Part Company
I was doing stuff with some university students on modals and conditionals, and the topic of advice inevitably came up. You seem obliged to introduce topics like that with personal anecdotes - something I’ve been avoiding for the last few years since everyone I teach has a life so much more interesting than mine.
I was able to think of two pieces of advice: don’t eat cheese late at night (it makes you have bad dreams); don’t write letters late at night (but I think it meant not to send the letters you write). My father and my mother; both ‘don’t’s rather than ‘do’s. That’s what advice was. Should it be otherwise?
Cheese I’ve more or less cut out for cholesterol reasons (except for the odd trashy sandwich or the indulgence of some gorgonzola after dinner with good wine) and letters have been replaced by blogs and mails and the advice has become even more relevant and acute. So what can I do to get things wrong? Write to/about people whose addresses I don’t have about things I should just forget.
People who I’d look up on Google (or who I have, to be honest, however perfunctorily) if I had a broadband connection alongside the time I have today and tomorrow as the children try to finish their homework.
Mick F
Last heard of, mistakenly I think, as a customs officer in Dover. Last remembered as the driver of a Mini hurtling into a roundabout somewhere approaching Cardiff on the way to see Simple Minds on the Promised you a Miracle tour (when they were just past their goodishest). I looked left and right and saw traffic coming both ways. In Mick’s estate-mini we went straight ahead, and went into, and onto, and up, the large-scale roundabout. Frosty, untouched. There was some discussion of the best way to drive off our elegant perch and rejoin the traffic.
A British response. An Irishman from London, a Welshman from near Cardiff, an Englishman from near Scotland.
That’s the closest I’ve been to a fatal accident, as far as I know. Sure, the holy water Mick’s mum (and Mick) had insisted on must have helped. Adrian might not have been very convinced about it at all. Not til we were on the way back to Aber.
-My eye’s fucking killing me. Can we stop somewhere?
-Where Ade? Where, mate?
-I dunno but my eye’s gonna fuckin fall out soon, I tell you both.
I had my glasses on, Mick had his 20/20 vision.
-Oi! I know what! There’s a bottle of holy water there at the side of the seat ...
(I would swear now, sitting in Italy, that he crossed himself)
… and it’s pure - I swear, me mum went and got it at Lourdes and everyone knows that the water there’s pure - wash your lens out in that!
Julie K
- Take a look at this photo and then tell me what you see.
Cambridge First Certificate, June 1986. Kavala, Greece.
It was usually a wedding, or some sort of family celebration, and that led the examiner to some soft follow-up question. ‘Have you ever… when did you last…’ When I think about it now, there was no recording of the interview, no way of double-checking what was said. Marking was arbitrary in the extreme (and probably still is).
Tell me what you see. (Tell me what you see.)
-I see a man, he’s in his early twenties, I would say. He has curly brown hair and he’s quite tanned, rather slim, and good looking. He’s looking through the bus window and he’s smiling and waving. There’s a woman who’s waiting for him, she’s quite young, and she’s laughing and she’s waving too. She’s holding a book in one hand.
The next six days no-one can know.
At least we have that, secret, still. Even from Elli. And the woman with Down’s on the balcony opposite who didn’t care about the World Cup either.
Now? What book would she be holding? She’s changed her name - no longer Julie but, even to her Anglophone colleagues, the Helllenic version, Ioulia.
She told me off for getting the stress wrong on the name of my street...
- NikomeDIas. My god! How can you get that wrong? I can’t believe you don’t know these things! Oh god, really!
… where we closed and locked the apartment windows before we made love in case her classmates should dive through the windows on a Sunday afternoon prank.
She sent photos of her in places that I would recognise back to me, from Macedonia to Crete, writing on the back of one, ‘I’m sorry it had to end this way’. I showed the photos - as some sort of proof of something - to the woman who would become my ex-wife and felt, then, the weight of the next ten years tearing through my back.
She hadn’t even decided upon her handwriting, let alone her name.
How could I make such a mistake?
Elena G
He had a denim shirt, faded away and very simple. As they searched for the Thames (she knew it was here somewhere in these grotty suburban streets, and he didn’t have any scrap of knowledge to contradict her certainty), she picked out lavender from a garden and shoved it into his shirt pocket, buttoning it up.
-Here, you’ll remember this evening.
