- The Observer, Sunday 14 February 2010
Mahe, Seychelles ... there's no denying the glamour of the setting
There's no denying the glamour of the setting – the Banyan Tree's luxurious hotel and spa on Mahé in the Seychelles. It's the sort of place you might travel to once in a lifetime, and I was lucky enough to be visiting on a travel-writing commission for this very paper. Our bedroom looked over our own secret garden and then, through carefully planted vegetation, the beach.
I had run away to this oasis for the luxuriously inclined, a beautifully imagined theme park for romantics, to escape the brutal, inescapable fact that I was 40, or just about to be. Birthdays during the preceding decade had tended to boisterous affairs. This was different: a date to mark respectfully. After a decade in and out of doomed pairings, for once I had the perfect companion, a man I'd met a year earlier on a trek in the Himalayas and whose solid presence in my life had a feel of permanency about it. Yet who was I to be making such predictions? To say I was slightly in fear of passing my vintage, having possibly bypassed motherhood and a long-lasting relationship on the way, would have been to downplay my apprehensions on that day.
So why, as we sat by our plunge pool listening to the Indian Ocean roll on to the sand, were Jason's hands shaking? Above us the moon glowed benignly in the star-strewn sky. I shivered as the surface of the pool rippled in a sudden breeze and then in my hand I found a ring-sized box. "Will you?" he asked.
Mariella Frostrup is the Observer's agony aunt. Tropical Sky (0870 907 9600; www.tropicalsky.co.uk) has six nights from £3,439, including flights from London Heathrow, accommodation in a hillside pool villa, breakfast and transfers. For further details go to www.seychelles.com