Desisting With Maidens.

I was telling the priestess in an email the other night about two women I met during my travels with a camera. One was a German woman with big hands whose grandfather I was tempted to suspect had been a PE instructor in the Hitler Youth. The other was the lovely Hélène from Le Puy in France who was possessed of the most beguiling Gallic accent. Neither went further than the conversational stage (which disappointed the priestess because she was expecting a good story, at least in the case of Hélène.)

But they weren’t the only ones. There was also Catherine in Toronto who picked me up from my hotel in her black BMW the first morning I was there and took me for breakfast in a posh restaurant. And there was Jeannie in St Johns, Newfoundland, who even took me home to meet her parents. The problem with those two was that they would insist on mentioning their boyfriend, and I took it as a warning to back off. So that’s what I did.

But maybe I got it wrong in the case of Jeannie because her reference to her boyfriend included the fact that he was currently in British Columbia nearly 3,000 miles away. So should I have taken that as indicating a lack of impediment? I’ll never know, of course, but there’s nothing wrong with mysteries which will never be revealed. (Actually, there is. Mysteries which will never be revealed are like sealed bags of something or other which hang on pegs just out of reach even if you stand on a chair because you haven’t got a ladder. But at least you get used to them being there eventually and regard them as complimenting the wallpaper.)

No such area of doubt existed in the case of Catherine, but she did insist on taking me to the airport when I was leaving and most unexpectedly gave me a long and apparently heartfelt hug. Needless to say, I wondered whether I’d misconstrued something and would be forever rueing a missed opportunity. But it is encouraging to reflect on the fact that a gentleman is a gentleman when all’s said and done, and the first instinct of a gentleman must always be ‘if in doubt, back off.’ I was, I’m glad to say, ever a gentleman.

(They were all very attractive, by the way, especially Catherine.)

I haven’t mentioned Ruth in Halifax, Nova Scotia, have I? That’s because the story was a little sad, and I’m not in the mood for sitting on the ground telling sad stories of the deaths of kings or the desisting with maidens.

I’m sure that if I’d had the near-flawless radar that I have now I would have managed the various areas of potential much better. But I didn’t, so that’s that. And they would all still be mere memories of long ago anyway. And now that I look like Gollum’s granddad, memories are all there will ever be.