Out of the Woods

As 1993 swung around, I was living in the largest room of a shared house in Lewisham, living otherwise alone and very much aware of approaching the ten year anniversary of when I'd last had a girlfriend. The ten-year anniversary of my last having experienced naughty naked nudity with a lady of the opposite sex was still a little way ahead - 1997 to be specific - but as things stood I had no reason to doubt that it was going to be an anniversary I would celebrate with a lonely beer and Death in June records. Life in London was okay but a bit solitary, and work at Royal Mail was often tough. I had discovered the music of Death in June through being a member of a group called Konstruktivists, with whom Death in June shared a distributor in the form of a company called World Serpent. At the time I subscribed to the view that Death in June were simply exploring controversial or otherwise transgressive ideas and imagery, and that when they sang songs likening, for example, a high-ranking members of Hitler's Nazi party to a bouquet of preciously scented flowers wreathed in a legacy of golden tears, I tended to give them the benefit of the doubt, appreciating the startling image for its contrast of beauty and horror. It hadn't really occurred to me that the theme of such a song might actually state a belief of the gentleman in question having been a right nice bloke and someone to be admired.

I was slowly slipping off the deep end, and I was dimly aware of the process. Both the cartoons and the music I produced, by which I justified my existence, were becoming increasingly cranky and prone to the psychological quirks of the terminally insular - cruel humour and a delight taken in provocative authoritarian imagery. I was heading down the bitter road trodden by fifty-year old men who never leave home but continue to live in the houses in which they grew up, eventually marrying someone resembling their own late mothers. I was developing a condition which might best be described as an ingrowing personality, the end result of belief in one's own bullshit - the lies we all tell ourselves in preference to owning up to either flaws or failure. Thankfully this was the point at which Mandy showed up.

Mandy was a friend and former flatmate of Christine, girlfriend and her indoors to Carl, my bestest pal. We met each other a couple of times in mixed company at pubs, but the encounters had not made any significant impression upon me, probably because I had been sat in the corner nursing a pint and frowning whilst thinking really hard about Death in June records, about no-one understanding me, and about how none of them could ever hope to appreciate the pain of my daily existence, a pain which I bore without complaint because I knew it was my duty and my burden to be so much more deep and meaningful than everyone else. Thankfully, the encounter made some impression on Mandy, and an impression which was at least different to the one I had been straining to project.

She sent me a card on Valentine's Day, which pretty much knocked me sideways. It wasn't that I never received Valentine's Day cards so much as that when I did they were usually sarcastic to some degree. Detective work followed, resulting in conclusive proof of source and sincerity, and then a phone number; and I phoned her up just like that. It had never before occurred to me that this was how it worked, that you could just phone someone up if you knew they liked you, and you could phone them up with some sort of expectation of things moving along. Until that point my understanding of the politics of sexual attraction was based on the idea that if you liked someone, it was best to make sure that they never found out. So much for that biology 'O' level.

We met one Sunday evening in a pub on Lewisham Way in New Cross. It was a date, I suppose you would say. I'd had my hair cut specifically for the occasion. We talked and she laughed at my jokes, which wasn't something I had anticipated. She told me that she really wished I hadn't had my hair cut, and that I should probably shave off the ludicrous beard I'd been cultivating in hope of it making me appear intellectually florid. We seemed to like roughly the same music, and even though everything seemed to be going swimmingly, just like on the telly, I still couldn't quite bring myself to acknowledge the reason for our both happening to be there in that pub and at that time. This seemed to amuse Mandy no end.

'I er um,' I suggested helplessly. 'Well it's just that like er I um sort of well we er you know well I,' and so on and so forth, and then a kiss just happened as though brought on by some intangible force, as I suppose it was. I stroked her hair and said, 'you have a really nice skull,' then immediately realised that I had just told my date she had a really nice skull. I was unaccustomed to any sort of physical contact, and this was the thing which had occurred to me and the words had just fallen out of my mouth. She seemed to understand, although that didn't keep her from laughing at the absurdity of a significantly weird observation.

We settled into a routine of dates here and there, getting to know each other better, mapping the territory of our relationship. We went to see a ton of bands together - Suede, Siouxsie & the Banshees, the Manic Street Preachers, Killing Joke, Nine Inch Nails, Lydia Lunch and others. Then on Friday the 14th of May, 1993 as we sat drinking in the Nag's Head in Rochester, Kent, Mandy suggested we should consider looking for a place in which we would live together. I recall the proposal having been made in the Nag's Head, and the date is written on a Polaroid photograph taken at the time. We had gone down to the Medway towns in Kent for a day out, and the Polaroid SX-70 camera went everywhere with me. It had been a Christmas or birthday present and I'd had it since 1981, but had never really got much use out of it because the film was so expensive. Now I had a job and a weekly wage and could afford to splash out the occasional fifteen quid on one of those cartridges of ten snaps and the necessary flash bar, although somehow I was still too cheap to buy myself a proper camera, which would have paid for itself within a month at the rate at which I had begun snapping photographs. Being in a relationship at long last had made me suddenly conscious of the passage of time, of how many years already seemed to have passed without consequence. My life was moving forward, and I took to documenting people and places as though I knew I would never see any of them again. Accordingly I have over three-hundred Polaroid photographs mostly commemorating my drinking habits between the years 1993 and 1995.

Mandy and I had been seeing each other for about three months before deciding to look for a place together; and the first photograph taken at our new shared flat in Derwent Grove, East Dulwich is one of myself, sat in the kitchen in my Royal Mail uniform smoking a fag. The date written at the bottom of the picture is 16th of December, 1993, which was a Thursday, and so I assume we must have moved in around the beginning of the month. We had not yet even known each other a year, but it seemed the right thing to do at the time, and neither of us was getting any younger.

Our relationship was neither the smoothest nor the most tempestuous in human history. Sometimes it was fun, and other times it was a pain in the arse, but most of the time it was nevertheless better than being single. Mandy was an extrovert with an occasionally raucous, even somewhat volcanic personality, whilst I was roughly the opposite. I had always imagined that true love - as seen on television - would be intense and all-consuming once it came my way, because my belief in smouldering love affairs of the kind which might be soundtracked by Cocteau Twins albums had remained more or less unchanged since I was about thirteen. I had difficulty adjusting to the realisation that this wasn't how it worked in the real world, and so I was quite insecure and needy, alternating with brooding and bitterness at the universe having betrayed my vision of perfect, everlasting romance.