It felt like an unbelievable intimacy; irreplaceable, unreturnable. That lavender stayed in that shirt for good. The fragrance has never left. Even the scent of the frangipani on the streets of Rethymnon only rendered to Berkshire.
The electricity went in the village as they had the dinner he ordered from the waiters he knew from other (drunken, matey) weekends. They brought out candles and made ironic comments about the romanticism of it all. They laughed it off, the non-couple, used to it after all this time, after the episode in Istanbul where he was about to be charged for a double room though all that had happened was that she’d helped him pack in the afternoon before she flew back to Milan. (Really.)
Her travelling from Italy to Crete at his whim; him giving up any other woman’s demands.
Wasn’t it like that? Just friends?
And the lights were still out when they went to bed. And they lay there, the candle spent on her side of the bed, with the sound of the sea on the stones of the bay below their room and the salt-scent drifting through the shutters, too frightened to move. And if they had moved? If they’d even breathed.
And they didn’t breathe, or move, ...
Julie B
I saw your message to me on FriendsReunited. I’m sorry I didn’t reply sooner (well, at all, now that you mention it). (Well, I’m not actually that sorry really.) What a waste of bandwidth. Really.
I’d already seen your entry there. Did I look you up before you looked me up? It seems unlikely but what would I know of your life now? And why would either of us care? These are the things that go through our minds before we plunge and sign over ten quid or dollars or euros or whatevers.
I thought I saw you in the back of a cab somewhere near St. Paul’s one day when I was family-holidaying in London (the last time - now I go back for work or lunch with Stuart). A startled moment in a one-way street. You saw me but you couldn’t quite believe that the man pushing a double pushchair was the man who slept next to your bed in a strop arguing that he could be a Buddhist, he could, it was just that he didn’t need to at that precise moment. Following a BBC 2 documentary.
I don’t imagine you trawling through all these sites looking for ended-relationshipees. I’m not sure what I do imagine you doing though - working as a beeb producer, doing radio documentaries that a few people’ll listen to in between their prescriptions, I suppose. Stuff that I’d put on my iPod and then delete one sunny morning wondering how on earth it had got there in the first place.
You’d be amazed to know that I passed my driving test. I used you as a sort of chauffeuse, didn’t I? That trip to see my brother and Prefab Sprout in Bournemouth. And they’d cancelled (this was long before mobile phones and the internet)…
Then there was the time we went to Cardiff (or Swansea, though that was where you embarrassed yourself by meeting Johnny Marr and demanding to know where he was hiding the prat Morrissey) to see Elvis Costello. I got very uncomfortable during the Pogues and had to sit in the foyer and drink Special Brew to try and cool down.
Failed.
Then it was an epic Costello performance and I still couldn’t manage to stay in a sweaty concert hall for more than a quarter of an hour at a time.
The next morning we drove (i.e. you drove) up to Manchester. Your parents, Aztec Camera at the Free Trade Hall (wow, I pulled that out of the back of nowhere), supported by… The Go-Betweens. That was why I wanted to go. (Did I write off for tickets and send a cheque? Keep them on a pin-board?) The time of Part Company, Spring Hill Fair. As you drove I felt the chicken pox spring onto my face. Just in time to collect new glasses from a trendy boutique somewhere near somewhere famous.
‘That’s her handwriting, that’s the way she writes...’
Did your friend Valerie really have an affair with Robert Forster, or did you just make that up to impress me? Did you see that Grant McLennan died in May? Just a few days before my father died.
‘...from the first letter I got, to this, her bill of rights, part company… And what will I miss?’
The desolate sex in that weird council house of ours - my brother’s and mine, our property; it went on and on. We really didn’t know what we were doing. ‘In case of loss, return to this address…’
I never have.
My brother had painted out all the colours in the walls; he knew how. He took out all the chairs. We had to lie down on the floor even to listen to a 45. It was summer; the one record we owned was ‘wordyrappinghood’; there were lots of books on the floors though.
‘Her cruelty, her unfaithfulness, her fun her love her kiss,
like mud in the September rain, it comes back to me,
and part, I said part, part company...
… from her first words, to this, our last night’
There never was a last night with you, even in Crete, even in dismal south London. I’m sorry for that. That last night came with someone else, like mud in the September rain.
I was doing stuff with some university students on modals and conditionals, and the topic of advice inevitably came up. You seem obliged to introduce topics like that with personal anecdotes - something I’ve been avoiding for the last few years since everyone I teach has a life so much more interesting than mine.
