Dave was in search of a string quartet in Prague; the local person he approached rolled her eyes when he asked her if she could help. “I really wanted to see one, and Veronika thought it was a line,” he says. She laughs. “Come on. What could be more of a cliche than: ‘I’m in Prague and there must be a string quartet on every corner’? This is the worst pickup line I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Dave, indignant but smiling, protests: “It wasn’t a pickup line!”
He had left his job in the UK as an English teacher and was doing a Tesol language-teaching course in Prague in July 2016. There was a bar close to his flat, to which he went regularly. It wasn’t somewhere Veronika usually visited, but she was passing and hungry, and went in for something to eat. She sat behind Dave, who was eating pasta, which he says was almost inedible. “I looked at her food and asked if it was OK. She wasn’t very responsive,” he says.
“I was just like: ‘Let me be,’” she says. “I was just polite. He was another tourist in a bar who wanted to talk to local people.” But then he made her laugh “and I wanted to show him the real Prague. I don’t know, it was charity, maybe.”
Dave laughs. “Jesus Christ. I didn’t know you felt sorry for me. I had no intentions of anything dishonourable – it was purely just to speak to someone.”
They finished their drinks and walked to Naplavka, by the river, where there were lots of bars and music. “No string quartets,” Veronika adds.
They stayed out for a couple of hours, and swapped numbers. Was there a spark? “There was something,” says Dave. “It was a case of not daring to dream. I’d hoped about getting a job and staying for a bit longer, but I hadn’t even thought about a girlfriend.”
It was probably their third date, Dave thinks, when Veronika touched his shoulder as she sat down next to him. “That was the first physical contact we’d had. I thought: ‘That was nice,’ but it still took another few dates …”
“I was melting, slowly,” says Veronika.
“I was ready to give up,” says Dave. “I thought it was all really hard work and she didn’t seem that interested, or at least she didn’t seem to want to advance things.” They kissed on their fifth date.
A few weeks after they had met, Dave stayed with Veronika for 10 days until his new flat became available. There is some disagreement about whether they were a couple at this point.
“Yeah, we were,” says Dave. “No, we were not,” says Veronika. Dave laughs and says: “I thought we were,” but admits that he didn’t even know if he would stay in the Czech Republic. “People come and go, especially English teachers in Prague,” says Veronika.
Still, there was one promising sign. “One of the things Veronika had asked me was: ‘What are you looking for?’” Dan recalls. “I said something like: ‘Chicken soup and cuddles.’ It was just a line I used, and she wasn’t particularly impressed.” But when he arrived at her flat, she was making him chicken soup.
Dave went back to the UK that Christmas and, over video calls, they agreed that when he came back to Prague in January he should move in with Veronika permanently. The following New Year’s Eve, they decided to try for a baby. Their son, Oliver, was born in 2018.
“We were quite old for a first child,” says Veronika. “Oliver was born when I was 44; we didn’t have much time to think or date each other for a couple of years.” Having a child together wasn’t really something they talked about, says Dave. “We just thought: ‘Let’s do it.’ It was all very relaxed and I think perhaps that helped.”
Their son, says Veronika, is “like the centre of our universe”. That meeting, which she initially brushed off, “changed my life dramatically. It was the right man and the right time, which I didn’t know at that moment. I was never as happy as I am with David and Oliver. And he can also cook potatoes, like, 40 different ways. He still makes me laugh.” She still makes him chicken soup.
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