Mandy's younger sister, recently finished at university, came to live with us with the intention of finding work in the capital, which she eventually did. Some days I found this awkward, even a little crowded, and at other times it was something of a relief to have another person there, meaning it was less awkward on those days when Mandy and I didn't seem to have a whole lot to say to each other. Then about a year and a half after we moved in together, I moved out, having found a cheap but generally decent flat in which to live in Lordship Lane. Mandy had been pursuing a course of art education and would soon be moving to Norwich to take a degree, and I wouldn't be able to afford the place in Derwent Grove on my own so it had seemed a good idea to take the new flat while it was available. This left just the younger sister, Zoe, although she appeared to be on the verge of moving into her own place anyway, which was what she did. It turns out that it also left Mandy somewhat homeless given there still being four months to go before she migrated to Norwich, and so she came to live with me in Lordship Lane for a while.

This was a strange time, neither one thing nor the other. It was obvious that things weren't entirely great between us, and whatever we had shared would soon be drawing to the end of its natural life; but on the other hand we didn't really discuss it. It was just there, something which was going to happen and which had to happen regardless of how anyone felt about it. Worse still, Buster our beloved cat was run over within weeks of moving to Lordship Lane. He was large and black with a white bib, about four years old, and we loved him. Losing him was horrible.

Eventually September rolled around, and by wearisome coincidence my thirtieth birthday was also Mandy's final night in London. We had some friends around for a drink and a send off, but I found it a strange, sombre occasion. At the end of the evening she said, 'don't go funny on me,' because she knew me well.

'I won't,' I said, feeling as though I was helping out in my own crucifixion. As relationships went, there was some room for improvement, but it was nevertheless the only relationship of a kind which included me, and I couldn't even work out how I felt about it coming to an end. About a month later, I wrote:

Things have calmed down a lot. Mandy has gone to do a three year degree in fine art so I guess that's the end of that. I felt fucking gutted for a few days but I feel pretty good right now as it happens. My flat is clean, tidy, organised, and run along lines so strictly efficient as to put the golden years of Mussolini's Italy to shame.

Mandy had moved, and we had seen each other once or twice since when she came to collect what remained of her stuff. We even wrote to one another, but we now had separate lives and I really needed to get on with mine; and unfortunately in order to do so I needed to do something with all those conflicting emotions, because I needed my relationship ragnarok to be as dark and important as it had been in my imagination; plus I was now free to mutter and mumble about everything that had irritated me during the previous three years. I went funny, just as Mandy anticipated.

I nursed that resentment for years, telling myself it had all been her, not me, and all the usual crap which is better than facing up to the reality of your own bullshit. It made me feel better about the present. The truth was that I had gone into the relationship as the pure little soul, sat alone in his room clutching a single rose, unwilling and ill-equipped to engage with the real world; and the real world had accordingly kicked my ass. I eventually came to realise this during the last few months of my next relationship, another decade down the line. I had gone into this one with eyes open, anticipating a smoother ride through having learned from previous mistakes; except I hadn't really learned from previous mistakes and it all went tits up, albeit for entirely different reasons. Then one evening I found all of my old Polaroid photographs and began scanning them in a fit of nostalgia.

Marian looked on with a faintly acidic expression. 'I'm not sure how I feel about you looking through pictures of your old girlfriend.' Marian's position regarding her own history was, so far as I could tell, that it served to explain the psychological misery of the present, and was the source of those obstacles which she must overcome in order to attain acceptitude of holistic winningness and developmental emboldenation. In practical terms this meant destroying old photographs, or at least tearing them in two and burning the half featuring the person whom she would no longer even name, and then blaming everything else on her mother.

I thought of Marian attributing all the evil of the world to the legions of those who had let her down, then considered those old pictures of Mandy, pulling faces with a pint in her hand, howling with laughter at a bus-stop after some gig, stood on the beach in Anglesey proudly displaying the package of Pennywise brand sanitary towels which would fall from her bag at Crewe station only to be retrieved by actor Kevin Lloyd - then better known as Tosh Lines from The Bill - with the words 'I think you dropped these, miss.'

At least you could have a laugh with Mandy, I thought to myself, realising that this particular extended lesson had at last reached its punchline.

Another five years have passed, and it is Thursday the 28th of May, 2015. I am in a pub in London, an unusual situation for me given that my default setting is now married and sort of Texan. I am back in the old country visiting friends, specifically Carl and Christine on the occasion of their getting married. Mandy is also around somewhere, so some form of circle has probably just been completed. We meet and it's strange but wonderful as we talk, and as we talk without my finding myself filtering everything through the usual residual cynicism. We've both been through different kinds of sausage machine since we were last face to face, nearly two decades previous, but we seem to have come out of the other side, out of the woods you might say. Mandy is now a successful artist and soon to be a teacher, which she credits to my influence with far more generosity than I feel I deserve. Her life has followed an unorthodox course, but one which has at least been more interesting than it looked like being when first we met; and of course the same has been true of my own life. Were I able to go back, I would tell my younger self to lighten the fuck up, to take the moment for what it is, and to refrain from imposing upon everything expectations of Biblical scale importance; although I know my younger self wouldn't listen, and in any case maybe the important thing was that Mandy saved me from the evils of an ingrowing personality, even if it's taken me a while to realise as much.

We spend most of the evening talking, catching up, and comparing notes, and it's not as though no time has passed because actually it's much better, and to my own very pleasant surprise I realise that I am proud of this woman, and proud to know her.

So I got there in the end.

We both did.

The One That Got Away

We don't have summer camp in England, or at least we didn't the last time I looked. Our summer holidays began in July as schools broke up, and comprised six weeks of hanging out in the town square eating crisps or setting things on fire, and all the while wishing cancer on those responsible for filling the shops with back to school promotions in the middle of August, reminding us of homework, misery, and cross country runs in the freezing rain a good four weeks before we would find ourselves obliged to engage with the dreadful reality of the same. Summer camp was something which happened to American kids, usually ending with either Rick Moranis or Martin Short gibbering and tied to stakes as a bunch of whooping brats apply the flaming torch.

