Surprising the one you love is hard....very hard.
Usually, if they know you well enough and you're not an Oscar or Grammy Award winner they can tell when you're fibbing and when you're nervous.
They can even tell when you're uncomfortable and uneasy, so if your surprise consists of more than a juicy meal and a sexy outfit, it could get somewhat tricky.
If you're anything as loud, open, and absent-minded as I am, it could become downright impossible.
Being the type to reveal way too much about myself and to be the first to invade my own privacy, I found keeping mum about a surprise that I was organising for my partner even more difficult to control than hunger pangs.
I totally underestimated how difficult it is to hide things from the person you live with, especially if they are regimentally organised, excessively tidy, and have an eagle eye for detail.
Determined to pull it off, it took me 2 weeks of military precision planning, 10 collaborators, 56 emails, 3 nightmares, 4 close shaves, and 500 white lies, to organise a surprise party.
Then, with 12 hours to go until the big show down, and with less than a good night's sleep before everything coming to fruition, I was asked to fill in for someone at a book press launch.
On any other day this would have been no big deal for me, but in this case it meant giving up the few final hours that I had reserved to fine tune the ploy that was going to get me and my partner to the surprise venue.
As unnerving as this felt I just couldn't refuse the invite, because the book launch was in aid of the Association for Abandoned Animals (AAA), and I'm such a sucker for wet noses.
My job was simple enough - all I had to do was to turn up to Centru San Frangisk in Ta' Qali on Sunday morning, and fill in for Mr. Sergio Grech of Klabb Kotba Maltin, who had got caught up with a family emergency.
So, a couple of hours before the big surprise, with a million last minute thoughts rummaging through my head, I attended the blessed press conference and helped launch Blood Lines - a collection of poems by Raymond Fenech recently published by SandCrab Books in Cuba.
I promised myself that whether the big surprise blew up in my face, or whether it turned out to be a huge success, I would give Ray Fenech's initiative all the publicity I could, not only because all proceeds from the book are going to the Association for Abandoned Animals (AAA), but also because the press conference had inadvertently occupied what would otherwise have been hours of torturous brain wrecking.
So here goes....
The author of Blood Lines, Raymond Fenech, has always had stray dogs for pets, and after his 12-year-old Labrador mix, Pooch, died of cancer in February 2011, he came up with this idea to support the AAA.
Blood Lines is a collection of poems, dedicated to Pooch and amongst a myriad of other poems, it includes the dog's life story narrated in the first person. Copies of the book are available by order from either the AAA or the author himself, who can be contacted on 99498927 or by email at writer@maltanet.net.
By the way, after another close shave, this time with death itself (read a crazy taxi driver on the loose), the surprise party worked out perfectly.