What can I say about Bahkti? We met on 27 May 1999 and it
was Love at first sight. No exaggeration. I was in
Manchester’s Gay Village, having an evening out after
working in Alderley Edge. It was one of those inexplicable
things. I walked into The Rembrandt, as I’ve done on
hundreds of occasions, and a guy with a little red (and I mean
pillar-box red!) quiff smiled at me. A couple of seconds later he
beckoned me over.
We started talking about all sorts of things. Egypt, punk music, archaeology, clothes… I couldn’t believe what I had chanced on. A person who seemed to share all my little obsessions and peculiarities. Within half an hour we were talking French to each other, writing hieroglyphs on beermats and… well, we’ve been doing the same sorts of things ever since.
The coincidences in our lives are frightening. We have roughly
mirrored piercings (for instance, whereas my right eyebrow is
pierced, it’s Bahkti’s left eyebrow), many of which
were done at the same time as each other. I have some very
obscure records (hands up everyone who owns a copy of There
goes Concorde again by …and the Native Hipsters. I
thought not); Bahkti used to own most of them himself. We are
both quite obsessive about Ancient Egypt. I could go on and on
and on…
Bahkti has introuced me to so much. Without him, I would never have gone to Malta, where he lived for three years as a child. Like him, I’ve fallen in love with the place and would happily live there.
We have been together now for more than ten years. They have been the best years of my life and being legally “married” has been the best part of it all. I can now understand why people want to get married!
Bahkti set up his blog in April 2006 to give him a space to post pictures with his new camera, talk about his life, our friends and Hitchin (as well as have the occasional rant, I suspect).
He now has another site, dedicated to his pet cephalumpus, its friends and various characters from the Sminsk-Smir Republic and Oudjmenistan. Oh, and not forgetting the Feral Bede, too!