Doomed and unrequited

Codetta

2008-06-10T21:45:00.001+01:00

There have been kind comments, and I'm grateful for them. But this blog is now purposeless. I could write a thousand more things about L, about ageing, about the Burra Mem and the Swainlets, about the world's sadness, about the Mills and Boon centenary...actually that last one is not such a bad idea. M&B fans divide themselves strictly according to genre. The doctor-nurse romance, some argue, is

Wedding

2008-02-29T12:21:00.002Z

It's dull and conventional to end a story with a wedding, but I must, for L tells me she is to marry someone, not me, of course.I shall not write here anymore. I will leave it for the entertainment of the young and as an awful warning to other middle-aged men.Finis.

Post 14th February post

2008-02-15T09:13:00.001Z

I don't have the stomach for this. I can't summon the energy even for the necessary denunciations of yesterday's VD nonsense.One part of the myth though seems to me worth attention, the belief, perhaps Chaucerian, that on 14 February birds choose their mates. Yesterday I saw seagulls eyeing each lasciviously and squawking invitations to rough seagull-sex. This means little seagulls in the months

Party going

2008-02-08T21:50:00.000Z

At a party, L and I sit at some distance from one another. I buy her a drink; we pass commonplace remarks to one another across others' heads, yet still each platitude seems to me to have extraordinary significance. Someone else is there, who, saying goodbye, kisses me fondly. In my arms this woman seems light, as if her skeleton were as hollow as a bird's, and as delicately warm as a pastry

Aversion therapy

2008-01-25T20:55:00.000Z

I see a lot of L these days. It will not last, but for the moment it is very agreeable. She chats away to me. Innocently, she tells me about her weekends away with the current boyfriend, who can boast of holding that title for the second time round, They go to snug hotels in agreeably pretty parts of the English countryside.I thought I could take it. Then I had a job interview, and was grilled by

Voluptuousness and sordid uncleanness

2008-01-09T15:34:00.000Z

You may wonder how I have been passing the time. I have been emulating the life of Sardanapalus, described thus by Diodorus:Sardanapalus, the thirtieth from Ninus, and the last king of the Assyrians, exceeded all his predecessors in sloth and luxury; for besides that he was seen of none out of his family, he led a most effeminate life: for, wallowing in pleasure and wanton dalliances, he clothed

Swain escorts

2007-10-23T21:29:00.001+01:00

I spent a day with another man's wife. I took her to the town I was born in; we ate an intimate lunch by the river, as she enthused about the romantic surroundings. We sat close to one another. We saw a play, and afterwards had a drink. I could not take my eyes off her.I have known her for some years. 'S, the pretty one', is how a friend describes her, and she is indeed pretty, but more, there is

The afternoon men

2007-10-11T22:01:00.000+01:00

I was in a wine bar, near somewhere I worked over fifteen years ago. It was four o'clock in the afternoon, on a working day. I had just been to see Julie Delpy in Two Days in Paris. By definition, everyone there was superfluous. No one would haved noticed or cared that they were not at their posts. In the centre, a trio of upper-middel class men brayed. One was drunker than the rest, and gave us

Come landlord, fill the flowing bowl

2007-10-04T22:05:00.001+01:00

I have given up strong drink. Not, I repeat, not because I think I might in any sense be dependent on the sweet glasses, bubbles winking at the brim, the gorgeous light shining through a glass, perhaps of red wine or whisky. No, I have no drinking problem, except when I can't get a drink, ha-ha.Anyway, i hoped that, if sober, relations between the Burra Mem and I might improve. They did not. A

Chintz

2007-09-28T21:10:00.001+01:00

On an autumn morning, a gaudily-dressed man pushed a wheelbarrow across my path as I walked to the station on my way to work. On the wheelbarrow was an armchair, covered with a fabric I had not seen for twenty years. It was precisely the same chintz that a previous L had used to cover a sofa and two armchairs. I knew it well, for finding it, buying it, and having the chairs covered had not been

The first conkers

2007-09-21T15:21:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I saw definite markers of autumn: small conkers, shed from a horse chestnut, green shells cracked by their fall to show parts of the brown nut inside.Dusk comes earlier and earlier. I left work on Monday a little after 6. It was cold and dark. I longed to have L next to me, my arm through hers, so much so that I seemed to feel the warmth of her body next to me, and her hip bumping

An incubus

2007-09-09T22:12:00.001+01:00

There is much to tell, including a date with L. But I post now to give an account of a dream, in which a red-headed woman, not L, nor anyone else I have ever known, kissed me on the side of my mouth, a kiss which, though dreamt, still disturbs me with its physicality. Then, as I lay face down in bed, she lay on top of the duvet covering me; I felt her weight on me, then her hand reached inside