This was the full extent of my understanding when I first came to live in the United States. My wife explained that summer camp was fun, although when she herself had attended, her youthful enthusiasm and buoyant character had been of such apparent severity as to drive one of the camp counsellors to handing in his cards. As an institution I found summer camp difficult to imagine in so much as I'd generally hated the idea of staying away from home when I was a child, excepting visits to the homes of grandparents. Having seen Tom Brown's Schooldays I lived in constant dread of being sent away to boarding school, which I imagined to be much like prison but less fun. I never mentioned this to my parents, fearing the suggestion would urge them towards the realisation of what a great idea it was. I believed this because I knew that if I were them, I would probably have sent me away to boarding school. Had I actually mentioned any of this, I'm fairly sure my parents would have explained that our family really wasn't that well off, and that the private education of yours truly was extremely low on our list of priorities.

Junior had just turned eleven, and so this year he was going away for a week of summer camp for the very first time. He would be amongst strangers for five whole days. My wife was naturally a little anxious. I was less anxious, assuming simply that it would probably be good for him, and he would almost certainly have a great time; and his father took a similar view.

The week came and then passed slowly. Junior was at some place called Camp Capers, somewhere out beyond the town of Comfort in the Texas hill country. Each day we inspected the Camp Capers website for newly posted photographs of kids swinging on ropes or throwing buckets of water over each other. Junior looked very much as though he was indeed having a great time, particularly in those photographs wherein he has wrapped his own head and shoulders in a length of material leaving just his eyes peeking out from a narrow slit, bright blue and maniacal. Later he told us he'd disguised himself as a ninja, although his father's initial reaction was that we had inadvertently sent the boy to an al-Qaeda training camp. Somehow, this made me feel oddly proud, at least in so much as no-one could ever possibly describe the kid as dull.

Saturday came and we drove for about an hour out to Comfort, and then to the camp situated miles from anywhere, so it seemed. Most of the grounds were defined by a huge loop in the meandering course of the Guadalupe river, and the countryside was quite beautiful. Kids ran screaming back and forth with their bags, a toning down of the scene in the war movie where helicopters land as our hero journalist makes his way through the destroyed village.

'They have girls here?'

I don't know why this hadn't occurred to me before. For some reason I had assumed that summer camp would be a segregated institution. Probably I was still thinking of Tom Brown.

My wife nodded. 'I told you about my time at summer camp?'

Of course she had.

We crossed the field, passing a dried-out mud pit as we headed for the clusters of limestone huts in which the children had slept. I considered what this new detail could mean. Junior seemed to get on well with girls of his own age in a way that I never had. I had for the most part been far too shy to engage with members of the opposite sex for fear that they might take my innocent hello for a sexual advance, which it usually was in so much as such things are possible at that age. I was probably about eighteen before I managed a proper conversation with a girl. Junior on the other hand had recently made the transition from a slightly sinister boy's school to a mixed establishment and seemed to be doing much better, not least in that most of his friends appeared to be female.

At the age of five he had told his mother that he would one day marry Miss Maria, his first grade teacher. At least thankful that the child had outgrown his marital plans regarding the cat, Bess explained that Miss Maria was already married, so he probably shouldn't get his hopes up.

'Yeah but she might not be married by the time I leave school,' he replied. 'Anything could happen between now and then.'

We entered the compound, a group of huts facing each other, kids jumping and yelling and fighting over laundry in the central square. As usual I imagined Junior delighted to see us, and as usual he effected the calm of a Bond villain having only just noticed our being ushered into his presence.

I've been expecting you...

We looked into the hut, at the bunk beds lining the walls, and tried to imagine the living hell of the counsellor whose job it had been to get all twenty-five of them to shut up and go to sleep. Junior absently stuffed items of clothing into his case as though not entirely sure they were his.

'So how was it?'

'It was good.'

He shut the case and we began to walk back towards the car so as to stow all his stuff away before the big ceremony.

'In fact I'd say out of five,' he continued in response to questions he clearly wished we had thought to ask, 'I would give it a four.'

'What happened?' A note of concern had entered my wife's voice. I recalled her fearing the worst, the sort of horror stories which emerge when people who really shouldn't be allowed to work with children get to work with children.

'Well, let me see,' - it was always best to just let Junior tell you in his own time. When asked specific questions he tends to become wordy and thoughtful, peppering his rambling response with the sort of inconsequential asides that are actually a bit weird coming from anyone who is eleven and not smoking a pipe. The story was that there had been a camp fire, and Junior had asked a girl if she would be his date for the occasion. She had said yes, and then changed her mind, insisting that she already had a date.

If what you say is true, then show me this gentleman, Junior insisted in so many words. His suspicions had been raised by a whispered conversation between the girl and her friend, concluding in giggles and her suspiciously abrupt recollection of the supposed prior engagement.

'Well, I'm just impressed that you had the courage to ask her out in the first place,' I said, doubting there was anything else I could really say. Everyone experiences heartbreak, and most of us like to think that our own heartbreak is more painful than that of our friends, so I know how it feels is never really what you want to hear because it reduces your agony to something mundane and mutually understood, like an ingrowing toenail, something you should really get over. Because of this I was additionally impressed that Junior appeared to have taken his first rejection quite well, and certainly better than I would have done had I actually had the nerve to speak to girls when I was eleven.

One of us may have mumbled something about there being plenty more fish in the sea, but my wife artfully changed the subject to what he had done during the week. His account was a little hard to follow, and at least some of it was reliant upon a working knowledge of Pokémon lore, but it was evident that he'd had a great time but for the rejection of the final evening, and had slept soundly each night following a day of exhausting and athletic activities.

We loaded the car and made our way back to the covered area beneath which there was to be some sort of closing ceremony. My wife and I sat, and Junior went off to fetch paper cups of water for us, which merits a mention because this was done without his having been asked.

'See,' my wife said, smiling.

'Wow.' Summer camp had definitely had a positive influence.

A priest appeared at a lectern at the front of the covered area, then a young man with a goatee beard, ear gauges, and an acoustic guitar. He wore a blue T-shirt upon which was made some claim regarding Jesus, probably concerning his being awesome or something of the sort. The seating area filled as other parents returned from tending to their own offspring, and a second priest began to hand out hymn books.

Oh bollocks.

I recalled the pages of Jesusy material I'd been obliged to click past when looking on the Camp Capers website for photographs of Junior dressed as though ready for Jihad.

'This is going to be where we thank the man upstairs for a week of nachos and climbing trees, isn't it?'

My wife nodded, a little deflated. We had anticipated something a little less earnest, like a short play or kids singing songs or something. I at least hadn't anticipated yet another opportunity to welcome Him into my heart, and found myself slightly resentful at the assumption that it was okay to spring this sort of thing on us without some warning, and that we wouldn't mind; although that's probably Satan inspiring me to such thoughts.

