Me and My Musician

Tonight is my first date with The Musician. We’re going out for dinner and drinks. I’m incredibly excited and have purchased a new dress for the occasion; a pretty woollen thing that should show off my legs and hide my slightly bloated stomach that is the direct result of too much champagne last night and far too many hobnobs this afternoon.

We have already had an argument about the whole thing, which is promising – I told him he had to choose where we go weeks before hand but he has today decided that I will choose. Which is just not on. I told him to choose so that he could feel a bit more masculine about the event: after all I’m going to be the one paying. And for that matter – is it a date if I’m paying? I’m not sure.

But I do know I’m excited nevertheless. I haven’t seen him since Wednesday morning, which has been a bit too long I feel. But all this No Sex because of my period is excruciatingly frustrating. Time to get out the chess board again.

Perhaps society would be made a lot easier on everyone if every sub-section did have it’s own designated area, and it more or less used to. Hackney was for single mothers on benefit who chain smoked Embassy’s till their latest boyfriend brought home the freshly cut crack, but now the area has been flooded with artists, architects and new-age media companies that smoke Camels and get the Company Director to bring the crack to the office instead. And increasingly frequently the two dwellers have create a hybrid; the asbo chav is less inclined to wear velour and more likely to be wearing skin-tight jeans alla Kate Moss, still gets pregnant when she discovers the wonders of the benefit cheque but will also cut back on the Smirnoff Ice and do a mothers yoga class. The Hoxtonite favours fake gold bling with her brogues and pokadot dress, sips on a half-pint in a pub that used be a warming place for builders bums and drops her t’s when conversing with the taxi driver.  

The same goes for nightclubs; if it has a predominantly gay theme the ladies love it and the straight men have been clocked into that fact ever since one of them ‘accidentally’ stumbled into one just as S Club 7 were performing on stage and saw drunken female revellers throwing thongs into the crowd with wild abandon, and without any fear. Quite frankly I’m amazed that my colleagues were that excited about a “Real Live Gay!” in their midst. We work in Covent Garden for pete sake, right down the road from Soho – and everyone I know has at least one gay hairdresser they couldn’t live without. A few weeks ago they were in uproar about a film one of them had seen, documenting the life of a trans-gender undergoing the final stages of surgery. Her exact words were, “I didn’t think they actually existed.”

They have just about calmed down now, and the day will resume as usual I suspect – or until one of them spies a male with long hair, a female with a tattoo or a pair of lesbians holding hands. The suspense is killing me.  

As always, Monday comes as a harsh and unwanted reality, but today I consider being a little worse than most, and not just because the heating in our office is kaput. I got chatting on gmail (odious tool) with a friend of mine who I speak to almost every day. I’ve often had problems with her: some my fault and my inability to say No, but also because of her unbelievable selfishness and quite horrific meanness. And I suppose she’s what you’d consider a toxic friend (a term I believe Cosmopolitan conned a while ago) and absolutely should be avoided. But then there’s a problem, I don’t think she knows her behaviour is wrong – because no one has ever told her.

Today she was very rude about a comment I’d written in a new CV. After I’d spent all morning going through her new marketing plan for a new job, she had in return helped me by behaving like a little brat. I’m confused at her behaviour, she can be very loving and friendly, but on occasion is patronising and ignorant.

My advice to anyone who has a friend like this is to gently dispose of them – lift the lid of the bin slowly and gently slide them in. I wont, I’m a wimp and will ignore her behaviour and continue to be friends until time does its work and hopefully we’ll just drift. But no matter how much they will make you laugh at times, or know your world well, keep these people at a distance, or forever remain on the receiving end of small yet deliberate paper cuts.

Yesterday she was sitting at the dining room table and waxing lyric on the latest trip to Sainsbury’s where, low and behold, she bumped into someone she knew. What are the chances? I failed to escape her laser-like glare, so she turned to me, smiling brightly and said, “The Musician is so very nice, isn’t he?”
Nice? I looked at her in horror. What on earth has nice got to do with the intelligent, witty, slightly selfish, egotistical, gentle, drawling man with the funny, oversized hair that I date? Nice is a horrible word, it describes the uninteresting, the mundane. I’d describe Bolognaise as nice, I’d describe my morning eggnog latte as nice (change that – my eggnog latte is heaven) and it’s also the way I’d describe a Christmas card with a watercolour ice skating scene on the front, right before I threw it in the bin. And I wouldn’t mean it. Nice is a non-word; it’s stuck in the same linguistic bin as ‘average’ ‘pleasing’  ‘R.E.M’ and ‘adequate’.

