The first combination plane I bought was a Stanley 50 with two sets of cutters, this, as most of you will know is a perversion. Not quite in the same league as an oyster and leek frittata but all the same still a perversion of the normal ratio of two planes to every set of cutters.
The Stanley 50 is a disappointment in so many ways, until I wrenched it from it’s obscurity in the cold gloom of the tool cupboard to take this photo, I’d forgotten just how disappointing, with it’s twisted adjusting lever and un-drilled narrow fence. That’s it for the Stanley 50.
Sometimes the mildest words can be brimming with significance, in the final summing-up I was a disappointment to Michelle, she told me so and I wrote it in my diary.
Long before this awful judgement, whenever I looked at her, which was as often as possible without actually staring like a car-park attendant at a windscreen, I thought she was the best woman I’d ever met. I was into my fourth week of reeling from perfect Sarah’s abandonment, trying unsuccessfully to feel even a pout of dislike for her despite being left so obtrusively waving on the dock, when I met Michelle in a supermarket in a so well-named checkout queue. A queue of two. Both of our trolleys were indelibly stained with thin patches of aloneness and rejection, there was no bulk for groaning laughter-surrounded tables here; these were the carriers for rheumy-eyed old men’s half-sized tins and full-sized bottles. We waited with all our evidence neatly displayed on the conveyor belt, separated by a dark blue ’next girlfriend’ triangular sign, with starkly black rubberised space left for a real couple to start piling on their hods of tofu bricks and bushels of sausages.
From this apparent bleakness sprang unexpected, double clubcard points.
She turned to face me as we paused for a serendipitous till-roll change to be completed, and we both quietly tutted and jerked our faces upwards a fraction, I know at that moment we were both thinking, probably for the last time, the same thoughts because we mutually massaged our egos with it’s later retelling. Umm, not too bad, and quite small amounts of everything on show, faulty fridge or single? Actually, I was thinking, 'wow you‘re nice, you just flicked your hair back in a slightly nervous gesture, Sarah used to do that when we first met, oh dear, Sarah, Brussels; for the fourteenth time that week, how could you?'
Distractingly, Michelle started chatting while she waited for me to fumblingly finish, bag and reload my trolley in all it’s inglorious sparseness, and continued talking as we pushed our wire chariots of shame across the car-park. In the time it took to reach my boot-lid we had tutted indignantly about not even being asked by the assistant if we wanted help with packing and laughed together twice, but mostly we had bemoaned the futility of cooking for one, and arranged to avoid two further instances of contemplating our respective skeletal draining-racks, by going out for dinner the next evening. We parted with mutual smiling admiration and possibly a cheery wave as I left the car park and went round to my elderly parent’s house for dinner as I had done for the last four weeks. There are times when nothing succeeds so well as failure, or it seems, incessant tutting.
As we were engaged, engaged to be married, she decided to move in, from weekends to permanently in. It was shock at first sight, as if suddenly she had spontaneously appeared like a magician’s pigeon, flapping nervously in a haze of hairspray, cuddled toys, table lamps and other nick-nackery, uncomplicated underwear and complicated sex. But Michelle was much more than any of these things, and everything really couldn’t have been better, for a while she was the everything.
Thinking about it, she was a truly gorgeous looking girl and I have always associated her with a car I had at the time, an equally gorgeous Jensen Interceptor, if you’ve had one you’ll know, like Michelle, they would occasionally overheat and have some other little niggles. These little problems were as nothing compared to the feral growl of it’s 6 litre V8, and it could out-drag any hot-hatch many years it’s junior, just with sheer litres and torque. It was a visceral experience every time I drove it, and I don’t think much more can be asked from a car, I’ve got the modern equivalent at the moment, it’s a great car but just lacks a little of that animalistic primal malevolence. When given some welly, the Jensen could have a strange effect on the feminine nipple, and I wished at times that I didn’t have one.
A simple and happy state of affairs with Michelle continued for about another year until she lost her job in a frenzy of downsizing. For some reason this redundancy triggered a sudden compulsion in her to get married, if I thought about that correlation now I might think it was a classic mutually catalytic compensatory response, and if I had only voiced that opinion then, she might have said: “Yes, you‘re right, lets forget it, this skirt isn’t too short is it?” But I know she really wouldn’t have, she never forgot anything, ever.
If you’re engaged, engaged to be married, and you’ve buried that fact deep in your sub-conscious, suddenly a partner can wave a certain finger at you at any time with a confident flourish, "Look what I have here, yes that’s right, your solemn promise to marry me, now, what about it then?" Looking aghast and crying out too loudly and forcefully, "What, now?" may have been just a jaw-jerk reaction, but it didn’t come across very well, leading to some questioning type frowning. You can only say that you ‘just don’t feel ready at the moment’ and ‘aren’t we okay as we are’ or even in desperation, that ‘your dad hasn’t come up with those six goats yet’, so many times before they begin to sound hollow and look a bit worn-thin.
Even when I knew what the outcome was likely to be, I still couldn’t, as illustrated, bring myself to make the final leap. I never did take enough notice of her ultimatums, even the ones I knew about. I felt I was being drawn into the unknown, a permanent and irreversible unknown, the key word there is shoved. Despite trying to convince myself otherwise, I knew it was never going to happen, eventually that thief procrastination stole the day, and she left, resolutely disappointed in me.