'Let's blow this pop stand,' I suggested.

Happily Junior seemed to feel he'd done quite enough praising for one week, and in any case he wanted to show us the grounds of the camp. We sauntered away before anyone could thrust a tambourine into my hand, heading for the river. The kids had been out in kayaks a couple of times, and the Guadalupe river left me as speechless as it has done on previous occasions. Here, by the camp, it was relatively shallow, babbling in places, surrounded by grand cypresses with elaborate root systems on either side, very much a cathedral grown from nature and resembling a Thomas Cole painting to the eyes of one who grew up in England where so much is on much smaller scale. I thought of the memories forged here and hoped that Junior would one day appreciate them so much as I did at that moment.

Eventually we headed back to the car, circumnavigating the singing and praising still going at full pelt an hour or so after kick off. Junior settled into the back seat.

'You know,' he announced, his voice rising in pitch as though surprised to have realised any of this, 'I'm just impressed that I had the courage to ask her out in the first place.'

I repeated my earlier confession of having been terrified of girls at his age, and he seemed to consider it a second time. I wasn't going to point out that he had repeated almost word for word what I had said to him an hour or so earlier, or that he hadn't even known the name of the girl, the one that got away. He was unusually quiet for the next few days, not so much morose as simply thoughtful. This was a side of him I had never really seen before, and perhaps it had never been there before he went away to summer camp, but it suggested at least that he was heading in the right direction.

Just Six People

For many years I was certain of it being the power of words which had forged the path by which I and my first ever girlfriend found each other. I initially knew her as the musically gifted and undeniably attractive girlfriend of Jeremy, my oldest friend on the grounds of our having been introduced on my first day at Ilmington C of E Junior and Infants School.

'This is Jeremy,' Mrs. Daglish told me, indicating a small wide-eyed boy with a brightly coloured jumper and tidy hair. 'You can sit next to him.'

A little over a decade later I would be writing long letters to his girlfriend, feeling terrible about the deception, but nevertheless at the mercy of both my own hormones and the fact that she was replying to my correspondence with missives of equal length and enthusiasm. Soon she became my girlfriend, and I spent the duration of the admittedly brief relationship telling myself that it was just one of those things, which I suppose it was. Regardless of the morality of the situation, I took from it the notion of my greatest strength being found in artistic expression, specifically in the written word. I reasoned that the greatest obstacle to my progress with members of the opposite sex was probably my own awkward physical presence, and that my best tactic would be to blind them with wit before they could recognise me for a buffoon and run away.

A few years earlier, some time during the late seventies, a teacher at my secondary school had arranged for an exchange of letters with the pupils of an educational establishment somewhere in Arkansas in the United States. I seem to recall that we had borrowed one of their teachers, a young guy resembling John Voigt with a sandy coloured moustache who smiled a lot. I already enjoyed writing, although my enthusiasm went further than my ability to string together a working sentence, and so I put everything I had into my letter. Given my age, everything I had would almost certainly have included supplementary drawings of men with bulbous noses from which might be suspended either pendulous drips of nasal mucus, cobwebs supporting grinning spiders, or both. Although modesty kept me from mentioning it myself, I was fairly confident of my being a pretty entertaining guy, and so I knew my letter would be a huge hit, a rare comedic treat for those poor, chortle-deprived American kids with their terrible cartoon shows and laughter-free sitcoms like Chico and the Man or Holmes & Yoyo.

A month or so passed, and the replies came back, and unfortunately my confidence had been entirely justified. Those of us who had written each received one reply from an American kid who had seen the makings of a potential transatlantic friendship in our letters, all except for me. I received seven replies. Possibly my audience had appreciated the drawings of men with large snotty noses, but whatever I had done, it had worked. I received letters from American kids telling me how much I'd made them laugh, letters describing things of which I had no understanding - braces worn upon teeth, the music of Kiss, and so on. Some of the letters were even from girls. The sudden flurry of attention was terrifying. I didn't know what to say to any of these kids as I'd already used my best material in the introductory letter, and the only one of the seven to whom I felt I would be able to give a worthwhile reply had described herself as the class clown, which I found off-putting. A true class clown would naturally be identified by the testimony of others, I reasoned. It was unseemly to introduce oneself as a class clown. It was like saying hello, I am hilarious.

I eventually found a pen-pal in the form of Steven Bosworth who had been a classmate up until March, 1978, at which point his family moved to Hong Kong. We wrote back and forth for a few years before his father, being something in the Royal Air Force, brought the family back to Warwickshire. Steven returned to school for the last year or so and, bizarrely, our friendship immediately evaporated, exposed as something recommended for ages eleven and under, having been artificially extended by reduction to pure text, with the occasional illustration of someone with a large nose from which a green felt-tip tsunami of bogies didst gush amusingly forth.

A year or so later I discovered Jeremy's girlfriend, punk rock, and DIY cassette culture - fanzines, and the like; and I began to record my own musique concrète, and to send tapes of it to people I'd never met, who in turn would send their tapes to me. The mailbox on the back of our garden gate was filled daily with letters and rattling jiffy bags full of industrial noise and ranting photocopied anarchism. It was the internet at least a decade before its time, a global network of cranky loners much like myself churning out page after page of random observations and opinions in bright green pen, all to be whisked off to someone in a faraway town, county, or even country with a few stamps slapped on the envelope. I maintained this enterprise for a couple of years, at least into the early nineties, my enthusiasm periodically waxing and waning according to whatever else was out there, who'd had enough and packed it all in upon finding a proper job, and how much I cared about who else would get to hear my tapes or read my self-produced comics.

In the end technology progressed beyond that to which I'd been long accustomed, and my tapes lost what little audience they had acquired as everyone replaced cassette players with desktop publishing and music software - DIY apparently having been redefined as an aesthetic rather than as production achieved in spite of financial limitations. This is why I find it difficult to set aside my cynicism regarding the current revival of the tape cassette as collectible artefact for those who spent most of the nineties sneering at such relics, but I suppose that's just the way the cultural cookie crumbles.