Then, when I was too tired to watch C.S.I New York, I mulled it over a bit. What word would I use to describe him instead? Amazing? Hell no - he certainly isn’t. And if he were, wouldn’t Amazing get a bit tiresome after a while? – I think that Dinosaurs are pretty amazing, would I want to date one of those? Unlikely. I think that the Winter Palace in Russia is amazing, but I wouldn’t want to live there. So what else? Incredible, impressive, significant? These are all words that I’d associate with a fleeting emotion; they have no permanence because if they did, they’d cease to maintain their greatness – they would instead become, well, nice.

Maybe it’s time to stop with heartbreaking, exciting, troublesome affairs. Maybe now I’m a little tired of seeing the firework displays and have become more of a girl that hankers after a living room fire and a mug of tea. Which would make a nice change.

A friend of mine has just broken up with her boyfriend, leaving him bereft and heartbroken – but they both know it’s for the best, it was a case of right man wrong time. But I’ve started to wonder about the next girl that comes along. How on earth is she going to live in that colossal shadow left by my friend? How will he feel about the next one? Will he be forever comparing, finding one of them comes up trumps? And, oh the horror, will he catch his new girlfriend coming out of the shower, with a gleam of light shining on her upper thigh, and even though he’ll hate himself for thinking it – will he say to himself “God, that’s a weird shape, I miss (fill the blank)’s thighs”. It doesn’t actually bare thinking about.

But it doesn’t happen. You tell me – have you ever looked at your boyfriend and thought, “I bloody wish he’d be a bit more like (the last fucker I dated)” and then turned away in disgust? I doubt it. It’s more likely you’ve thought a tiny little dark thought, which went a bit like “I want to go out (the other guy…what’s his name?) used to take me out all the time” and then have a little sulk, emerging after a hot tea and a bar of chocolate like a girl re-born, adoring your current boyfriend as he’s on the phone making restaurant reservations.

There is never anything to worry about regarding the ex-girlfriend. They broke up for a reason, and after the break-up no matter how many Romeo and Juliet ‘we’re going to be together forever’ fantasies they had (or, more likely, she had) are going to be dashed on the rocks, and re-designed to fit someone else.

But you wont remember that the next time the fear strikes you. So the best plan is to sensibly, without whining, crying or putting on a green ensemble to further your point - talk to him about it. Just explain. Tell him that it’s something you think about sometimes, and that you’d understand if he got a little jealous of your former boyfriends (that’s right – share the neuroses around – it’s good for balance).  Whatever you do, don’t crack out. You’ll look like Ally McBeal, and I’m yet to meet a man who would have considered trying to get into her knickers.  

The pointless emails have stopped coming, and so have the songs, so have the postcards with random gifts or objects I left at his house. I no longer feel sick when I’m about to see him, and I don’t shout out another man’s name when he’s trying to make love to me. He can spend hours ignoring me when I’m stuck at his house, and we’re still yet to actually go out on a date.

But. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who made me smile this much. We’re in the middle of a little row at the moment, because I was cold and distant on Sunday, fell asleep and went home. He was also working all day and had failed to pay me the attention I craved. This bit now, when the ardour is dying – is normally when I run.

I’m not going to run today, or tomorrow or the foreseeable future. For a few reasons; One, we have plane tickets booked for Italy in December and Ryanair is as tight as a nuns cunt when it comes to refunds. Two, I’m finding it almost impossible to believe other men are attractive – somewhere down the line (when I clearly wasn’t paying attention) he’s turned into some sort of Adonis sex god type creature. Others would disagree. Three, if I left he’d go out with someone else. This makes me feel physically ill. Four, I’d have to remove the relationship statue on my Facebook, and that’s just embarrassing.