Even Lukewarm love takes up a lot of time and so my blogging life has been somewhat blank. On the page at least.
'So Jeremy Clarkson's gone?' asked Tom who has been wondering if his wife (my closest friend) and I have argued as we've seen so little of each other over the past months.
'Jeremy Clarkson? Gone? What - as in dead?' I'm surprised that I sound as though I actually care.
'Is he?' Now Tom is the one who sounds surprised.
'I don't know - you were the one who said he had gone...'
'But not dead, surely? Nell told me you had broken up...'
And then the exhaust fumes cleared. I think he's talking about Jeremy Clarkson the TV presenter who lives on BBC World in hotel rooms around the globe where Top Gear is always playing.
Tom, however, is referring to Jeremy Clarkson - his nickname for the last man in my life who drove a Metallic red Mitsubishi Evo (my kids called him the Essex Boy) and seemed to think it was all very vroom vroom and impressive.
A car is a handbag on wheels for me, and an Evo, surely, just a character in Star Wars - it was Tom who told me it was some sort of souped up rally car for people from Maidenhead so I can't say I noticed much about it beyond drum and bass blasting from the speakers, the torn gift wrap shoved into the door tray and the pair of shirts hanging in the back. However, as the sole driver in a family of four plus husband, I did like being driven around in it. Arriving at Worcester train station to find Jigsaw man (who my kids called Tory Boy) on the platform with his cream-upholstered convertible parked outside was one of the highlights of our relationship (the one before last - keep up!); and being chauffeured to Queen's Square in the morning really iced an otherwise very pale Victoria sponge of mutual indifference with Jeremy.
I mean he was nice enough. No really, he was. And extremely generous. And we made loads and loads of wonderful plans together. But the plans, somehow, failed to come to fruition. And despite him complaining bitterly about the noise of the extractor fan in my bathroom (nothing to my snoring apparently) and offering to remove and replace it, it's still there roaring like Runway 3 at Heathrow. As am I - though I always suspected that there were many covert attempts to remove and replace me - which is why the two shirts swinging on a hanger over his back seat rather surprised me when he never spent more than one night at my place (when challenged he said he often stayed up in London with 'friends'). Well, that and his daily visit to the Guardian Soulmates website - the man just could not stop shopping for love. The torn gift wrap, however, we'll leave for another paragraph...
I hadn't realised when I met him that he had only recently been dumped by his partner of fifteen years. But we all have our baggage, so I didn't think very much about it until I discovered, after we'd been seeing each other for a couple of months, that none of his family - his sister or his brother (who he spent Christmas and New Year with, respectively) or any of his three grown up kids - even knew that they had split up at all. Furthermore, since his ex girlfriend was his boss, none of his friends at work knew that he was seeing anyone else (that would be me, with a possible cast of suspected others) because he didn't want her to think he had moved on. The final rev on the rocky road of deception, however, was when I looked up his address on 192.com to send him a Birthday Day, and noticed the date range on the accompanying census entry was from 55-59... Very odd. Especially since he had told me he was 51. To compound matters he had also bought twelve tickets for Eric Clapton at the 02 Centre - intending to take his kids and their partners, as well as a few friends from work. But now not all his kids wanted to come and he couldn't rid of the tickets.
'Well you could ask me.' I suggested wryly. The concert was on Valentine's Day after all.
'No, because my kids don't know about you. And the people from work don't know about you either. So it would be awkward.'
I looked at him open mouthed. Awkward. Mmm. That's a word.
'Worlds were colliding!
Apparently, I really was dating Walter Mitty. In an Evo.
I marvelled that he could keep all his stories straight - what with subtracting seven years from to his kids' ages every time I asked about their lives, but enough was enough. I decided it was time to put the whole relationship into neutral and park it.
And then a couple of weeks later Jeremy pitched up at the house with a gift - a bottle of perfume. Darn it, I'm like one of those South Sea islanders from the turn of the century when it comes to presents. Show me a shiny thing and I'm signing away my historical land rights for a string of glass beads. Relationship putty, and soothed with reassurances that all truths would be told, I relented, and the next morning, with yet another extra spare shirt draped crisply on its hanger in the back of the car, he drove me to work.
...which is when I saw the gift wrap.
'Oh, what's this,' I asked, as I pulled it out of the seat pocket and smoothed it on my knee. It was torn along the top but still retained a small flat boxed shape. I remembered that he had told me it was his ex girlfriend's birthday the week before and he claimed to have taken her out to dinner in Covent Garden. I assumed this must have been the present.
He shrugged.
'Is this what you got Shrek for her birthday?' (She actually looks quite normal in a bland sort of way but it's the form to slag off the ex when you've been dumped - believe me, I know.)
'Yeah,' he said, vaguely, pretending a sudden interest in the road though the traffic on the Westway was stationary for a mile ahead.
'Oh, so what did you get her?' I checked out the dimensions. It looked like jewellery. (My ex husband used to say I was a loss to the Security Services and he was right.)
'I can't remember...'
'You can't remember?' Comeaaaaawn. I mean, I know Jeremy drank a bit, but it seemed unlikely that his memory was going to fail him after just a few days - especially honed with all the practice of the age discrepancies he had been juggling - not to mention having to explain away all these mysterious nights with 'friends' in London who had to be kept in the dark about my existence...
'Mmm.'
I said nothing. From many years of stammering kids' excuses I know when to keep my mouth shut.
'Well, I think it was perfume.' He said, eventually.
'Really. What does she like?'
'I don't know.'
The man lived with her for fifteen years. I'm guessing he must know what perfume she wore.
'I think it was Kenzo.' He added after a long silence.
I crumpled the paper into a ball and jammed it back into the pocket.
'Think again. I'll think you'll find that you gave the bottle of Kenzo to me.' I said.