I resisted both computers and the internet for a long time. It wasn't so much that they had nothing to offer, but that I wasn't engaged in anything which either of them would have rendered significantly easier. I was recording music on tape, doing a lot of painting, and a lot of written research towards that painting. Friends pointed out that I might find all sorts of online resources which would aid my research, and although patently true, I barely had sufficient hours in the day to process all the notes taken from my reading as it was, even without bringing in more material. Then in 1997 I began writing music reviews for The Sound Projector magazine, edited and published by my friend Ed Pinsent whom I knew from the days of small press comics. I had somehow inherited a primitive Amstrad computer from Zoe, my then ex-girlfriend's sister, and so I wrote on that for a while, slotting large clunky discs into the drive at one side of the screen. Then when Ed bought a new computer, he very generously gave me his old one. I immediately found it more pleasurable to write and to edit my reviews with the Lotus word processing package that came with the machine. It was tidier than ring binders full of notes scrawled with biros nicked from work, and writing with the Amstrad had felt a little unnatural, those luminous green ASCII characters seeming too far removed from any creative process with which I was familiar.

In September 2005, I found myself involved with Dora the Explorer - or at least that's what I'm calling her for the moment given her being of similar, height and appearance. Dora the Explorer was impressed that I owned a computer, despite the fact that I was apparently the second last person in England to own one, but she was concerned that I had not bothered to hook it up to the internet. I needed to move into the twenty-first century, she informed me - apparently missing the point that of the two of us, I was the one with a computer. I needed to move into the twenty-first century because this would save her having to use the internets at the local library whilst searching for a job which would pay well without requiring that she be out of bed before midday or relinquish more than twenty-eight days of her free time each month.

'Okay,' I said, because it had been a decade since I broke up with the girlfriend whose sister had bequeathed me the Amstrad and my nuts were about to explode, and I could think of no good reason to say no.

Almost immediately I acquired a taste for internet bulletin boards, a form of interaction which initially reminded me of my formative years of cranky letters written in green biro to gentlemen running cassette based organisations with names like Dead Cop Produktions or Sheep Worrying Tapes; except now the interaction was reduced to just banter, no jiffy bags spilling cassettes, home-made badges, or bits of coloured paper onto the living room table.

I began with an archaeological forum, drawn in by the prospect of discussing Mesoamerica with fellow enthusiasts. It was pleasant enough for a while, but I soon tired of a climate of paranoia regarding the Club. The Club were a shadowy body who supposedly suppressed archaeological truths in order to avoid the mammoth costs incurred by a complete rewrite of human history. There was all sorts of stuff the Club didn't want us to know about, but none of it very plausible or particularly interesting, and it was difficult to get much sense out of those who had fallen for the idea. One member of the board had the user name Clubs Stink, which I guess he thought was really showing someone or other. Another accused me of being a Club stooge for suggesting that certain ancient Mexican artefacts had been carved by ancient Mexicans, rather than ancient Africans who had sailed across the Atlantic to produce stone carvings and then returned home leaving no evidence of ever having been there in the first place. He also told me that my viewpoint reminded him of those racists who were unable to ever find it in themselves to credit Africans with anything.

Drifting away, I ended up on a bulletin board maintained by the Richard Dawkins Foundation, initially drawn there by an interest in both science and Dawkins' writing. It turned out that the scientific discussion was often somewhat dry and hardly the sort of thing I was after, but more to my taste was an off-topic section frequented by persons who, like myself, preferred our discourse to feature men with large noses decked with strings of mucus drawn in the margin. Unfortunately it transpired that Richard Dawkins himself was less keen on men with large noses decked with strings of mucus drawn in the margin. Specifically he took exception to the saltier topics of discussion on the one occasion when he managed to get some time away from boffinesque scientific experiments with test tubes to look in on the forum bearing his name. Threads were deleted, expulsions occurred, and three-hundred or so members took their drawings of men with large noses decked with strings of mucus elsewhere, specifically to a bulletin board named Thinking Aloud, or TAF as it was abbreviated; and it was at this point that I began to notice a peculiar phenomenon, specifically how seriously some internet denizens took themselves.

Human rights had been violated, and Richard Dawkins was no better than Adolf Hitler. He had destroyed the precious threads of the forum, just like whoever it was who had destroyed the great library of Alexandria. This was an affront to all right-thinking people utilising side-splitting Douglas Adams quotes as signatures to their posts.

Still, it seemed like these people were generally in a minority, the price one paid for communication with the more entertaining representatives of the online community, and so I generally did my best to ignore them. I spent the next few years posting on a number of different fora, switching from one to another each time it became too exhausting dealing with people who needed so badly to be right about everything. My online presence was, in certain respects, the latest expression of the long letters I had written to the class clowns of Arkansas, Steven Bosworth, Jeremy's girlfriend, and the bloke from Smash the Cistern Tapes. I had been prone to overpowering loneliness before I met Dora the Explorer, and the overpowering loneliness continued during our relationship. I was fairly certain it wasn't supposed to work that way, but there didn't seem to be much I could do about it; and so I continued to savour time spent stood around some virtual water cooler with people I would never meet discussing the worst jobs we'd ever had, loudest air biscuit we'd ever produced, fave band, and the existence or otherwise of God.

For a while I took a mildly evangelical view of internet fora in a general sense, encouraging anyone who would listen to get involved. The bulletin board seemed to occupy roughly the same conceptual space as that in which I'd written all those letters, at least in relation to ordinary social interaction. I would liken TAF or the Hive or the Anorak Zone or wherever I was posting that month to a virtual pub one might enter with a guarantee of having something in common with almost everyone present, or at least more so than would occur in real life. Strolling into a bar, one might strike up conversations with strangers, but possibly not conversations about obscure English children's television shows of the 1960s, for example. Figuratively strolling into the Anorak Zone on the other hand, that was mostly what they talked about.

Unfortunately though, the pub analogy may be further extended to describe an establishment founded by an egomaniac nutcase who populates the lounge bar with his legion of admirers, or at least those he hopes will become his admirers, perhaps viewing him - it nearly always being him in my experience - as a benevolent God graciously presiding over this bounteous electronic playground of zany wit and common sense. This was one problem with the Anorak Zone, the virtual realm of a man who'd once written a book about the children's television show Sapphire & Steel, and who now ran the cult film and TV forum for black people, as the banner had it. This seemed fair enough at the time, although the occasionally proprietorial site owner's frequent arbitrary references to Brixton in south-east London never struck me as quite so amusing as everyone else seemed to find them being as I'd lived there, roughly speaking; and his displeasure with online behaviour which he denounced as lickle white bwoy shit struck a similarly odd chord, as did everyone calling each other mon. It later transpired that these people were largely white, middle-class, and engaged in some extended private joke, digging each other in the virtual ribs and smirking as they commented on each others posts in a phonetic approximation of Jamaican patois. By this point I'd already been banned, but the discovery seemed to explain a lot. It wasn't so much that there was any inherent racism in this peculiar masquerade, although I suppose some of it might well have been considered the forum equivalent of blackface, but I had essentially made my conversational bed amongst a cadre of giggling student tossers, people I would ordinarily have crossed the road to avoid in real life, and I hadn't noticed because I was too busy agreeing that the The Doctor's Wife had been shite.

