Triumphs and disasters Part 1

I was reflecting over the weekend on my dating score since my second wife left (For the final time) ten years ago. It doesn’t seem like ten years have passed since she slung her proverbial hook with a Yugoslavian Knife sharpener from Belgrade, but as the saying goes Time fly’s when you are enjoying yourself. True I was gutted at first, nobody likes change but within a couple of hours of the door shutting behind her, I became used to the idea of living without the woman I had always assumed I was going to drag the rest of my life out with.

The last few months we spent together was a bad time for me, she left and returned many times and as the year hurtled toward its end. I knew it would soon be over. Call it intuition, call it a hunch, call it what you will but I knew somehow that things were not right between us. At first it was little things that tipped me off that something was wrong. Things like my watches and rings going missing, having my card snatched at the ATM because there was no money in my account, other men wearing my clothes, my wife calling me Olaf when we made love. Incidents that on their own wouldn’t mean anything but put them all together and they add up to Get a grip you thick bastard, Are you blind man? or who comes home at four in the morning after visiting their Mother wearing a little black number with her tights inside out?..

She walked through the front door for the last time on Christmas day at four in the afternoon as I lay on the bed sleeping off a huge great turkey dinner and two helpings of plum duff with rum sauce. I was awoken by the sound of her creeping around the bedroom on all fours gathering the clothes she was to take with her for this final departure. I didn’t open my eyes but pretended to sleep, as she crawled onto the landing and down the stairs.

As the front door closed quietly behind her I opened my eyes and forced myself to rise and sit on the edge of the bed, It wasn’t easy; it took all my willpower to force my muscles to comply with this simple task. A turkey dinner with all the trimmings and a four and a half pound plum duff pudding is a lot of weight to carry around, but I forced myself up into a sitting position and then on to my feet. Slowly I walked to the landing window and looked out at the woman I had spent twenty three years of my life with walking away from our marriage with her possessions in two black bags and several ammunition cases. I was to spend the rest of what should have been a day of celebration alone, and as I necked several bottles of Baileys I wondered what the future would hold.


I was to find out on New Year’s eve when friends who insisted that I shouldn’t spend the beginning of a New Year alone dragged me to a party. They were adamant that I should start as I meant to go on. Well that new years eve I got as pissed as a carrot and stayed that way for more or less the rest of the year. Through the foggy haze of alcoholic excess I managed to carry on as normal, I ate, I slept, and I worked. I had plenty of female friends I could go out with for a meal, a movie or a couple of drinks. But I was giving myself a year before commiting myself to any kind of sexual relationship. It was only fair to the dwindling memory of what once had been a mediocre marriage.

In the event I only lasted three weeks with the sexual thing; I put that down to my will power being out of whack due to the vodka I had become very fond of. You mustn’t get the idea that I was hopelessly addicted to Vodka, far from it, I had become hopelessly addicted to Gin too, and I wasn’t shy about accepting the odd Rum Dachery when it was offered.

I met Lesley at an AA meeting in the spring of that first year as a bachelor. She was blonde, pretty; bright as a button and twenty years younger than I was, but we hit it off right from the start and she was a refreshing change from some of the pot-boilers my well meaning friends had introduced me to. Her story was much the same as mine, abandoned by an uncaring husband, she had taken to drinking cans of lager with a Tia Maria chaser as she did the housework. Over a short period she become dependant on drink to get her through the day, and by the time she had sought help with the AA was in the habit of knocking back seven or eight pints of lager in an afternoon. She had these amazing stomach muscles and could burp like a man.

We would sit next to each other at meetings and soon became friends, then one night as we left a meeting I offered her a lift home, she accepted and as we drove we talked. The conversation turned to her sadness at breaking with her husband and her hatred for the long nights she spent alone. As we pulled up outside her house, she turned to me and almost crying said, “I don’t want to go home just yet, I don’t, I don’t”. I suggested we go for a drink, she threw her head back and laughed loudly saying "Yeah f**k it, lets get f*****g pissed”. That night we drank, and later made love wildly in the back of a bread van left in the pub car park.

As the dawn broke over our naked bodies covered in bread rolls and the contents of squashed jammy doughnuts, we collected our thoughts and our clothes and made our way (Somewhat stickily) to our respective homes. Later as I stood in the shower allowing the hot water to run over my aching body I relived the passion of the bread van and marvelled at the versatility of bread products.

We were to meet many times after that night, and on every occasion we managed to put foodstuffs to good use during our sexual exploration of each other. We tried it all, the exotic Hot pot supper samba, the Bar-B-Q bang, sex through salad, we even went Vegan but it was a little too fetish for our taste. It wasn’t to last. She met another guy at a weight watchers club for insomniacs and whilst he was completely ok with the idea of sharing her both physically and culinary, I knew it was a recipe for disaster. She had to choose and unfortunately for me she chose fast food over Cordon Bluer.

It was the first of many disappointing relationships, but I will always remember that time with fondness and relish (No pun intended) and it was good fun and great practice for what lay ahead for me in the dating game.

To be continued………….

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