The one giveth

The (same) one taketh away

The Council had a stand in Market Square the other day, promoting their recycling scheme. I chatted to two employees in hi-vi's and came away with a roll of composting bags and a couple of pet food tin lids. Of all my debts it's the Council tax I wish I could pay. The credit card companies can wait.

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The break-up with Trina started one night when I was coming back from another drunkenly cultured night at the book group, where we'd been having great craic and only perfunctorarily discussing Achebe's Things Fall Apart.

It was my fault for not turning my phone off. I was walking home, the grey, metallic sky and the drink both within me, and she sent something innocent and well-meaning. It jerked me out of my evening and back to her, in a way I found infuriating. I responded thus (proof that reading doesn't make you a better person):

Trina you are so demanding sometimes. I've had a lovely night with the girls and the book club and now I am interrupting it to assure you of something. Why can't I just be left alone sometimes to enjoy my own life? You want to control me. I love you darling but I don't like this constant surveillance.

I don't love her, but I sometimes say it as a lazy shortcut to avoid the difficulties that ensue if you don't. She was very upset and cut me off. Once a few days of regret had passed, there came a feeling of relief in amongst my other emotions. Before the latter arose, and still in the tide of the former, I sent her an apology.

Trina, I am abjectly and deeply sorry to have said such a very hurtful thing, to someone who has shown me nothing but love, kindness and affection. It is too late for apologies now but I am utterly sorry and ashamed of myself for being so cruel and heartless, and I bitterly regret what I said and the sentiments behind it.

We had a hurried reconciliation, a telescoped emailed and telephoned accomodation before I went to France with Kirsty and the girls, and she to Italy with her friend.

A couple of days after I got back, I was walking tiredly back from the station and decided to pop into the pub for a quick one. I met Barry there and we got talking about it. "The only way it'll work, looby, is if you pretend."

On Thursday, Trina picked me up in her racy sports car with its flippy-uppy headlights and growling engine and low centre of gravity which makes 40mph feel like 70. She took me to the flatlands of Lancashire, a part of the county which will be under water long before it affects us on our perches up here. I was to stay overnight at the house in which her mother "lives", in a body which persists in housing a senile brain.

Trina's mother's house has a garden akin to a small nature reserve out the back, with hedge sparrows, goldfinches and great tits having their busy avian social life. I more noticed how the conservatory's uPvC shut off all sound and sensation from outdoors.

Trina saw her mother off to bed (which takes a good hour), and I found a shortwave receiver in my room, which evoked memories of sending reception reports and learning all about single sideband and how sunspots affect propagation, when I was about thirteen and thought I might be a broadcast transmission engineer--before I abandoned the idea of "being" anything. I managed to pick up Radio Romania International by laying naked on the bed and gripping the aerial, making my body into one.

Trina crept in for a cuddle lest mother wake up and notice her missing. It was only a cuddle too. Successful sex requires control over the situation, and I had none.

She's coming round tomorrow. I feel all of the following: like a gigolo (given her texts about what she's expecting); a coward (given the fact that the braver thing would be to end it); wondering whether I should try to make the best of the ingredients I've got (given that they are: a woman with whom sex has worked successfully, who likes a drink, who's kind and with whom I have several interests in common--especially dancing).

Another part of me thinks it all sounds like a lot of fucking effort, that I never make with other female friends of mine. Don't know, just don't know.

faille

Back from two-and-half weeks in Brittany--the area in France I mean, not that slapper at number 46.

We almost missed both the outward and return flights, receiving a "final call, for passengers..." on both legs. In the first case, CattleJet advised us to turn up thirty minutes before our flight, which was not nearly enough; in the second case, as we were quaffing Affligem at 5.40 euros a pop in the bar, I misunderstood the word "enregisterement" as meaning "check-in" (which we'd already done), rather than "boarding". We hared sweatily through the various hurdles between two countries, and were ushered across the apron by a man who told me that next time we would be "unboarded". We rushed aboard the plane with British booze-breath.

