Monday 14 February 2011

Sam Vimes and his Lady Sybil...

Oh gosh I do hate Valentines Day when I am single. I have spent all day seeing couples everywhere, even when I went shopping I kept seeing couples holding hands and then the men paying for lots of lovely underwear and perfume and chocolates for the women in their lives... Arrgh!!!

At times like these I think of all the wonderful men in literature who I find deliciously romantic, Sam Vimes being at the top of the list. This is deeply ironic as he wasn't at all romantic, but what happened between him and Sybil felt so deep and just incredibly special. A real proper connection exists between them, they love each other truly and deeply and yes I do believe passionately, he just doesn't go in for gestures. Just as well he has Sybil as I am a girl who adores romantic gestures!

Last night I watched Braveheart and cried. I always cry at the end, I love it and his fight, but above all the deep and abiding love he carries for his dead wife. Rhett Butler speaks to me as well, he would have gone all out for a Valentines Day with Scarlet and would have done so because it meant a lot to her rather than because he liked roses and chocolates. Oh gosh what I wouldn't give for a man like that who made my heart beat hard and fast.

I am very intentionally not thinking about Germanicus... I have been an awful lot recently and I do hope it is because of St Valentine and his bloody day. I go round and round lots of different issues in general but then last night I got very upset. My flatmate and her boyfriend were giggling and having a lovely time in the other room and I suddenly felt hugely lonely. I felt this urge to get back in touch with him but then I remembered that I had tried to get us back together and he had said no... It is about time I took that as closure and moved on.

However, I refuse to mope or be in the depths of despair (a charming Anne of Green Gables reference there) and so I am going to my friend's flat (she of the married man affair fame... still to hear from him on whether he is going to give her up or leave his wife.... she has now been waiting almost 6 weeks!) and we are going to eat lots of yummy things and polish off a couple of bottles of champagne, pink to match the special day!

Wednesday 9 February 2011

Love?

I am lonely... I would really like to stop thinking about my ex and to move on and find someone else. I do like that I have time now to do my ironing and read as many books as I like but I would love to have someone who cared about me and wanted to have dinners together a few times a week. To be the automatic person that I would take with me to the theatre this weekend since I have managed to blag some free tickets, the person I would call when something wonderful happened and the person I fall asleep with at night.

Bridget Jones would be appalled in public but would secretly agree that having a man around is jolly nice. My flatmate has been around a lot recently as her chap has been away but he got back this weekend and since then she hasn't been here and I have been a little lonely. Tonight when she got in she had her bf with her and I have listened to them giggling through the wall ever since. I am really pleased she is happy and begrudge her nothing, it just makes me realise more and more that I would also like to have a boyfriend around.

There is a man I like so very much and would love to go on a date with... but he is one of my lecturers and has not shown any interest in me. We both regularly arrive early for our two lectures together a week and chat together before other people arrive. He is so lovely but I have no idea if he is even single, and even if he were I don't feel I can ask him out incase he felt it was inappropriate... Gosh I do adore him!

Monday 7 February 2011

A fool for love.

Recently I have  taken to thinking of my ex-boyfriend a good deal and about our relationship. I can't yet write that I forgive him or that I wouldn't care if I suddenly saw him again but I am a lot happier and calmer than when we were together latterly. I read a very interesting article in The Times about a study conducted over a few years whereby people kept diaries detailing their sex lives and how they felt about the amount, frequency, etc of it all. My sex life with Germanicus almost always left me wanting more...

I am now, some months further on, able to admit that he is a good person but he was never terrific in bed. Yes there were some good nights under the sheets but then we were together for years and so you would hope that there were some good nights. But mostly he was very boring in bed. I tried lots of different things to spice up our sex life: candles, incense, massage bars, different places, positions, sex books and so on and on and on and on. Those things did all help but mostly they would just help the first time or two and then he would revert back to his normal, and dreadfully boring, routine.

In The Times article there was one case in particular that hit me hard and that was of a lady in her fifties who was looking back on how her marriage first started out. She commented that when she and her husband were in the early years of their relationship they couldn't get enough of each other and had sex every opportunity they had... I would love to say that I have experience that with someone but the truth is I haven't and would like to. With Germanicus I certainly felt that way but sadly he wasn't keen on terribly frequent even in the very early days and certainly not later on either.

At the time I was forgiving and later as I thought we would be together for ever I was a little sad, but now I am anticipatory and excited as I hope to go out with someone who feels that way about me and who I feel that way about also. There are currently four chaps I rather like and so we shall see if anything is soon afoot, I do hope so! Valentines is only a week away but I have already planned a night of champagne with the friend who is still (almost 5 weeks!) waiting to hear from her married lover and lots of jolly anti-valentines chatting.

Friday 4 February 2011

Men and boys.

I adore book shopping in charity shops. One finds so many hidden treasures and not only are you helping a good cause but you can try out books you would not normally have bought because they are so very cheap. A good 2/3 of the time the books I buy in charity shops end up being given back but the whole experience sits very well with me and although not on a par with the excitement and joy I feel when browsing through a second hand book shop the delights of the charity shop are numerous.

Recently I found the relatively new Tony Parsons book 'Men from the Boys' in my local Oxfam and having read both the previous two books in the series about the rather hopeless Harry Silver I forked out my £2.99 and gave it a shot. I was disgustingly disappointed...

The first about Harry Silver was 'Man and Boy' and although I found it jolly irritating in places it was all centred around a splendid idea: that of a youngish married man who had a one-night stand and then faces divorce, and as his world crashes around him he is left for a while to bring up his son alone. A very interesting concept which was well handled and led to much speculation about the state of modern man in our culture of divorce as shown by Silver and paralleled against his father who had had a long and happy marriage and been more of the old fashioned able to change a tyre and put up a shelf sort of man.

The second book was 'Man and Wife' and didn't work as well as the first but was still rather interesting as it focused on Harry's second marriage and how that fit in with his relationship with his son, his step-daughter and his ex-wife. As I said it was not as good, but it did still work.

However, the third book 'Men from the Boys' is rubbish... it does not work at all. I always found Harry Silver a very irritating character but I could still feel empathy with him in the earlier books, but in this one Tony Parsons has made him into a parody of useless 20th century fatherhood and he fails at everything. The book is dreadfully boring and I only managed to finish it by skimming a good deal. Parsons has always struck me as the poor man's Nick Hornby but in this book he is totally bargin bucket.  Although I didn't think his other two Silver books were remotely high literature this one is dreadfully bad and I am rather appalled it was even published.

Men are most peculiar creatures and the appeal for me of the first two Silver books by Parsons was the idea of the struggle for manhood of some 20th century men. An acquaintance of mine clearly struggles with this for though he appears very camp indeed he is straight and at great pains for the world to know it. Last night at a wonderfully fun party (no action for me sadly) he admitted to me that the girlfriend he mentions from time to time was all a lie... I immediately thought he was going to come out of the closet to me but instead it turns out he is pretending to have a girlfriend because he has slept with one of my friends who then took to pestering him to sleep with her again or go out with her afterwards but he is interested in her best friend but thinks her too good for him and so the best way to avoid situations was to create a fake girlfriend... As I say men are strange creatures!