Virtual communities are fine when one's own life is otherwise so miserable as to require either booze or endless middle-class knob gags to get you through the day without killing yourself, but the internet can be a tough environment which favours the survival and amplification of the most forthright and obnoxious, those who go the furthest in forging for themselves an online persona which they could never reveal to anyone in the real world, because if they did they would end up with broken legs. Realising this, I have reached an understanding of my own bulletin board as virtual pub analogy being completely wrong, because in real life half of the people one might encounter online may not even be capable of normal social interaction, and so you end up with a pub full of basement dwellers who believe in the enforced sterilisation of dunderheads or whatever.

Individuals in groups, particularly groups formed through some artificial agency, tend to vie for attention, for the highest quota of interaction, interaction being the entire point of posting on a message board. The individual who garners the most attention will therefore tend to be the one making the loudest, boldest, funniest, or even most provocative statements; which is fine, but tends to make for a toxic virtual environment for anyone failing to make the distinction between online existence and real life, for anyone with basic manners. This is why such places tend to last about six months before everything collapses under the passive-aggressive weight of bald old men being right about something or other.

There's the problem, specifically the need to be right smuggled in below the conversational radar as open debate or support of some cause, because some people are, so it seems, only able to elevate themselves by pushing down on somebody else. Therefore I've largely given up on bulletin boards - beyond the occasional requirements of flogging some book which no fucker is going to bother buying anyway - because the occasional pearl of wisdom, or even the occasional pearl of entertaining stupidity, really isn't worth all that sand. I'm now down to more or less just facebook, although even this, more easily customised to individual requirements as it is, is far from perfect, because I'm part of the equation, and I like to think the best of people, to give them the benefit of the doubt, and so I still find myself engaged with people whom I should probably ignore, people who communicate from the perspective of the angry, basement-dwelling loners I would never encounter in a physical pub.

When I first moved to San Antonio from England, one particular Anorak Zone bell end took it upon himself to challenge the wisdom of my decision. What the hell are you moving there for? It's in the middle of nowhere. You won't be able to just jump on the Eurostar and pop over to Paris, you know?!

As with all such questions, that one seems to have been born from the presumption that anyone who is not yourself will by definition require your opinion, which will be better-informed because it comes from you. In this case it falsely presumed that visits to Paris by Eurostar must be fairly high on my list of priorities. The online situation hasn't improved much since then, particularly as I've had the gall to live in Texas of all places, a state which for some serves as shorthand for everything that is wrong with the world because nyer nyer nyer Republicans blah blah blah...

People from the United Kingdom tend to do this quite a lot, for some reason assuming they alone have a deeper insight into the issues affecting the rest of the world, regardless of actual experience of those issues - not all people from the United Kingdom, but certainly more than seems to be the case with any other nationality so far as I've noticed. Britannia no longer has an empire, but some of its people still regard themselves as essentially the font of all culture, and of all that is reasonable and correct.

Well, this seems like a good idea to me, but we'd better find some English guy and see what he thinks before we sign anything...

I would say it's a tendency of the political left, except it's probably that I ignore the political right and only have a vague idea of what they're saying most of the time - it so often being something I've already dismissed as either annoying or deeply sinister - so it's most likely just people who need to be right about something, for whatever reason; and, in the immortal words of Toyah Willcox, it's a mystery to me. It's a mystery to me because ever since the days of the green biro, I've reached out to other parts of the world because I'm interested in how other people live their lives, because essentially I like people, even those with terrible taste in music. I've never really held with the essentially misanthropic conviction that everyone who isn't myself must be in some sense stupid and will therefore benefit from my advice regarding their situation. That I hold no such view does not seem to me either an unreasonable or arrogant proposition.

For example, I recently had a disagreement with someone I would otherwise consider a friend over an issue relating directly to the United States and the people who live here. Specifically, he disagreed with me and explained that my routine was getting old, this apparently being my routine of making statements regarding the country in which I have now lived for three years based on the experience of having lived here. He doesn't live here, and disagreed with what I had said, but more than disagreed, he knew that I was wrong and that he was right, so my experience has therefore been either delusional or anomalous in the wider context, as has been that of my wife and everyone we know. He later contacted me by email and explained that it was okay because he hadn't taken offence, fairly typically missing the point that actually I had taken offence.

It happens over and over. Always there will be someone who knows better than you do, because although they haven't been there and it doesn't directly affect them, they've read an article and it stands to reason innit, and because nyer nyer nyer you Americans with your guns, or nyer nyer nyer Texas, or just nyer nyer nyer for its own sake. The internet is a wonderful thing, and a medium through which I have formed some genuine friendships over the years, but life is just too short for the drivel of those for who lack basic manners, and really just need to be right about something, and to view themselves as a crusading force.

Keeping in mind here that my research comprises what I can recall of books read several years ago, what little I can be bothered to look up on Wikipedia, and a general feeling that I'm probably right on some level - humans were primarily nomadic hunter-gatherers up until about twelve-thousand years ago when some bright spark decided that farming was a good idea. Actually it wasn't a good idea, given that agriculture demands of the individual a much greater expenditure of energy in exchange for a more impoverished diet in nutritional terms, but soon everyone was at it and probably for reasons which are adequately explained in Susan Blackmore's excellent The Meme Machine. My point is that the human race has spent 90% of our time on Earth mooching around the plains, eating nuts, berries, and probably the occasional rodent, communicating exclusively with a fairly limited group of family members, and probably not even encountering the concept of other persons in numbers beyond the lower reaches of double figures. We were never designed to have millions of friends strung out on some vast cat's cradle of increasingly tenuous social interactions. Few people really - it seems to me - are able to maintain more than two or three close friendships at a time, and honestly, there probably isn't any good reason for anyone to do so. The more people we know, or at least of whom we know, the greater the chance of our exposure to the sort of tossers who, without the crutch of online interaction, would rightly be friendless fuckfaced trolls sat growling to themselves in some poorly-lit basement far away from the gaze - or at least far away from the facebook likes - of the rest of us.

A world of just six people probably wouldn't be that bad.

That's my opinion.

