2006-08-09
Aha! So I was right – he said in that smug self satisfied way that men approach anything to do with ‘the curse’.Friday I could see that Jo was getting in a stew about something. She has this funny (oh! I dare not say ‘endearing’) way of twisting her mouth when something is annoying her and for once it wasn’t me that was causing it. She was getting annoyed at Lesley who had been letting her know what she had been buying for Julie’s present – Julie is leaving to have her first baby on Friday.
I sent her an e-mail: ‘twisted mouth?’. She replied ‘She’s goading me!’ – the reasoning being that Lesley should know that she continues to be annoyed at the fact no-one got her anything when she left (rather suddenly you’ll remember as she collapsed a couple of weeks before the expected departure). I suggested to her it was actually quite a good sign that Lesley was speaking to her at all considering the antipathy there has been there, and that actually the woman is not bright enough to work up a goading strategy that sophisticated.
She wasn’t so sure so I tried another tack: ‘And anyway. You shouldn’t give a toss about her trying to upset you. You don’t really care whether she likes you or not – it isn’t really important to you, is it? Surely you’re above being annoyed by any pettiness there?’
Which (coupled with a discreet declaration of affection) seemed to do the trick. But she confessed she knew the real problem was a surge of hormones and PMT – ‘something I’ve not been used to over the last four years or so’. And then she went on to say she knew she’d been out of control and irrational the last couple of months when it hit her and that I’d taken the brunt of it: ‘I knew what I was doing – just couldn’t stop it happening’. Which I suspected at the time, but then she’s always been given to fiery tempers and just as sudden dramatic recoveries.
Apparently I had a near-miss on Friday night. For once I stayed out in town with friends, just having a few drinks in a pub along the road. It turns out Dave was in the bar next door for a lot of the time. Jo said he was supposed to have been going somewhere completely different and it was too late by the time she heard of the change of plan to get a warning to me. Actually even in he same area of town it is pretty unlikely that we’d ever be willingly in the same kind of bar – he would be looking for bright lights, music (women?) and lager, whereas I’m a conversation, dark wood and dark beer type of person (always have been). But even when it’s unlikely it doesn’t mean it can’t happen and if he had happened to walk through the door there would have been no missing me, and no chance of avoiding the confrontation that has miraculously not occurred in the three and a half years it could have done. And there was a worry (which she endured and I didn’t have to) that we might emerge onto the same street at the same time and walk into each other.
But then – as she said – he wouldn’t actually have been looking for me and so might not even have noticed. But then the same might be true of me. Don’t want to get complacent – that way a bloody nose lies. At the very least.