Autumn

2007-08-17T16:23:00.000+01:00

On my way to work I pass autumnal flowers in gardens: dahlias, Japanese anemones, nicotiana. The light is changing too. Soon the Proms will end, the bank holiday will come, summer will be over. V, for so I shall call the grey-eyed classically-profiled one, bade me a sweet goodbye a couple of hours ago. She coloured prettily, smiled, waved and, after I had stumbled my way through a few words in

A bewildered Swain

2007-08-03T21:18:00.000+01:00

Oh dear, summer at a university is a bad time for susceptible middle-aged men, especially when placed in what higher education management juju men call 'student-facing situations'. The barbarians who coined this term have never 'faced' a student in their lives, God rot their flaccid pox-blackened genitals, indeed they would not know a student if one bit them on the arse, which would not be at all

Weather cocks

2007-08-01T21:46:00.000+01:00

When a couple can no longer eat together in a civilised way, then that is the end, never mind sexual incompatibilities, infidelities or political differences. The Burra Mem and I ate buffet-style the other night, salads and cold meats, arrayed in the kitchen. Any gallantry I tried to display, any attempt to help her to a dish, or let her choose something first, was rebuffed. Having served our

Nay, not unyoked to wedlock's bed am I

2007-07-23T21:36:00.001+01:00

Thus the marvellous Loeb translation of Aegeus' line from Euripides' Medea, οὐκ ἐσ μὲν εὐνῆς ἄζυγες γαμηλίου.It would have served me so well in answering the status questions on internet dating services. What a wonderful double negative..."not unyoked"Elsewhere chez Swain a beautiful woman researching erotic fiction leaned rather close to me by the photocopier.

Dates

2007-07-18T17:05:00.001+01:00

The subterfuges I have resorted to: I was reminded, while eating a date, of a picnic with L. I brought the lunch and included, for the end of the meal, some dates, in order that I might claim in years to come that I had a date with her.

In which the Swain and the Swainlets enjoy a Chinese meal, and some meditations on bra sizes

2007-07-13T13:29:00.001+01:00

The Burra Mem berated me recently after finding a piece of paper on the dining room table on which were written various combinations of numbers and letters, for example 32C, 38A, and so on. She took them, it seems, to be the bra sizes of the many tarts and floozies she thinks I consort with. They were nothing of the sort, rather the Swainlets’ choices from the menu of a Chinese take-away who

Drinks

2007-07-12T16:16:00.000+01:00

So it came to pass that I found myself at the end of a week waiting in a bar for after-work drinks with L, and others. Circumstances required me to arrive early; I ordered drinks and some olives for the others and sat down with the solitary drinker’s paraphernalia: the Guardian crossword and a book or two.Then, by an extraordinary stroke of luck, L too came early. She sat with me and we talked;

Buxtehude and Brel

2007-07-02T22:53:00.001+01:00

How I wish I could play the harpsichord, I think as I listen to Buxthehude, its plucked strings sounding as sharp and incisive as my thoughts are dull and muddled, or sing as Jacques Brel did when he performed 'Quand on n'a que l'amour', his intonation undermining the trite lyrics, or do anything that could move L.To evoke any response would have to involve pubic performance of some sort, it

St John's Eve

2007-06-24T11:33:00.001+01:00

I came home from work utterly exhausted, and without appetite. I cooked for the Swainlets and the Burra Mem and took to my bed.I thought I would sleep, but did not. I lay awake, midsummer light outside the curtains, and remembered how, as a boy, I would lie in my bed on summer evenings, listening to the swifts cry as they flew around our house. Why do they utter that odd desolate scream?Here

No J

2007-06-22T18:42:00.001+01:00

J has not come. I expected her today. Perhaps she reads this blog?There are complications. She is from another part of the world and I fear I have misunderstood her, her body language and other signs; what I read as interest may be, for her, no more than normal day-to-day interaction between a man and woman who know one another professionally.I have been caught like this before. I thought that a

Train travel with the Swain

2007-06-21T20:08:00.001+01:00

I like train journeys, especially at this time of year. Generous daylight helps. Though I had a five hour trip to a northern city, where I delivered a brief paper, ate lunch, listed to the other speakers, had a drink in a bar by the station, and caught my train back, I managed it all in daylight. There are romantic pleasures in winter trains too: the darkness outside cuts one and one's fellow

A weekend passes

2007-06-11T21:45:00.001+01:00

After my last post, you expected a follow-up, dear reader, I'm sure. Perhaps you interpreted my silence to mean that J and I, after we met, had taken ourselves off to a hotel, there to slake our lusts on each other for days and nights, and that I emerge now, weak with sexual exhaustion, to write these lines with shaking fingers, her scent everywhere, in my nose and mouth, on my hands, on my

Of J

2007-06-08T15:57:00.000+01:00

ACG asked for a fuller account of my new "interest" and she is right to do so.The first impression is important and contrasts with my first meeting with L. Then, I thought her pretty, nice and clever, but it took several months of closer acquaintance before passion seized me.In this case, with J, as I shall call her, I felt violent emotions the very first moment I saw her. She is strikingly