I’ve gone off lager. This doesn’t sound like much of an epochal statement to make in print, though as I’m not someone in the public eye at this moment in time, someone from whom a statement of importance is occasionally expected, I’m sure I am already forgiven. We wouldn’t think much of our leaders if the newspapers were forever writing things like: When pressed on the issue of inflation, the prime minister replied, “Do you know, I’m sure that Wagon Wheels used to be a lot bigger.” But I guess that I can get away with it.
In any case, the change in my drinking habits probably is significant. I was also a heavy smoker until about eight months ago, when I simply decided that I would give up. I get the occasional twinge of longing but no more than that. It is difficult now to see how the need once controlled me, how smoking was such an interwoven feature of my life. It’s like remembering that you once loved someone without being able to recreate the passion and desire you felt for them.
I still enjoy a drink, but these days, possibly through a combination of belated maturity and the reclamation of my taste buds, I much prefer a pint of quality real ale to that ubiquitous fizz the major breweries produce. My friend Mark - you met him when I helped erect a shed on his allotment – is similarly inclined, and as coincidence would have it a reformed smoker himself. Every other Sunday evening we meet up in our favourite pub to try out the guest beers and occasionally ponder life’s eternal questions.
“Buffy versus Xena?” Mark mused. “In a vat of jelly? Interesting contest…” He picked up our empty glasses absently. “Have you tried the Bishop’s Finger?”
“A long time ago,” I intoned, “They gave my mum a new washer and nobody ever mentioned it again.”
“What do you want then?”
“Timothy Taylor’s.”
Mark pulled a sour face “Boring. We can’t make a sexual innuendo out of that! How about a Fox’s Nob?”
“No.”
“I know, how do you fancy getting your lips round an Old Yorkshire Mare?”
“And a bag of plain crisps.”
Mark looked crestfallen. “Come on, make an effort!”
I sighed deeply. “Sorry. I can’t seem to get any further than the Bishop’s Finger this evening.”
“Maybe if you relax a bit,” he suggested. “I’ll get you a pint of Landlord.”
He went off to the bar. I used the time alone to trawl through a series of unhappy text messages from – do I even say this? – my Thai girlfriend. A simple misunderstanding arising from an e-mail message has exposed some vulnerability in the relationship. It was almost funny – and of course I saw the funny side at once. In fact I saw the funny side of this particular misunderstanding set somewhere like a doctor’s surgery, and swiftly e-mailed it to Punt and Dennis in the form of a comedy sketch. Not the most sensitive reaction I’ve ever had to a girlfriend’s insecurities but, as they say in rural Thailand, sensitivity doesn’t feed the goats.
I’m messing of course. It was all a bit upsetting for me too. What happened arose because she – my Thai girl – has a limited grasp of English. She speaks the language well enough, but the subtleties and precision of expression often evade her. She can’t, for instance, say that our affair was lovely, and that from it she is willing to explore the possibility of a long-term relationship. Instead she simply tells me that she loves me.
Unless…unless she really does love me.
Anyway, what happened was that I wrote an e-mail. In it I happened to use the phrase ‘I can’t wait to see you.’
Not the worse thing I’ve ever said to a girl. I once called Sonia Cheeseman’s mother a witch, and poor Sonia herself a ‘witch’s tit,’ which sounded deliciously vulgar and insulting even though I had no idea what it meant. I suppose I could have looked it up easily enough. I was the school librarian, after all.
The thing is, my Thai girl literally read the phrase ‘I can’t wait to see you’ as ‘I can’t wait to see you.’
Of course, as waiting to see one another is, at this point in time, the glue holding our tentative romance together, telling the poor cow that I was no longer waiting was sort of tantamount to breaking up with her.
It took a lot of explaining to put things back together. Even now I’m not entirely certain that she understands what I actually meant. She’s a 25-year-old woman, smart, funny, moderately successful in business, independent and educated, and yet I had to speak to her as I would a small child or a professional footballer. It was exhausting and frustrating for both of us, but particularly for her. I think she felt patronised, and fuck me but I couldn’t even explain how that wasn’t my intention either.
