GlaD1 Posted October 4, 2023 Posted October 4, 2023 The moment I knew: ‘She called my mother back to say she’d changed her mind’ When Steve Roberts called Barbro to invite himself to Sweden, he felt he had something to offer. She said no. But just after midnight, she reconsidered n 1973 I was living in a share house in London, finishing my postgraduate studies in chemistry and riding around on a sputtering Finnish motorbike. One summer evening I arrived home, covered in oil spatters, to find a beautiful Swede named Barbro sitting in our kitchen. She had turned up out of the blue, a friend of one of the girls in the flat who had hit a rough patch. From the outset I found her to be a very interesting person to talk to and her progressive Scandinavian approach to life made her much better company than many of the British girls I knew at the time. For those reasons, and considering it was her first time in England, Barbro seemed the perfect person to invite on a day-long mission to purchase a secondhand refrigerator from my uncle in Guildford. A few hours driving through the countryside confirmed my suspicions: this was a woman of rare character, someone I wanted to get to know better, even just as a friend. I was already engaged to be married, and both my fiance and I became fast friends with Barbro. After she returned to Sweden, we kept in touch and even visited her there together. A year later things had changed. My fiance had broken it off with me and taken up with another bloke who she was much better suited with (and is still married to). By October I was a newly single PhD graduate, had bought my own house and was waiting for a new job to start. I felt I had something to offer, and Barbro was on my mind. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/oct/01/the-moment-i-knew-she-called-my-mother-back-to-say-shed-changed-her-mind
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