I was able to think of two pieces of advice: don’t eat cheese late at night (it makes you have bad dreams); don’t write letters late at night (but I think it meant not to send the letters you write). My father and my mother; both ‘don’t’s rather than ‘do’s. That’s what advice was. Should it be otherwise?
Cheese I’ve more or less cut out for cholesterol reasons (except for the odd trashy sandwich or the indulgence of some gorgonzola after dinner with good wine) and letters have been replaced by blogs and mails and the advice has become even more relevant and acute. So what can I do to get things wrong? Write to/about people whose addresses I don’t have about things I should just forget.
People who I’d look up on Google (or who I have, to be honest, however perfunctorily) if I had a broadband connection alongside the time I have today and tomorrow as the children try to finish their homework.
Mick F
Last heard of, mistakenly I think, as a customs officer in Dover. Last remembered as the driver of a Mini hurtling into a roundabout somewhere approaching Cardiff on the way to see Simple Minds on the Promised you a Miracle tour (when they were just past their goodishest). I looked left and right and saw traffic coming both ways. In Mick’s estate-mini we went straight ahead, and went into, and onto, and up, the large-scale roundabout. Frosty, untouched. There was some discussion of the best way to drive off our elegant perch and rejoin the traffic.
A British response. An Irishman from London, a Welshman from near Cardiff, an Englishman from near Scotland.
That’s the closest I’ve been to a fatal accident, as far as I know. Sure, the holy water Mick’s mum (and Mick) had insisted on must have helped. Adrian might not have been very convinced about it at all. Not til we were on the way back to Aber.
-My eye’s fucking killing me. Can we stop somewhere?
-Where Ade? Where, mate?
-I dunno but my eye’s gonna fuckin fall out soon, I tell you both.
I had my glasses on, Mick had his 20/20 vision.
-Oi! I know what! There’s a bottle of holy water there at the side of the seat ...
(I would swear now, sitting in Italy, that he crossed himself)
… and it’s pure - I swear, me mum went and got it at Lourdes and everyone knows that the water there’s pure - wash your lens out in that!
Julie K
- Take a look at this photo and then tell me what you see.
Cambridge First Certificate, June 1986. Kavala, Greece.
It was usually a wedding, or some sort of family celebration, and that led the examiner to some soft follow-up question. ‘Have you ever… when did you last…’ When I think about it now, there was no recording of the interview, no way of double-checking what was said. Marking was arbitrary in the extreme (and probably still is).
Tell me what you see. (Tell me what you see.)
-I see a man, he’s in his early twenties, I would say. He has curly brown hair and he’s quite tanned, rather slim, and good looking. He’s looking through the bus window and he’s smiling and waving. There’s a woman who’s waiting for him, she’s quite young, and she’s laughing and she’s waving too. She’s holding a book in one hand.
The next six days no-one can know.
At least we have that, secret, still. Even from Elli. And the woman with Down’s on the balcony opposite who didn’t care about the World Cup either.
Now? What book would she be holding? She’s changed her name - no longer Julie but, even to her Anglophone colleagues, the Helllenic version, Ioulia.
She told me off for getting the stress wrong on the name of my street...
- NikomeDIas. My god! How can you get that wrong? I can’t believe you don’t know these things! Oh god, really!
… where we closed and locked the apartment windows before we made love in case her classmates should dive through the windows on a Sunday afternoon prank.
She sent photos of her in places that I would recognise back to me, from Macedonia to Crete, writing on the back of one, ‘I’m sorry it had to end this way’. I showed the photos - as some sort of proof of something - to the woman who would become my ex-wife and felt, then, the weight of the next ten years tearing through my back.
She hadn’t even decided upon her handwriting, let alone her name.
How could I make such a mistake?
Elena G
He had a denim shirt, faded away and very simple. As they searched for the Thames (she knew it was here somewhere in these grotty suburban streets, and he didn’t have any scrap of knowledge to contradict her certainty), she picked out lavender from a garden and shoved it into his shirt pocket, buttoning it up.
-Here, you’ll remember this evening.
It felt like an unbelievable intimacy; irreplaceable, unreturnable. That lavender stayed in that shirt for good. The fragrance has never left. Even the scent of the frangipani on the streets of Rethymnon only rendered to Berkshire.
