On Lunchtimes and the Swedish Connection.

Back in the late seventies, when I was little more than a slip of a lad ever eager to make the acquaintance of nearly every colleen who didn’t have a beard, there was an equally slippish of a girl who worked as a typist in my office. We began the habit of going for lunch together, often to some local hostelry where we would listen to Abba songs and dream of an imaginary togetherness. (Abba was especially apposite to our situation because the colleen in question bore some resemblance to Agnetha Fältskog.)

Eventually our working situations changed, but our habit of meeting for lunch didn’t. She got married, but we still met for lunch. I got married and the habit continued. She had a daughter and I got divorced, but the lunchtime trysts remained a natural part of the calendar unabated. And so it continued for twenty years.

It never became physical, you understand, not unless you count the day in a pub car park when she kissed me on the cheek and blushed. And when I did finally decide that enough was enough and I wanted us to go away together, I rang her from a phone box to say so and she was out. (Mobile phones were still a cloud on the horizon then, and on such whims of outrageous fortune does one’s life path irrevocably depend.) But still we continued to meet for lunch.

So if you should ever read this, Miss JEG, be it known that I still occasionally think about you. My waking mind realises that you must be as old and ugly as me by now, but the half which dreams chooses to ignore the fact.