10 whole years together. I didn't even know. That's how good I am. But Stevie remembered. I know I give him a hard time on this blog, especially for his funny little Stevie-isms, but he intersperses them with moments of great romance which take me all the more by surprise. He bought me a huge bouquet of roses, which I loved all the more because I could see that they hadn't come from a petrol station or a supermarket. He bought a card and wrote me a lovely letter in it. Admittedly, it was a birthday card, but it had a number 10 on it, so I get where he was coming from. He says he didn't know what he should be looking for in German. We had a lovely romantic evening. I provided a lovely dinner that no one would eat (let's pretend that that's because it was so beautiful it would have been a shame to eat a work of art), and then we strolled down memory lane to the swing park, and swung by the video shop for a movie, 2 Chupa Chups and a bottle of Prosecco. It was like a scene out of a Barbara Cartland novel. I've never read any Barbara Cartland, but I'll bet there are plenty of beautiful romantic scenes where the female protagonist ends up with a cherry Chuppa Chup stuck to her best trousers cause it's "diz-guss-TING!"
But as Stevie said "You can't expect it to be all fireworks after 10 years together". As if to illustrate this point our evening was rounded off in the most wonderful, heart-stopping manner, as two of the neighbour's cars went up in flames right outside our building.
Nothing says "I love you" like 8 exploding tyres at 2am. I thought Orla's balcony had fallen off.
What you can't see in this photo is all our neighbours in various states of undress huddled round watching the smouldering cars and merrily toasting our momentous anniversary with champagne* while we all choked on the noxious fumes. 
Was ist das? "You....fan........the flames.......of...my...heart". Ein Hinweis vielleicht!
It was a wonderful night. Here's to the next 10 years!
*This is possibly not true.
According to one of our neighbours this was another incident of luxury car arson, which has happened quite a lot in Berlin. It seems that people set fire to cars such as Mercedes and Porsches in "concerted attacks on conspicuous wealth" (The Local). Police found another car in flames a couple of streets away from our street. The arsonists choose slow-burning substances such as barbeque lighters to start the fires under the cars allowing them to be some distance away when the fire takes hold. Here's a link to the car arson map of Berlin.