In the heavy, dully aching silence since the end of all that, I took some time to really think about what was going on here.
Why did I care? It was stupid really. I can’t go planning important bits of my life based around the fact that a pretty girl made me happy for one immortal moment under the sun. Andrew Flintoff also made me happy for one immortal moment under the sun but I don’t go writing soppy letters to him. Anymore. I don’t, you know, miss him.
At the same time there’s another part of me, who is either a liberator or a saboteur, we haven’t quite established his identity yet, that is furiously sawing away at the locks on a mental trapdoor. When he breaks through I’ll drop like a skydiver, or a hanged man, take your pick. It might not be this time but it will happen, won’t it? One day someone will come along and bury me under tonnes of rubble and roses, and the whole wonderful, awful cycle will start anew.
I don’t know what the first signs are exactly. I think about her at odd moments, and I miss her, and I worry about her, and in the long slow hours before dawn I sometimes wake up and physically reach across the bed for her. Is that the real deal? Do I have to wait for it to get shit before I can admit that I was happy? What the fuck is wrong with me?”
“Old Fool.”
I looked up sharply as Mark stood a pint of Old Fool Dark Ale on the table in front of me. I'm lying. It was actually Deuchars IPA (Timothy Taylor was off) but it was too good an opportunity to miss.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said. Mark got sucked into a pretty scary relationship when he was still something of an anarchist punk. He took the whole package – woman, kids, house, debts, overgrown allotment, even some Phil Collins LPs. I needed his experience. “If I could magically wipe away the last five years, wipe them so that nobody associated with you remembered anything, but all your own memories were intact, and Sharon walked through the door right now, what would you do?”
“She won’t recognise me?”
“Nope.”
“So she won’t know that I forgot to tape American Idol last night?”
“She won’t know anything about you, I just said!”
“I’d go talk to her then,” he said, suddenly serious. “Because now I know what a great person she is, I’d be scared that someone else would get there ahead of me.”
I heard a ghostly chorus of a song that has been going around in my head for weeks now. It was Stevie Winwood singing While You See a Chance, Take It.
“There is one thing I’d change though,” Mark said. “I’d never let No Jacket Required into the house again.”
We drank to that.
In any case, the change in my drinking habits probably is significant. I was also a heavy smoker until about eight months ago, when I simply decided that I would give up. I get the occasional twinge of longing but no more than that. It is difficult now to see how the need once controlled me, how smoking was such an interwoven feature of my life. It’s like remembering that you once loved someone without being able to recreate the passion and desire you felt for them.
I still enjoy a drink, but these days, possibly through a combination of belated maturity and the reclamation of my taste buds, I much prefer a pint of quality real ale to that ubiquitous fizz the major breweries produce. My friend Mark - you met him when I helped erect a shed on his allotment – is similarly inclined, and as coincidence would have it a reformed smoker himself. Every other Sunday evening we meet up in our favourite pub to try out the guest beers and occasionally ponder life’s eternal questions.
“Buffy versus Xena?” Mark mused. “In a vat of jelly? Interesting contest…” He picked up our empty glasses absently. “Have you tried the Bishop’s Finger?”
“A long time ago,” I intoned, “They gave my mum a new washer and nobody ever mentioned it again.”
“What do you want then?”
“Timothy Taylor’s.”
Mark pulled a sour face “Boring. We can’t make a sexual innuendo out of that! How about a Fox’s Nob?”
“No.”
“I know, how do you fancy getting your lips round an Old Yorkshire Mare?”
“And a bag of plain crisps.”
Mark looked crestfallen. “Come on, make an effort!”
I sighed deeply. “Sorry. I can’t seem to get any further than the Bishop’s Finger this evening.”
“Maybe if you relax a bit,” he suggested. “I’ll get you a pint of Landlord.”
