Beware the Ides of March.

It occurred to me earlier that the Ides of March, fabled in folklore and celebrated by Shakespeare as a day of ill omen, are almost upon us. I sometimes think that everybody should have a strange story to tell about March 15^th. There should be one 15^th March in everybody’s life which is difficult to the point of being distinctly odd and disturbing. Julius Caesar made his by a matter of minutes.

My strange 15^th March came in 1995. The theatre was showing Hamlet that night, and I was in the company of an attractive young woman who was on the verge of becoming a romantic entanglement. It snowed very heavily during the course of the performance.

It was a night replete with much alcohol and marijuana, a night on which an innocent male third party stole my dream without even knowing it. It included an undefined period of amnesia, the contents of which remain a mystery twenty one years on, and a strange temporal shift during which four hours of silent inactivity seemed like a matter of a few minutes. And all to the incongruous strains of Enya’s Caribbean Blue, just because it happened to be in waltz time.

There was a walk at 4am on cratered, frozen snow which turned every footfall into the report of a shotgun. A mood of insane and enervating jealousy hung like an assassin’s dagger in the frigid air, and the full moon riding high in the starry heavens seemed intent upon mocking most cruelly. While my lady companion exalted, I waited with growing impatience, desperate to be anywhere but in my own head.

It passed as these things do, and the prospective romantic entanglement passed with it into unrealised history.