a ‘holiday’ before I jet back with the intention of cracking America.

So there you have it. There’s the reason. Nice eh?