He went off to the bar. I used the time alone to trawl through a series of unhappy text messages from – do I even say this? – my Thai girlfriend. A simple misunderstanding arising from an e-mail message has exposed some vulnerability in the relationship. It was almost funny – and of course I saw the funny side at once. In fact I saw the funny side of this particular misunderstanding set somewhere like a doctor’s surgery, and swiftly e-mailed it to Punt and Dennis in the form of a comedy sketch. Not the most sensitive reaction I’ve ever had to a girlfriend’s insecurities but, as they say in rural Thailand, sensitivity doesn’t feed the goats.
I’m messing of course. It was all a bit upsetting for me too. What happened arose because she – my Thai girl – has a limited grasp of English. She speaks the language well enough, but the subtleties and precision of expression often evade her. She can’t, for instance, say that our affair was lovely, and that from it she is willing to explore the possibility of a long-term relationship. Instead she simply tells me that she loves me.
Unless…unless she really does love me.
Anyway, what happened was that I wrote an e-mail. In it I happened to use the phrase ‘I can’t wait to see you.’
Not the worse thing I’ve ever said to a girl. I once called Sonia Cheeseman’s mother a witch, and poor Sonia herself a ‘witch’s tit,’ which sounded deliciously vulgar and insulting even though I had no idea what it meant. I suppose I could have looked it up easily enough. I was the school librarian, after all.
The thing is, my Thai girl literally read the phrase ‘I can’t wait to see you’ as ‘I can’t wait to see you.’
Of course, as waiting to see one another is, at this point in time, the glue holding our tentative romance together, telling the poor cow that I was no longer waiting was sort of tantamount to breaking up with her.
It took a lot of explaining to put things back together. Even now I’m not entirely certain that she understands what I actually meant. She’s a 25-year-old woman, smart, funny, moderately successful in business, independent and educated, and yet I had to speak to her as I would a small child or a professional footballer. It was exhausting and frustrating for both of us, but particularly for her. I think she felt patronised, and fuck me but I couldn’t even explain how that wasn’t my intention either.
In the heavy, dully aching silence since the end of all that, I took some time to really think about what was going on here.
Why did I care? It was stupid really. I can’t go planning important bits of my life based around the fact that a pretty girl made me happy for one immortal moment under the sun. Andrew Flintoff also made me happy for one immortal moment under the sun but I don’t go writing soppy letters to him. Anymore. I don’t, you know, miss him.
At the same time there’s another part of me, who is either a liberator or a saboteur, we haven’t quite established his identity yet, that is furiously sawing away at the locks on a mental trapdoor. When he breaks through I’ll drop like a skydiver, or a hanged man, take your pick. It might not be this time but it will happen, won’t it? One day someone will come along and bury me under tonnes of rubble and roses, and the whole wonderful, awful cycle will start anew.
I don’t know what the first signs are exactly. I think about her at odd moments, and I miss her, and I worry about her, and in the long slow hours before dawn I sometimes wake up and physically reach across the bed for her. Is that the real deal? Do I have to wait for it to get shit before I can admit that I was happy? What the fuck is wrong with me?”
“Old Fool.”
I looked up sharply as Mark stood a pint of Old Fool Dark Ale on the table in front of me. I'm lying. It was actually Deuchars IPA (Timothy Taylor was off) but it was too good an opportunity to miss.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said. Mark got sucked into a pretty scary relationship when he was still something of an anarchist punk. He took the whole package – woman, kids, house, debts, overgrown allotment, even some Phil Collins LPs. I needed his experience. “If I could magically wipe away the last five years, wipe them so that nobody associated with you remembered anything, but all your own memories were intact, and Sharon walked through the door right now, what would you do?”
“She won’t recognise me?”
“Nope.”
“So she won’t know that I forgot to tape American Idol last night?”
“She won’t know anything about you, I just said!”
“I’d go talk to her then,” he said, suddenly serious. “Because now I know what a great person she is, I’d be scared that someone else would get there ahead of me.”
I heard a ghostly chorus of a song that has been going around in my head for weeks now. It was Stevie Winwood singing While You See a Chance, Take It.
“There is one thing I’d change though,” Mark said. “I’d never let No Jacket Required into the house again.”
We drank to that.
