The Pearl of the Atlantic

8pm and I am alone in my new workplace, a flourescently bleached office of well-meaning bureaucracy, where 578-page manuals about volunteer management sit as ignored as the leaflets about Okiwnba from Burundi, who brought joy to her village with her braided irrigation techniques. The white noise of a server and a photocopier the size of a Minolta dalek, breathes through fire safety doors.

I've been in my old home town of Funchal for five days. Me and Kirsty used to teach there and Trina was curious to see it. There were memories on every corner, many of which I swallowed, so as not to push my life with Kirsty onto Trina.

The flat was made of breezeblock and every scrape of every bit of furniture da cima came resonating to us down below. On the road down into town, there was a gym.

The humidity films your face and neck; I remembered this feeling too, and luxuriated in tossing my head for no reason other than sex at a distance. The Madeirense are kind, gentle, accepting people. We found a tiny bar with two blobbish, elderly men with agricultural faces. My weak Portuguese, learned there twenty years ago, was good enough for a mostly-understood bonhomie, while Trina ploughed on regardless in English. Portuguese is a physically pleasurable language to speak, with its mordant consonants, its suppression of most vowels, its mooing nasal sounds, and its shusshing 's'.

Three glasses of vinho seco, a cheap shop-bought home-made wine of tannic severity, cost in total 1€50. After dragging Trina around for half an hour trying to remember where it was, we found an old haunt of mine which served home-made poncha, with a dentinho of octupus. Next afternoon, the creased owner dished up spicy pork with pasta. The touristy place a couple of doors up gave you peanuts.

We went to the bar where me and Kirsty drank in till 4am one Tuesday, off work on Wednesday due to one of the many Saints' days, before one of the soaks at the bar offered to drive us home, has had a superifical poshing-up.

In it, I ran out of money, and the man sitting behind us first directed me to the Caixa Geral de Depositos, before getting tired with the effort, and offering to pay for our round.

Trina was melting getting up to my old flat. I took her the more interesting way, through a fury of roundabouted traffic and a huge garage where someone beeped us to get out of the way and I turned round and told him to fuck off, before the road narrows and quietens and you turn off onto a long, steep row of steps enclosed by tiny corrugated-roofed houses, where people who live outdoors urge you in sympathy towards the handrail -- "pega o ferro!" Dogs bark, then give way reluctantly, with some shame.

The nearest thing to a boring street in Funchal, Rua Fernão Ornelas, has, on one side, a life-size cardboard cut-out of the Pope standing outside a shop selling tracts, and almost opposite on the other, its cousin, a photographic studio with the Madonna and whore splayed on either sides of its entrance.

It's a beautiful city, held in by a claustrophobic corset of sea. Everyone is a gardener, and as you are fogged in the diesel fumes of the roaring buses up the steep pavement-less roads, you can turn your head away to gardens fecund with flowers and bananas. The mosquitoes love foreign flesh. In a farmácia, we asked for something for the bites and a local pulled up her trouser leg to show us her bites.

Back home, Trina was unbearable, snoring, and I wanted her to fuck off. She stayed another four days. We went down the pub on Tuesday and we got into this hateful argument. I was determined to retain self-control, and I did so for a couple of hours, before erupting into a horrible finger-jabbing, angry, aggressive attack on her. I sent her this and I really hope it's finished now.

Trina, I am exhausted with all this. I am physically at the end of the amount of effort I can put into these endless, circular arguments, which are coming to occupy more and more of our time together. I am also utterly ashamed of myself at losing control of myself the other night in the pub and that was a line I crossed which I never want to get even close to again.

I love our times together when we are having fun. Yes, I am shallow enough just to want fun. How about that? I love going out (and staying in) dancing, the holiday was fab, and I love going out and the concerts and of course, [pet name for conversation]. But it comes at too high a price, too much of a cost. I don't want them when they are partnered with arguments, hour upon hour of discussion and analysis. I want to perform an operation on us, excising the latter and keeping only the healthy former.

In order for that to work, the only option for us is to continue as friends. I am not relationship material, not with you, not with anyone. I am at heart a very selfish person, the only advantage being that I am aware of it.

I would love to continue the great, fun, times we have -- which I want with *you* because you add to them and make them different and infinitely better. But only in the context of friendship, because I have reached the brick wall at the far end of the cul-de-sac for any more talking, discussion, arguments, and all the crap I find unbearably uninteresting.

looby