Surprise

The poor bloke. He gets a lot of stick from me for being no good at romantic surprises. Until this week I could think of two over the course of our relationship. 1) When he told me he was taking me to McDonalds and instead we pulled up outside our favourite Mexican, where he'd booked a table. 2) When he asked me to get him some water from the fridge and I grumblingly did so, only to find a bottle of perfume in there waiting for me where the jug of water should have been. Ten out of ten, both times.

For some men this sort of thing comes naturally. You hear about girlfriends being whisked away to Paris for the weekend on surprise trips by their significant others, who have secretly acquired their passports and even packed a suitcase of all the clothes they'll need for the trip. Surely they're embellishing the truth? Or going out with men who are secretly gay?

Anyway, I digress. Yes I berate the bloke for being crap in this area – but this week he came up trumps. It started out on the wrong foot though, when I arrived home to find an extremely grumpy bloke, peeved I was two hours later than he'd expected me to be.

We got into a stupid row about whether or not I'd in fact told him that morning, while he was in the shower and half asleep, that I would be late. But it was weirdly interrupted by him asking me to fetch him some pipas (salt-covered sunflower seeds) from the kitchen.

Not wanting further arguments I stomped off to the kitchen in a huff. But when I opened the cupboard to get the pipas my brain stopped working for a moment. I was seeing a brand new iPhone in there, but my mind just wasn't processing it.

He'd completely got me. Maybe if he'd asked me to get him a bottle of water and put it in the fridge like last time I would have twigged. But no.

An iPhone! He'd got me an iPhone – the only thing I'd been coveting for at least the past year, maybe more. As far as romantic surprises go this was the numero uno. Far more superior than jewellery, flowers or chocolates or any of that stuff. And better still, it was the third generation model, and therefore better than the one he had. I now have a better phone than my techno nerd boyfriend, oh how that must have hurt him to order. A sure sign of true love.

In my days of English teaching, a student told me that if you expect men to come up with romantic surprises, you will always be disappointed. It's just not in their nature, she said. Especially not Spanish men, who don't like to plan things, make dinner reservations, and prefer to just go with the flow. For special occasions you have to tell them exactly what you want, and most of the time if you're reasonable they'll be happy to make you happy. For celebrating Mother's Day this enterprising lady had all but given her husband a list of what she wanted – breakfast in bed, followed by an extra two hours sleep while he looked after the kids then lunch at a restaurant, which he would choose for them and book.

I liked her attitude. It was easy and everyone was happy. She was clever. (that's probably why she was a company director.) So I thought I would just take the same tack with the bloke, who has shown himself to be very romantic in other ways, but crap at surprises. But perhaps I was wrong on that last detail.

The iPhone incident has shown me that he does have it in him to catch me off guard in the most fantastic way.