LOOKING FOR 'LAURA': Steve Drew is desperately trying to make contact with a girl he met in Nelson between 2005-2008.

A lovelorn Scot is on a quest to reconnect with a girl for whom he has carried a torch for four years – if only he can remember her name.

Scot Steve Drew has contacted The Nelson Mail to help him with a problem of the heart: he wants to track down a girl he met when he lived in Nelson several years ago.

Unfortunately, one detail he lacks is a clear memory of the girl's name, but he thinks it may be "Laura".

"It was before the days of Facebook and I'm not much of a diary keeper so I guess it just drifted away over time," he said.

Mr Drew, now the general manager of a London restaurant, lived in Nelson between 2005 and 2008 and while he was here he met a girl from London who was visiting family.

The two became friends and spent two weeks together, but then both returned to Britain separately. She texted him, but he lost his phone, and the love story, for now, ended there.

Now Mr Drew wants to hear from her family, or anyone who can connect her with the girl who has been on his mind ever since.

"It's been so long that some of the details are fuzzy; all I know is I feel terrible at how it was left."

He first met "Laura" when she visited a Nelson city bar, where he worked, one night. She came back on New Year's Eve when he was working, and they went to a party his friend had put on.

He drove a silver Toyota Grande, and remembered picking her up and dropping her at her house in the hills off the Ridgeway or Waimea Rd.

He said he had looked on Google Maps and had found a million houses that fitted the description, but he could not remember the name of the street.

"Laura" was between 165 and 172cm tall with strawberry blonde fair hair and blue eyes, and was slim, very pretty and spoke with an English accent."

At the time Mr Drew was about 22, and "Laura" would have been about 25.

She was on holiday visiting her family with a friend for Christmas 2006 and New Year 2007. Her friend had dark hair, and she later went on to meet up with her family in the Bay of Plenty.

The girl's brother had long hair, wore a baseball cap and drove an old, dark "gunmetal" grey, 1980s Holden Commodore. He came to drop her off and pick her up at the bar Mr Drew worked in.

The pair went sightseeing, visiting Rabbit Island, Kaiteriteri, Takaka and a few other spots in Golden Bay.

"I had lived in Nelson for over a year at that point so when she came into the bar I offered to be her tour guide."

He said he did not know why he had waited so long to try to make contact with her.

"I guess life just takes over. I still find myself thinking about her on a regular basis, more so than say my ex-girlfriends, which I'm not sure is significant or not."

Thinking "what if" was driving him crazy, he said.

"I've read two stories about people who had thought they would never find someone and have, so I figured why not give it a go?"

Although at the time the two were very good friends, he thought if they had stayed in contact it could have been the start of something.

"I'm hoping I can explain to her what happened and that I didn't mean for us to lose contact with each other."

Meanwhile, in an email received this morning, Mr Drew said he still couldn't believe that the woman's name had "slipped away'' from him.

He did remember that she wore a light bright blue bikini when they went swimming at Rabbit Island, and had pale skin.

He also recalled that she had stayed in the UK when her parents and young brother emigrated from England. They lived in "a lovely house" overlooking Tasman Bay, possibly in the Austen Ward Heights-Panorama Dr area. He remembered her brother's car, parked on the street, was "an old beat-up Holden, dark green or dark grey'', and that he had seen her brother drinking at the Shark Club a few times.



"We hung out one last night before she went back to the UK and that was at the bar whilst I was at work and then I dropped her off home.

"She left very shortly after this and that was where it ended, I'm just gutted that she's going to think I wasn't replying or that I wasn't interested.''

His quest might be a case of "the grass is always greener'', Mr Drew said, but he was hoping that he would be able to track the woman down.