Not for the first time, I wondered where the girl I had met in the supermarket queue had gone, while she was undoubtedly questioning what had become of all those declarations of blind Venetian-induced love.
But I am incorrigibly romantic and sentimental, and in quiet moments of reflection like now, I still sometimes think longingly of her and the good times we shared, and there were good times, like leaving Chelmsford at dusk on an August evening, in all her gleaming burgundy with cream vinyl-roofed, Italian-styled, hand-built magnificence. Burbling along behind a few dawdlers, anticipating the moment, waiting, then floor the pedal for the kick-down at the first straight, smiling at the roar from the exhausts, louder than Bruce Springsteen, as the surge of adrenalin and acceleration pinned me back in the seat. Before long, I realised everyone had been left far behind, out of sight and forgotten.
4 comments:
I despair when I read things like this, I was jilted and I can assure you it is one of the worst things that can ever happen, it leaves an empty feeling, worthless, small, and it takes years for confidence to return.
You have made it all sound like a joke, but it is not at all funny from where I am standing. Can you imagine how your fiancée felt to be all of a sudden not good enough, being engaged means something, it’s more than a plastic ring in a playground game. You broke off your engagement for what reason exactly? It was not very clear, as are a lot of the other things you put on this blog, I imagine you think like a Guardian reader, that as long as you can hold a conversation about some obscure piece of art then how you treat people is apparently of no consequence. You sound very much the same sort of person my first husband was, inconsiderate and selfish. Don’t bother to reply, I am not at all interested.
Yes it is true when you ask someone to be your wife and marriage you must mean what you say or it can not work out or be happy for everyone. Before we married we talked about what we wanted to get for a long time and now we don’t have to. I showed my wife this and she thinks you are also wrong it is better not to. She said you are never going to be happy and you should not analyse everything in a way. In a reply you said the b flat minor third is why?
No Anonymous, you’ve bothered so it‘s only polite to answer in some way and the alternative is a disagreeable looking Panini and talking to Barry about his camping holiday in Mid Glamorgan. If you blame yourself for how badly people treat you then you are going to feel devastated when it happens, and unless your name is Ant or Dec it will happen occasionally, life is full of rejection and acceptance, that’s what a lot of it is all about.
You can look critically at yourself, make excuses for the person who dumped you unceremoniously, lose all self-esteem and soon you’re in a bitter cycle of trying to beat a partner to be the first to end your next relationship. I have personally found it far easier to be the rejected half, and in the incident you’re referring to, ultimately I was, though she may have thought for her it was more of a constructive dismissal.
I would have been happy to continue in our imperfect way, who knows, it might have improved, and we could have become an old married couple. As these things go it wasn’t terrible but we weren’t going in the right direction, and I thought we should leave out any big commitments for a while.
Did you get the chance to ask why you were jilted? Did the answer sound at all lame? I know a chap, not mentioned here before now, who just walked out on his wife after twenty something years. He just one day didn’t come home, sent her a text that read ‘ I don’t love you anymore’, and went to stay with his mum. He stayed away for months, until one day he found he wanted to go back to his wife, who by then had channelled her despair and confusion into animosity and would only allow him in the house to visit their teenage sons on weekends. He’s now having counselling to find a reason why he left, he really doesn’t, or perhaps prefers to think he doesn’t, know why, he obviously doesn’t believe his own text message. He will I’m sure, blame himself eventually, it’s always more convenient to drag out some hackneyed self-accusation, it seems the decent thing to do really from the man’s perspective, and it saves a lot of further trouble in the long run.
People change, they find they want different things, very suddenly sometimes, and if relationships are investments of your time and emotions, like their financial counterpart they can sometimes plummet, and we just have to accept that, without being demeaned by it. What one person might find to be an unattractive trait in you, another person might absolutely worship, unless it really is terrible and you have to think about addressing it.
My probably unwelcome and unnecessary advice to you, if it happens again and of course I hope it doesn’t, would be to counteract your humiliation and pain with the belief that you deserved better anyway, don’t ever become defined by your partner, always embrace selfish coping strategies, avoid emotional paralysis and don’t read silly blogs. I hope this has been helpful, I feel sure it has been. To think, some people’s first reaction when they read your rather brusque comments would be to just type ’grow up’, how inconsiderate and selfish that would have been.
The Guardian? That’s ridiculous, you need look no further than the Halstead Gazette for a trend setting opinion former, a newspaper that has long had it’s stubby ink-stained finger on the pulse of local life, mainly to check if there are actually any signs of it.
Don't bother to thank me Anonymous, it was an absolute pleasure.
Benoit. You really showed your wife this? Putting that admirable ‘caring is sharing’ aside, I’m pleased as punch to hear of perpetual unhappiness stretching into the future, but these things, these hiccups shall we say, are all part of life‘s rich whatsit. It’s best to think of it as a lucky escape for Michelle, which she has probably been thanking me for ever since.
Actually it was an upper b flat minor third Benoit, she wasn’t that husky. I should never have mentioned any of this in the first place, a lovely quote from one of your poets (French?) would have been far more appropriate, like, entre deux coeurs qui s'aiment, nul besoin de paroles, and left it at that.
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