The electricity went in the village as they had the dinner he ordered from the waiters he knew from other (drunken, matey) weekends. They brought out candles and made ironic comments about the romanticism of it all. They laughed it off, the non-couple, used to it after all this time, after the episode in Istanbul where he was about to be charged for a double room though all that had happened was that she’d helped him pack in the afternoon before she flew back to Milan. (Really.)
Her travelling from Italy to Crete at his whim; him giving up any other woman’s demands.
Wasn’t it like that? Just friends?
And the lights were still out when they went to bed. And they lay there, the candle spent on her side of the bed, with the sound of the sea on the stones of the bay below their room and the salt-scent drifting through the shutters, too frightened to move. And if they had moved? If they’d even breathed.
And they didn’t breathe, or move, ...
Julie B
I saw your message to me on FriendsReunited. I’m sorry I didn’t reply sooner (well, at all, now that you mention it). (Well, I’m not actually that sorry really.) What a waste of bandwidth. Really.
I’d already seen your entry there. Did I look you up before you looked me up? It seems unlikely but what would I know of your life now? And why would either of us care? These are the things that go through our minds before we plunge and sign over ten quid or dollars or euros or whatevers.
I thought I saw you in the back of a cab somewhere near St. Paul’s one day when I was family-holidaying in London (the last time - now I go back for work or lunch with Stuart). A startled moment in a one-way street. You saw me but you couldn’t quite believe that the man pushing a double pushchair was the man who slept next to your bed in a strop arguing that he could be a Buddhist, he could, it was just that he didn’t need to at that precise moment. Following a BBC 2 documentary.
I don’t imagine you trawling through all these sites looking for ended-relationshipees. I’m not sure what I do imagine you doing though - working as a beeb producer, doing radio documentaries that a few people’ll listen to in between their prescriptions, I suppose. Stuff that I’d put on my iPod and then delete one sunny morning wondering how on earth it had got there in the first place.
You’d be amazed to know that I passed my driving test. I used you as a sort of chauffeuse, didn’t I? That trip to see my brother and Prefab Sprout in Bournemouth. And they’d cancelled (this was long before mobile phones and the internet)…
Then there was the time we went to Cardiff (or Swansea, though that was where you embarrassed yourself by meeting Johnny Marr and demanding to know where he was hiding the prat Morrissey) to see Elvis Costello. I got very uncomfortable during the Pogues and had to sit in the foyer and drink Special Brew to try and cool down.
Failed.
Then it was an epic Costello performance and I still couldn’t manage to stay in a sweaty concert hall for more than a quarter of an hour at a time.
The next morning we drove (i.e. you drove) up to Manchester. Your parents, Aztec Camera at the Free Trade Hall (wow, I pulled that out of the back of nowhere), supported by… The Go-Betweens. That was why I wanted to go. (Did I write off for tickets and send a cheque? Keep them on a pin-board?) The time of Part Company, Spring Hill Fair. As you drove I felt the chicken pox spring onto my face. Just in time to collect new glasses from a trendy boutique somewhere near somewhere famous.
‘That’s her handwriting, that’s the way she writes...’
Did your friend Valerie really have an affair with Robert Forster, or did you just make that up to impress me? Did you see that Grant McLennan died in May? Just a few days before my father died.
‘...from the first letter I got, to this, her bill of rights, part company… And what will I miss?’
The desolate sex in that weird council house of ours - my brother’s and mine, our property; it went on and on. We really didn’t know what we were doing. ‘In case of loss, return to this address…’
I never have.
My brother had painted out all the colours in the walls; he knew how. He took out all the chairs. We had to lie down on the floor even to listen to a 45. It was summer; the one record we owned was ‘wordyrappinghood’; there were lots of books on the floors though.
‘Her cruelty, her unfaithfulness, her fun her love her kiss,
like mud in the September rain, it comes back to me,
and part, I said part, part company...
… from her first words, to this, our last night’
There never was a last night with you, even in Crete, even in dismal south London. I’m sorry for that. That last night came with someone else, like mud in the September rain.
2 Comments:
What a load of self indulgent, arrogant nonsense this piece of writing is. You are lucky to have any friends at all if this is the way you speak of them
How right you are, Anonymous. I'd forgotten. Good luck with your campaign to comment on all self-indulgent, arrogant nonsense on the internet. It must be a boring job and one that leaves you little time for friends, or a real life, yourself but thank goodness you're there to do it! Thanks again.
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