Had a good weekend doing one of the most-postponed, messiest clean-up jobs ever, tidying up the split and busted cheap plastic shed in the yard at Jo's house. A big tin of spilt paint, a burst bag of compost mixed with matt paint, broken tiles, broken shelves, accumulated stagnant rainwater, and the black aftermath of the Misfiring Roman Candle Incident of Bonfire Night 2010 in which a firework fell over in its unstable bed of marbles in a plastic bucket and fired into the shed and ignited the paint. Satisfying manual labour. What us arty types need to do more often.
Really don't think this thing with Mary-Ann is going to work. Just sent her this.
[...] You divine accurately that my thoughts are preoccupied with you. And
yes, I have been fencing about a little.
I often think this has got no future at all. We're too far apart, and I
feel that I have a self that I present to you that isn't really how I
am from day to day. A great deal is lovely - the bliss of being
touched by you and touching you is something that doesn't occur in my
day to day life. But there's a great deal of me that I will never be able to
share with you. Dancing, drinking, long face to face conversations that
can end up spontaneously in bed, cooking for you and so on. And my
friends. I've always imagined that anyone I was going out with would be
part of my friendship group. I know some really nice women and I'd
like you to know them too. All these things are stymied by distance, a
problem I wilfully overlooked because I just found you, at first, and
subsequently, and now, so seductive, so literate, so different - and funny.
The lack of frequently seeing you has the unfortunate effect of
making me feel that my contact with you is a bit staged, a
performance of a relationship. Last night, knackered after clearing out
the yard and smelling of paint and turps and with my knee playing up
from too much genuflection, I went down the pub and bumped into my
friends Kev and Neil and sighed with relief as we spread over the
table with the Sunday papers and sat in companiable silence. And then I
thought "Oh right, [I deleted the word "fuck"] I said I'd ring Mary-Ann."
And that moment made me feel sad. That's not how it should be, feeling
that you've got to ring someone. It's a function of not being able to
see you enough, of feeling that because of the fragility of our
contact, I ought to add more fuel onto the relationship lest it
wither, despite at that particular time, wanting to just have
a quiet, peaceable drink.
Another worry I have is that I feel sometimes a little bit mismatched
with you in terms of liking the quotidian, the meandering everyday
natter, the directionless babble of consciousness. I sometimes try to
please you by being a little more self-reflective in my speech, and
in my commentary on the day, than I feel at that moment. I can always
tell when I'm doing this because my accent, always an unstable thing,
veers more towards RP than the bastardised Lancaster in which I more
often talk. Again - that wasn't a problem when we were actually
together, but *not* being together is going to be a constant.
I want it to work, but after a couple of pints, I doubt it.
XX
Am off to see Clint Eastwood's film J Edgar in a couple of hours with my former pupil, the rather sexy Marianna. Bit tired and would rather have a wee little lay down. Oh for the days when such lethargy would be banished with the adroit use of a mirror, a razor blade, and a short white line.