We found our seats. Kirsty was swearing and haranguing me. I nodded quietly through a couple of minutes of it before saying "Could we continue this at home please?"

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gorgerin

The regional paper, Ouest France, predicted "temps frisquet", and a day of leaden skies and heavy rain was further darkened by a man who, the girls said, appeared to be wanking some distance away from them on the beach. But after that, the sun shone strongly, and "Todger Man", as we named him, made no further appearances.

We had some civilised but rather drunken nights with a family we met the first time we went there ten years ago. After one of these, my daughter Jenny rather pointedly commented on the effervescence with which I was joining in with the bilingual bingo, making baseless allegations that I was drawling my well-meant help to the Frenchman who wanted to learn the picturesque English phrases that accompany certain bingo numbers.

I won a pair of large round black sunglasses which make me look like an insect. We carried our bottles of wine--mine, a cheeky rosé called "Shepherdess's Thigh"--from the room and continued the boozing as we sat round and played noisy cards with all the children, back in our chalet. "You were a little bit drunk, actually," said Kirsty, the next morning. "You and..." (the female of the couple we were with, who was sat next to me.)

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moechialogy

We set out one day to repeat a cycle ride to a lovely restaurant in Locmariaquer. We got a bit lost at a pine-edged beach, where we rescued a crab that was panicking on the road, having fallen off the back of a lorry. We tried to pick it up but it wasn't having it, so we shooed it into my bag and set it free on the beach, where it gratefully (if crabs feel gratitude) scuttled backwards under the sand and seaweed.

I nobbled passers-by to help us find the way. An Irishman pointed us in the right direction and we arrived at the restaurant. There was very little for my vegetarian daughters, and they had to have an unappealing cold aubergine pâté, while I raked into a delicious skate painted with some sort of dark, pleasantly mordant sauce.

The girls' pudding of banana split erased their unhappy starter. The bill--128 euros--was the highest amount I've ever spent in one go in a restaurant. I had to improvise a bit when the first card I tried was declined.

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ciborium

Jenny was very pleased with her hairslide from Carnac market. I was too.

We went to our usual crêperie. On the table behind us was an Irish couple and their two young children. I felt some sympathy for them, remembering the rather determinded holidays that can feel like work when you're with toddlers. I helped them with the menu. All they wanted to do was to avoid "strong" cheese. Afterwards, I went over for a little chat as we were leaving. On his plate was a fastidious island of egg yolk, around which he'd cut his galette.

Back in town, Kirsty, Fiona (aged fourteen) and I ambled along the seafront to its best bar. When Kirsty ordered a pichet of cider, the waiter bought three glasses.

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aristolochia

Mainly though, I read, dozed, drank and swam in the sea--which was an almost hallucinogenic aesthetic experience just before sunset, waved in a massive glistering and shimmering, feeling part of something luxurious and impossible, probably the closest I'll feel to anything spiritual in my life.

The other luxury was reading Huysman's Against Nature, a perfumed breviary of fin de siècle decadence, using the largest vocabulary I've ever encountered in a novel (although the word "novel" has to be bent almost to breaking point to accomodate Huysmans's work). I've noted down the scores of words unknown to me. Amongst these, "aristolachia" is a vagina-shaped plant formerly thought to aid abortion, which might be handy if "moechialogy"--the study of adultery--spilled over into its practice.

Back in Manchester Airport's "cafe" no-one's wearing a shift dress. Litter everywhere, picked at by a silent dark-skinned man with a grabber stick thing. The blacker the skin, the lower the income. Hectoring announcements from the train conductor in their strange intonation ("we will be calling at Lancaster"), announcing "station stops." Threats--which are never acted upon--that the "security services" will "destroy unattended luggage without warning." If only.

