Good out of Bad.

I should have made this post on Monday. How did Monday pass without my realising its significance? Monday was 15th March – the Ides of March, famed as the date on which Julius Caesar was assassinated. On 15th March 1995, just fifteen years ago (I like round numbers,) I had an interesting and ultimately enlightening experience.

I’d been seeing a very attractive young woman for three months. She had been tugging me up the familiar ladder of mad infatuation, and I had been resisting with not inconsiderable effort (for reasons I won’t go into, ’cos they’re complicated.) On the night of March 15th my resistance crumbled and I resigned myself to her completely. My feeling was briefly one of euphoria, but then she chose the moment to drop me like something you’ve picked up out of the gutter and suddenly realised what it is! I felt like an abandoned puppy for an hour or two, and I woke up depressed every morning for the next six weeks.

I moved on and met Helen the following year, something that almost certainly wouldn’t have happened if the aforementioned puppy abandoner had behaved in a more accommodating way. Helen became the most important person in my life, and still is. We were together for eight years, and when she decided to leave me to start a Buddhist women’s community in Nottingham in 2004, I was able to handle the situation with a surprising degree of equanimity. I supported her decision. She’s had a trail of boyfriends since then (she’s very pretty and eminently lovable,) but we’re still very close.

So there it is. Lesson learned. Sometimes the disasters only happen to make way for the triumphs. In fact, I can think of very few ‘disasters’ that didn’t lead to triumphs. And I’m only on my second scotch. I spend a lot of time these days laughing at myself – and life.