In January 2010, slightly inebriated at a television awards ceremony, Ade Adepitan spotted a woman sitting alone. “As I pushed past, she smiled a huge smile at me.” He went to chat. “Linda was so warm and friendly and she had this really amazing aura and positive air about her.” Linda’s friends – they had essentially gatecrashed the event – had gone to the loo. “So I was on my own,” she says. “I remember he came across and commented on my tights.” (They were stripy.) Their conversation was easy, Ade says. “We could have chatted for ever.”
Ade took a photo of them, and took Linda’s email address so he could send it to her. “I expected her to receive it, and that would be that,” he says. Instead, they got into an email conversation. Linda was a music student and singer, performing as Elle Exxe. When they met, she vaguely knew who Ade was – she recognised him as the man from the BBC ident, and had seen him present some TV programmes. When he emailed her, Ade told her he had found the videos of her singing she had put on YouTube. “I was like, if he’s going to stalk me, I’m going to stalk him,” says Linda. “I searched his name and read about everything he’d done. I was in shock that somebody could have done so much.” Adepitan was a member of the wheelchair basketball team that won a bronze medal at the 2004 Paralympics, had been an actor and now mostly works as a TV presenter. “I read that he had climbed up a volcano on his hands and knees for five hours when his wheelchair wouldn’t take him any further. I just went: ‘That’s my person.’ I didn’t know at that point that it was a romantic thing, I just wanted to know him more.”