Two Years Later

For many years, or at least the many years during which I remained painfully single, I viewed the institution of marriage as potentially desirable for the reason that in the event of my ever finding someone stupid enough to lay still whilst I had sexual congress, it would at least contractually impede their progress in the opposite direction. During those significantly fewer years when I counted as half of a couple, marriage became something against which I had no strong objection, but which wasn't the sort of arrangement I wanted to get into for myself, at least not without a few stipulations mostly conditional to my partner becoming a completely different person.

I guess others have held the same view.

I was astonished when, having broken up with the final girlfriend at the end of 2008, she wailed about how I'd ruined everything and how she'd always imagined we would grow old together. The first part came as no surprise because she had spent most of the time providing helpful lists of my many, many failings as a human being, but growing old together? I tried to picture Adolf Hitler holding back the tears as he realises how few birthday cards he's received from his Jewish friends, and that was when I understood this person to be delusional. Maybe she was thinking of something other than the endless arguments and psychological warfare, whilst uppermost in my own thoughts were hot baths taken over previous months during which I'd find myself idly wondering whether it was true that suicide committed under such circumstances would be as painless as rumour had it; and I really wish I was joking about that particular detail.

Bess, as I immediately realised, was different in all respects to anyone I had known before, and the question of marriage was never really raised because from the beginning we somehow both seemed to regard it as inevitable and desirable. It was the natural choice to be made. Back in 2007, I went for a drink with Alan, the lodger from upstairs in the house in Lordship Lane, and we were discussing our respective partners. He described his wife as his soul mate, then pointed out that for all my declared happiness, I hadn't said much that was good about Marian, so she probably wasn't the one. This pissed me off because the soul mate thing sounded like Hallmark card drivel, but mostly because I knew he was right; and I at last came to understand that whole soul mate deal when I met Bess.

Nauseating though it may seem, we've never had an argument that lasted more than a few minutes, and I can count those on the fingers of one Simpsons' hand. Conversely, the aforementioned final girlfriend once told me that constant arguments and aggravation are natural and healthy for most couples.

Sure.

There's probably not much point my attempting to describe that which my wife and I share, because it will doubtless sound trite and isn't anyone else's business; but it really is unlike any other love I've known, as the song proclaims. When we are together, it is unlike being in a room with another person because we form a single unit like one of those giant Japanese robots where all the arms and legs fly off to become smaller autonomous robots. We laugh at each other's jokes. We have no barriers between us. There is no subject one of us cannot broach with the other, and apologies have generally proven unnecessary because neither of us does anything which might require an apology. I can describe the shape of our relationship by telling you what it isn't, but otherwise I would be straying into the realms of either poetry or religion. Let's just say that she's a very rare gem and leave it at that.

In April 2010, still a UK resident, I came to San Antonio to meet her family, and whilst I was here I did the down on one knee bit. My mother had given me the ring, passed on from my grandmother - three diamonds I would see sparkling upon Margaret Shepherd's finger as she sat watching the wrestling on Saturday afternoons in the 1970s, flicking ash from the end of her umpteenth cigarette. It belonged to a significant era of my personal history, and it was absolutely right to place that ring on my fiancé’s finger and pop the question just like in the films. We'd both seen the proposal coming a mile off, but it was no less special as a result.

By July 2011, all of the forms had been filled and I was back here in Texas on a K-1 fiancé visa. It was a strange couple of weeks. I was in an unfamiliar and very hot country, surrounded by people I didn't know, here without a safety net on the understanding that I hadn't just made the greatest mistake of my life.

Within a month, we moved to the larger house we'd been discussing, and on the last Sunday before August it filled with people. My wife's friend Sara was brought in to order us around, instructing me to be more cheerful having failed to understand that my cheer has never  been expressed with hootin', hollerin' or high fives; and she did an amazing job of turning our porch into Mexico and cooking enough enchiladas for everyone. The ceremonial aspect of the marriage wasn't legally necessary, but it seemed important that we should do something, and so we did; and it wasn't the greatest mistake of my life, if I had even seriously believed that could be a possibility.

Sometimes I think it may have been the first good thing I ever did.

The Valentine's Day Potlatch

Potlatch, as Wikipedia will tell you, is a gift-giving festival and primary economic system practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and United States. This includes Heiltsuk Nation, Haida, Nuxalk, Tlingit, Makah, Tsimshian, Nuu-chah-nulth, Kwakwaka'wakw, and Coast Salish cultures. The word comes from the Chinook Jargon, meaning to give away. In essence, potlatch is war waged with gifts, a means of destroying one's enemy with obligation through the display of such generosity as to place them forever in your debt. It's the offer that cannot be refused, the thermonuclear strike of passive-aggressive behaviour.

The first Valentine's Day card I ever received had cartoon mobsters on the front in keeping with its promising that I was about to be made an offer I could not refuse. Opening the card, the subject of this offer was identified as the person of an anonymous sender simply referring to herself as me. For about an hour I was delirious, believing this to have been sent by Anne-Marie Polley, a red-haired girl sat in the front row of the biology class. I had idolised Anne-Marie for a long time, writing truly shitty poetry which I never showed anyone, imagining improbable and slightly lurid scenarios in which my bicycle succumbed to a flat tire directly as I passed her house, with this one thing inevitably leading to another. Now that it's no longer 1979, I find it impossible to guess at whatever drive singled out Anne-Marie for my distant attention. She was tall and a little skinny with freckles and Deirdre Barlow glasses. I'm not sure if she had a particularly interesting personality because I never summoned up the courage to speak to her. I have a feeling her appeal may have been that she was conspicuously available, and I had decided on some subconscious level that she wasn't really in a position to be picky.

It turned out that she was at least a little picky. The furtive glances and chortling from the front row were not shy, girlish excitement, but probable discomfort deriving from her having been stitched up by the cartel of girls who sent the card. She was apparently flattered by my interest, but still, she unfortunately had some standards. The same could not be said of myself judging by the quality of the unusually shitty poetry I wrote that evening in response - the grey, heartless universe that had murdered me to death until I was a bit like a zombie or a Frankenstein, and so on...

The next Valentine's Day greeting I received came a few years later, a preposterous and over the top gushfest with hearts and puppies on a card large enough to temporarily shelter two homeless people. Both ridiculous and appreciated, it had been sent by girlfriend number one in a fit of irony. The initial irony was that we both wore black clothes and liked industrial music and so, as part of some ill-defined cultural elite, were therefore above sending such hilariously tacky cards. The second level of irony was that we separated soon after on the grounds of her having met some boy who wore even darker clothes and that I now lived 150 miles away. This was because I'd moved to Maidstone, Kent in order to pursue a degree in really, really expressing my inner self.

