In 1983, the epidemiologist and author Tim Spector moved to Brussels for a year for a secondment, as part of a European Medical Rotation Scheme. He was transferred from his role as a junior doctor at St Bartholomew’s hospital in London to Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc. It was there that Tim met Veronique Bataille, who was then a student.
“I was in my penultimate year of medical school in Brussels,” says Veronique. She first spotted Tim in a meeting where hundreds of different specialists gathered to present and discuss complex cases. He was among those who had been asked to present.
“It was horrible,” he says. “It would have been hard enough in English, but my French wasn’t very good. I got through it, but this ill-tempered professor was digging at me and making comments while I was trying to do my presentation.”
Seeing the poor treatment he was getting, Veronique asked her colleagues who he was. “I thought we needed to look after him,” she says. “I started inviting him to lunch and socials. I was really impressed he had the guts to jump from one medical system to another, especially when he had to speak a different language.”
Although she fancied him straight away, Tim admits he found Veronique a “bit swotty … Her white coat was always pristine and she was always busy. I didn’t think she was my cup of tea, initially,” he says. But over the next couple of months, they built a friendship and he began to see her “fun-loving” side.
By November that year, Veronique noticed that Tim was getting a lot of attention from the nurses. “I didn’t want him to get snapped up,” she says. In December, she went to visit him at his home, turning up with a box of croissants. “I had felt a slight shift in our relationship, but didn’t get the message until the day Veronique brought the croissants,” he says. She told him she liked him and wanted them to be together. They shared a kiss that day, and began dating from then on. “I realised he was a foodie and we went to some lovely restaurants together,” she says.
The following year, Tim moved back to London. The pair continued their relationship long-distance, travelling to see each other whenever they could. In 1985, Veronique realised she would have to move to the UK if they were going to be together long-term. “It wasn’t possible for Tim to move to Belgium at the time,” she says. “I applied for a job at Barts and told them how much I wanted to work in London. One of the professors said: ‘Don’t lie, we know you’re the girlfriend of Tim Spector’ and we all had a laugh about it.”
She landed the job and the pair got married in 1988 in Belgium. They have two children together, born in 1989 and 1992. Tim went on to train in epidemiology, while Veronique began researching melanomas.
The couple love travelling together. “We have a shared passion for skiing and the mountains,” says Tim. It was on one of their skiing holidays, in 2012, that things changed for their family. “Tim began having double vision at the top of a mountain and we realised it was something very serious,” says Veronique. “Luckily he was fit enough to ski down and we quickly flew back to London for an MRI.” They discovered that Tim had suffered a small stroke. The incident, which left him unwell for three months, changed his outlook on life.
“It was quite frightening. It was then that I started focusing more on nutrition and lifestyle, and wrote The Diet Myth,” he says. His research also inspired the launch of Zoe, a community health app, which became a valuable tool during the pandemic. “Luckily, I’m used to him being very busy,” says Veronique, who now splits her work as a dermatologist between the NHS, private practice and research. The pair live together in London.
• Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well by Tim Spector is out now (£20). To support the Guardian, buy your copy from bookshop.theguardian.com. Postage charges may apply.
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