Bagel Belly Blog

agony and ecstasy

By all reasonable measures I would have stayed at home today.

But I've been known at times to eschew reason. After several days at home in a miasma of lemsip, ibuprofen and sudafed, I decided I'd had enough of being an invalid. I sallied forth and met up with David, Elise, Thom, Paul and John in town for lunch, and then on to an evening out by way of a meeting with Clare, old friend from UEA whom I meet with on something like a bi-annual basis.

In the evening we caught up with Lauren, Nick, Laura, Caz, and a whole bunch of Lauren's friends. We spent some time in the pub, and then when they went to a club, I bailed out.

I'm really paying for my afternoon of recklessness now. My throat is like fire, my head is pounding, I've already written off tomorrow as a bad idea. I'm not entirely convinced Monday should happen, either.

Let's get this out of the way first: this is my internal monologue. I do this to clear my head of the random noise, to work out the problems that are bothering me. Fortunately now and then other people choose to join in, to lend a bit of perspective to my rants. And I'll be honest, there's a hell of a lot of self-censoring going on. Maybe one tenth of the heartbreak, hope, venom and vitriol makes it through to here. Hey, you're listening to a purified and cleansed version of my mind. Bloody good job too. You should thank me for it.

So there's two things buzzing round my head that I'm struggling to work out.

Women have a certain wisdom about them, an ability to cut to the chase without any detail or background. I was humbled by the wise words from Caz when she prescribed in a nutshell my relationship troubles. "Andrew", she said, "you need a woman with brains. Forget about the dizzy ones." I'm paraphrasing, but that covers the gist of it. Goddamit if she isn't right.

David says "widen the pool, dude. C'mon, it's positively inbred up there". Eloquent and accurate.

It's incredibly difficult to meet women here. What's even tougher is I've got into some stupid kind of second-guessing paranoid mindset. This seems to happen as you get older - the carefree devil-may-care approach is discarded in favour of "what if" and "but" and "err" and a million reasons why not. It doesn't matter that I know it's there and that I know I'm a victim of it - self-awareness doesn't help. Go to Jail, do not pass Go.

You're from Huntingdon aren't you?

Someone I met maybe three years ago for maybe a ten minute conversation. She got the abridged version of my life that has me coming from Huntingdon. I remember most of the details of that conversation. She's gorgeous, blonde, a struggling actress - this is the truth, I don't make this up. And here I am thinking "she lives in London. That's no good." with the words of Caz ringing in my ears.

And then there's the other, a moment of breathlessness, a scary whirlwind of intensity, she terrifies and exhilarates me, but wrapped up in unfortunate circumstance and bad beginnings. I find it intensely annoying that I can't work my way round it, resolve the conflict and find out if this actually goes anywhere.

I'm very, very, tired.