In Lancaster, I notice the Lefthanded Antiflappage Skirt Tug. It's used by girls who have taken an over-optimistic assessment of how their flimsy skirts can cope with the gusty weather round here and are anxious to police others' gaze to just that point short of knicker.

There are also Trina developments but I will report back later about that.

Off to Brittany with Kirsty and the girls. We all know this will be our last big holiday en famille.

See you in a couple of weeks.

We have definitively split up. I might at some point put a little more detail on how it happened but it's too close and upsetting at the moment. She's everywhere in the house--the pillows on her side of the bed were just as she had arranged them; she's in the kitchen--the cheese and the blueberries and the yoghurt and other things she bought, and there's the Teletubbies cup she used for her coffee; she's in the front room, where I doubt I will be able to play The Dictionary Game with anyone for a while.

Worst of all, is her lovely Christmas card she had made out of a photograph of us on a beach in North Wales. Both of us happy, leaning into each other. Our bookclub book this month was Things Fall Apart. And although they did towards the end, I will only remember her as one of the kindest, most generous, and loving women I have ever met. It's tragic that I couldn't reciprocate the love she wanted to create for us.

On the night Trina and I split up I was both regretful and relieved.

Most times we went down the pub, Trina would ask us to get our diaries out and plan what we were doing weeks ahead. I go along with it and prepare myself for the apologies when my slack life disappoints her. As Kim said last weekend "Women end up administering men's lives."

Around midnight on the night after we had "split up", (after my unconscionable decision to reinstate a beer tasting night without consulting her first) I was luxuriating in my own company. I saw that Carl Weathers's You Ought To Be With Me had appeared on You Tube. I'd never seen it there before. Twenty-odd years ago, a subculturally-eminent soul DJ used to invite listeners to submit their Top Threes. One Sunday, he chosen mine to play. You Ought To Be With Me was my number one.

The following morning, I received this disruptive email.

I was irritated with her for retrospectively spoiling my joy. How did she know that I had been playing it? I found out later that she had found through one of the ways in which YT makes collective what should be shared. She assumed that I had been thinking of her, love-lorn.

She sent me an email in which she said that "all I'm doing is criticising and nagging you and making you feel unhappy and confused" and will not do so in the future. Then, a reinstatement of her coming round on Monday, for two nights.

We had a good afternoon of Prosecco and sex on Monday. That evening I went with my eldest for an exhilerating evening of orienteering training, a constant 1.5 hours of running and scrambling and leaping in our craggy, slippery, wooded, park. I felt a bit self-conscious about my clothes--a brown check waist-length shirt, and some narrow beige cotton trousers, the nearest things I could muster to proper orienteering dress.

We had to leave the "wind-down" game of frisbee as a team sport because I wanted to go with Trina to The Gatekeepers, a film in which past heads of Shin Bet were interviewed about their experiences in dealing with Palestinian and Israeli extremists. I'd never have thought that I would come out of a film feeling some sympathy with the Israeli Security Services.

Back with Trina, I was silent on all the misgivings, trying not to spoil the Renaissance. Now, after two days of both pleasure and doubts, I am exhausted with having to do emotional work, even to talk, on insufficient sleep.

Exhausted with her snoring: exhausted falling asleep after sex and then her snoring; exhausted with putting my T-shirt and pants on at 2am to go downstairs, exhausted with dragging the quilt out of a bag that doesn't want to give it up, exhausted with springing alert to attention when the lodger's door opens at 7.30am and quickly, almost panickly rolling the duvet back up into its bag and putting the cushion back into the cellar because I don't want to be seen in the living room before he goes out; exhausted with going back to bed with her at 7.35 and ten minutes of cuddling and then falling asleep, but then again, her snoring, getting up, with her saying "Are you off again?" with a mixture of disappointment and reproach.

She left at about 3pm today and I was relieved. Is this what "compromise" means? Second best, to an idealised first that doesn't exist (Kim, but with sex)? All my relationships end up feeling like jobs.