I first met Clare on the last day of the Easter term, 6th April 1977, and we spent, I think, just under three months dating - inconsequentially, with some degree of ambiguity on both sides - before we had one of our inevitable arguments, and she basically called it off (27th June 77).
I think the thing which really irritated her was that we had gone out with my fellow teachers for a night out, and, while Clare and I were kept in conversation by one of my colleagues, the others took the wheels off my car as a joke.
I don’t think I ever quite saw the funny side of that - it was dark, we had a long way to drive. They put the wheels back on, of course, afterwards - it was a joke. So we were able to drive away. But I thought it was unamusing, and Clare thought it was less than that. So she duly pulled up the anchor and zoomed off.
And then, on November the 5th, Clare rematerialised at the fireworks party at Sefton Park and showed interest in getting back together again. She’ll say now that she realised she’d made a mistake in being so brusque and dismissive. And very rapidly, we got together. And very rapidly, we clicked.
During the last months of 1977 she used to come round to my flat on the Croxteth road for weekly maths lessons. Yes, that's how romantic our dating was.
Naturally, Adam has composed a different take on this - after his Marquis de Sade period, he now appears to be channelling Michel Houellebecq: I can at least vouch that his illustrations seem to accord with my memories!
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are moderated. Keep it polite and no gratuitous links to your business website - we're not a billboard here.