I had a couple more Valentine's Day cards whilst at Maidstone, received as part of a pact drawn up between myself and two girls from the illustration course. Ain't no-one gon' send us shit, we agreed, so let's cleverly send cards to each other and pretend we don't know who they're from. It worked, but didn't feel that great seeing as I fancied one of these girls to a quite sickening degree, and had therefore sent a genuine Valentine's Day card with the pretext of it pretending to be genuine, just like in a Philip K. Dick novel.

The tenth anniversary of my first Valentine's Day card came and went, and I met girlfriend number two. She was a friend of a friend who caught my attention with what might be argued as having been the first true Valentine's Day card I received - true here defined as a card anonymously sent by someone you don't know very well and who is interested in the contents of your pants. A relationship ensued, perhaps not the greatest relationship in the world, but not without its merits, and it took us both where we needed to go, if that doesn't make it sound too much like a management training exercise.

Now returning to the theme of potlatch, in September 2005 I became involved with girlfriend number three. For the sake of anonymity I'll call her Marian - although as that's actually her name I ask the reader to pretend I mean a different person called Marian.

Marian had issues - self-esteem, motivation and the usual bullshit - which she dealt with by attending a series of dubious self-help courses and learning how to accept that almost anything could be blamed upon someone else through application of the right sort of tortured logic.

'You have just shot me in the foot using a handgun,' I might point out as I bled onto her expensive carpet.

'Oh! So now I'm not allowed to shoot you in the foot using a handgun?! That's the law now is it?!' Marian would screech, eyes popping out of her head as a precursor to that thing which Karen Gillan equates with acting when playing Amy McBoggle in The Doctor Who Show. 'It always has to be about you, doesn't it!'

Being something of a knob, I always imagined she might improve over time. She might notice how I didn't spend every waking minute being angry at something or other, how I actually had a job and seemed relatively happy. I hoped she would ask herself how can I learn to be more like that? Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself always seemed like a nice idea, and hopefully one that could be spread without too much of a headache.

Valentine's Day approached, and Marian informed me how she had certain expectations regarding the quality of my offering, and she was not looking to be disappointed. By this time I'd grown accustomed to brushing off such low level emotional blackmail, rationalising it as simply a part of Marian's unusual and potentially delightful personality. Within weeks of the formation of our relationship she had explained to me how easily she grows bored with people, so I would therefore need to ensure that she had cause to remain interested. I imagine she thought she was helping me out.

I'd already been planning a fairly distinctive Valentine's Card, regardless of the ultimatum. I had recently got back into woodworking, having made myself a load of shelving, and so I made a card from two squares of thick pine the size of LP record sleeves. These I joined with hinges, cutting a heart-shaped hole in the one I had chosen for the cover, then painting the whole thing. It was laborious and absurdly extravagant, but the point was here, I made this. I love you, and although you just keep on giving me bullshit, I put all this effort into something to show you that I care regardless, and that you will always be able to rely on me, and you might therefore like to think about cutting out some of the crap. Look at this and tell me again how I only ever think of myself.

The evening of February thirteenth, Marian pointed out that tomorrow would be Valentine's Day, and began to explain to me when and where she expected delivery of her card, and how she did not want to see my name written within so as to preserve the tradition of Valentine's Day card anonymity and avoid spoiling the magic. I said that I had not signed the card with my name, but that as it was rather large I would be unable to post it through her letterbox as per her instruction.

'I'll leave it on the table,' I said.

'But then I'll know who it's from.'

I could see a spark of anger in her eye, the fires ignited by always having to do everything herself and so on and so forth.

'Well, yes,' I sighed, 'but I'd really rather not just leave it on the doorstep, and you already know who it's from.'

'You don't understand,' she raged, this being her standard reaction to anything other than compliance. You have failed to obey, went the logic, therefore you cannot have understood what I said. The argument ran around in a circle for maybe an hour. In the morning I left my stupid wooden card on her living room table, because that was the only practical option. When I returned later that day, no comment was made, although it was still there on the table.

'Did you get my card?' she asked with a slightly superior tone, speaking with the authority of one who had correctly observed tradition and thus preserved the magic, unlike some...

'Yes,' I said. 'Thank you.'

Having developed an unusually healthy sense of that which she saw to be her due, I believed she might question the sincerity of my gratitude, something she did often. Instead she asked if I had liked it.

The card had appeared through my letter box that morning and it had not been signed. It had been purchased in a local card shop, and I'm pretty sure I'd been present when she bought it. It was one of a typically twee series by greetings card artist Giles Andreae, The Interesting Thoughts of Edward Monkton which Google describes as quirky and philosophical musings on life. She had given me Edward Monkton cards at Christmas and on my birthday, and I still didn't know how to tell her I found Andreae's wearying brand of self-conscious surrealism profoundly depressing. The thoughts were neither interesting nor even particularly funny, the sort of thing that happens when people who run holistic healing workshops try to prove that they too have a sense of humour:

These drawings would like to be your friends. Use them for inspiration. There is no corner of life into which they cannot shine the bright torch of insight.

See what I mean? I hadn't liked the card, but I said that I did because it was easier. If I had said no she would have explained that her card had been carefully chosen whilst mine showed neither thought nor effort, contrary to what I might cheekily describe as evidence. For Marian, social interaction was a form of potlatch. It was all about the value of what you could give being by definition less than the value of what she could give, and because she wasn't really in the habit of giving anything, she became an expert in promoting and inflating the worth of her own stock. She eventually addressed my handmade wooden card in terms of suggesting that I should think about making more and selling them to people, thus I suppose finally acknowledging that it hadn't been a complete waste of time.

I've never been a huge fan of Valentine's Day. There's just too much that can go horribly wrong, not least because if you can only really express your feelings to someone by sending them a card on the same day every other bozo in the universe is sending a variation on the same card for the same reasons, then frankly you're screwed; and no-one likes being reminded of that. I often wondered why Marian was always so angry, and in the specific case of Valentinesgate, I'm in two minds. Perhaps the incident served as a painful illustration of the utter futility of our relationship; or perhaps it was simply that she just needed to be angry about something, that thirst for feeling wronged because it's easier than accepting that maybe you were the one who messed up; but actually I hope it's because just for once during those three crappy years, I beat her at potlatch.