Gentleman

I was picking up a prescription from the chemist this morning when a man that i recognised came in. A man in his seventies held the door for the other man who is possibly a similar age.
"You're a gentleman sir! There's not many of us left," said the man whom i recognised.
I know the man because he lived near our old house. The house was on a really steep hill. i would see him regularly pushing his wife, who was in a wheelchair. He pushed her valiantly, in all weathers, up or down the hill, on whatever errand they were running.
One day i was on the street battling to cut the huge hedge at the front of the house. I made way for them to come past, and he found time to empathise with my hedge battle, saying, "It's the growing season isn't it love?"
i still see him around the area where my doctors surgery is. He is no longer pushing his wife.
I wanted to speak to him in the chemist. I paused as i was going to the door, but i couldn't think of what to say. He doesn't know who i am, i couldn't ask after his wife because i knew what the answer would be. What if i cry?
This simple thing, i couldn't do it, just make a bit of polite conversation with a man who indeed was a true gentleman.
I waited to hear his name as he asked for his prescription, and then i left.

Presence/Absence

If i'm not writing on my blog for a period of time, it might be because i've met someone. There's a break between May 13th and September 25th last year because this guy contacted me through Facebook.
We messaged for a while but he asked me if i wanted to go out fairly swiftly. His personal circumstances at the time are way too complicated to relate here. So i won't.
Anyway we went out. I cried after our first date because he was so much more fragile in real life than he had seemed through the old social networking. I still decided to see him again however, and what followed was pretty intense from that moment. We maybe saw each other once a week, but spoke on the phone almost every day, had phone sex, text sex and sent videos and messages for each other on FB.
I just can't tell you the whole story but about three months later (three- it's the magic number) we fell out.
Within a matter of hours after the disaster that precipitated the end, he had removed all pictures of me from his Facebook account. He had wiped me out. It was such a weird feeling. Really painful and really harsh.
On having the post-fall-out 'what are we going to do now then?' connversation he agreed that was a little extreme. Further talks ensued along the lines of the 'maybe we could sort this out at some time in the future' variety. He'd left me a couple of dunken nasty messages that i had forgiven him for. Then a similar message appeared on his status update, for all our mutual friends to read. So i took him off my friend list and vowed never to conduct a relationship through Facebook again.

Happy Valentine

This is fucking hilarious.
I just Googled this guy, thinking that i really wanted to tell you his name, but i'd just better check that he's not a famous photographer first.
Okay, he's not famous, but his website came up straight away.

So, i'll tell you the story anyway.
A small group of us took a selection of our degree show photographs to Germany. We showed our work in a disused chocolate factory that was being used as studios by a group of young artists. We even slept there.
The review in the paper said "There are no people in the photographs of Nina Chadwick."
On the exhibition preview night this huge German guy came to talk to me. I mean, he seemed like a giant to me at the time (i was 23 and a very average 5'5"). He also had the deepest voice i had ever heard in my life. I mean, it was one of those voices that rumbled through you at a somewhat disturbing bass level. I can't remember what we talked about, but he asked me for my phone number and i gave him it, probably because i was too embarrassed to say no.

Once we were back home, i forgot all about it. Until he rang me.
I was living back at my mums. I was mortified when she hands the phone over to me and says, "It's Valentin for you."
This is actually a bit of a shit story because i can't really remember the conversation in enough detail. I'm pretty sure he asked me if he could come over to England. What? In my mums house? That's not sophisticated enough for a trans-Europe affair. I must have put him off somehow. I can't remember if he called again. I was going to live in Manchester in a few weeks anyway......