A Consequence of Braving the Cold.

I’m sitting here in my office, snuffling in the chilly air and rubbing my thighs vigorously. I have a woollen jacket on, which is almost sufficient to provide adequate relief, but not quite.

(This room is actually an oasis of warmth because the rest of the house is colder, but I have scant tolerance for anything less than temperate these days.)

It wasn’t always thus. When I was eighteen I had a girlfriend called Pauline McNichol, and one night in December she caught the bus and came over to my house for a visit. I suggested we take a walk to a pub located in a village about a mile away beyond the suburban estate where I lived. It had snowed that day and she complained of being cold shortly after we left the house, so I took my coat off and draped it around her shoulders. My naïve young self thought it the proper act of a proper gentleman, and she seemed to appreciate the gesture. For my part, I felt cold but happily accepted the fact as a small price to pay for doing the gentlemanly thing.

A couple of weeks later – it was Boxing Day as I recall – I went over to her house in the car (even though I hadn’t yet got my driving licence, but the risk was another small price to pay for the pleasure of visiting Pauline.) She asked if we could drive somewhere quiet because she had something to tell me, and so I drove to the same village and parked up in the dark and deathly-quiet square close to the pub.

I waited patiently to hear what she wanted to tell me and turned to look at her face, dimly lit by the spill light from the illuminated pub wall. She looked a little reluctant, but then told me that she was ending the relationship. She said I was too nice, too considerate, and she’d met another boy who treated her a little roughly and liked to tell her what she was and wasn’t allowed to do. She preferred it that way, she said. I accepted her decision graciously, drove her home, and never saw her again.

And never again did I have the opportunity to give my coat to a woman to protect her from the cold, so I can’t honestly say whether it taught me any kind of a lesson. I suppose it must have done, but lessons like that tend to mingle with countless others and disappear in the muddy waters of a life spent fielding them from all quarters. Occasionally I wonder whether Pauline eventually moved on from the domineering new boyfriend having learned a lesson of her own. I expect she probably did, but I have no reason to care.