I remember our first date. Date? It was more like a “Why don’t you come horse riding with us?”

Mottsu was a friend of my house-mate and “us” was a group of his friends and house mates. The invitation was to join them on a bush ride 5 or 6 hours on a horse. Horse riding sounds easy enough, you sit on top and the one under the saddle does all the work.

An all day horse ride sounds deceptively easy, it is body bruising work. Unfamiliar with the inevitable muscular outrage I readily agreed to go.

It was a fabulous day, a memorable first date, I paid for it later with all over body distress and that’s not my lasting memory. I vaguely recall the physical torment.

There was some natural awkwardness during the long day, it was difficult to converse with ease, from horse back to horse back. Sometime mid-afternoon I felt a particular silence was a tad pro-longed and I scanned my head for things to say when Mottsu, a laconic easy rider, started with “I spy with my little eye…”. We slipped into an unanticipated game of I spy.

WTF? I spy? It wasn’t exactly conversation.

Far out, I spy.

I was delighted by his unconventional wit and style. Unpretentious, the perfect foil for my own uptight sensibilities. I was hooked with a game of eye-spy.

There all sorts of things you love about someone, all sorts of reasons.
Right there, ‘I spy’, is why I loved that man