Dedicated to my wonderful bro, Herebe who keeps threatening to write this himself. He should – it would be funnier (and save me time)

The story so far… You could go back and read it. After all if I’d intended Part 1 to be a three line paragraph I would have written it in three lines to start with. What’s the point of me ruining my liver writing for you ingrates if you can’t even bothered to join in at the beginning? You’ve missed all the jokes; the story about climbing out of LA County hospital in order to escape the bill for a major operation, several cast iron, guaranteed-or-your- money-back ways of causing severe mental and physical trauma to any member of a shitty band, the polemic against female rock musicians and an impassioned tutorial on how to achieve your dream, but hey, your loss. However, for those of you whose short term memory’s shot (obviously not Herebe or his readers as they’re so disgustingly healthy and sportive it makes you want to skin up), the story so far goes something like this. F went to LA, made it 2 hours from his death, got signed to a major label, was scheduled to tour Europe, decided to come back to France a bit early to see his folks but was spending a couple of days in Paris with V first (don’t ask, it would get way complicated were I to even try to explain who V is) and was attempting to Europeanize himself by wandering round Paris on his own. Got that. OK. So, right now he’s standing in the Pigalle area of Paris, it’s early evening in late summer and he’s just spotted the love of his life.

Let’s leave him there for a moment. He’s got a (almost) full pack of Marlboro in the inside pocket of his navy blue pea coat (with the buttons fastened on with safety pins from the inside), a working lighter (this is in the days before he met me, ace lighter stealer of the Western Hemisphere – PB 15 lighters in one handbag) and he’s flashing her one his darkly intense soul-searching looks. I know he’s doing that because that’s the sort of look he gave me the first time we met and I know enough about men to know that, like their underwear, there are some things they don’t change. He’ll be fine for a while. In fact, if I could freeze time I’d leave him there. This is as good as it’s going to get. Not because I (with the gift of foresight) know that this particular story will have an unhappy ending and want to spare him pain (I’m not that nice). But because (in the words of Cocteau) if “the best moment in love is walking up the stairs”, then you might as well make sure that the staircase you’re walking up is very long indeed.

Obviously it would be a Frenchman who nailed love. As a nation, they’re obsessed with it (and nutella –whether one leads to the other I’ll leave to someone less body dismorphic than I to discover) But he got it down. Walking up the stairs. That’s the bit, the only bit that you remember. Not the smiley happy picnics in the sun bit, nor even the long bone crushing heartbreak when it all turns to ratshit. But those stolen, street lit seconds. The walking up the stairs moment remains in your head, as sharp and clear and cold as if it were carved in ice, long after the memory of who was walking behind you has faded and blurred. Maybe that’s the most perfect bit. The intense, anticipatory weight before it all begins, when time stops and you are faced with a series of infinite possibilities. Before the mundane, everydayness of it all intrudes. Before you realize that their feet are not only made of clay but are pretty pongy to boot.

Of course I’m probably the wrongest person to be discussing this great love of F anyway. Not because I’m his girlfriend – after all who better to discuss his amorous adventures than his last romance (man you gotta hand it to me, I’ve got bigger balls than John Holmes, I don’t just tempt fate, I stand there with a target) but because I just don’t get love.

Never have, never will. It’s a mystery to me… (the game commences and all that jazz) I know that it’s supposed to be. I know that this is the wonder of, the thunder of, the blunder of and all crap. I know that when it comes to love, our heads are in spins, our hearts on strings and our arms in slings (no, really, it did happen although it was broken jaw and I did warn him not to laugh or I’d whack him and he did laugh at precisely the wrongest time to laugh so honour demanded that I carried through with a right hook – possibly the most perfect right hook I’ve ever slung - but not only does jaw not rhyme, it’s a whole other blog). Yet, despite (or maybe, because of) being so crap at love, I’m fascinated by it. It’s like a gyroscope, so many patterns from so few colours.

It’s not that I’m incapable of feeling things deeply, just that I’m highly unlikely to show it. From an early age, wearing my heart on my sleeve never appealed. This might have been because I have a horror of kitsch accessories but mostly I think that it’s because while other girls were counting their eggs before they hit puberty, I wanted to be an assassin. Or a pirate. Or both. (Still do). I never saw the point of all that self-inflicted emotional upheaval that girls seem to view as being a necessary part of growing up - all those giggly gazes from the furthest edge of the playing field while the witless (in so many ways) object of their pent up sexual frustration played football. Forget the definitions of tuppence ha’penny psychiatrists; it’s not gender stereotyping or the honing of nuturing skills necessary to a females emotional development. It’s nothing more than a complete and utter waste of fucking time with the added insult of boring the pants off anyone stupid enough to listen to them.

You’d think it would stop once they got older. But it doesn’t. No sooner have they collected their diplomas in hopeless crushes than they enroll for a MA in obsession. It’s as if they need the white noise to fill up their brains and stop thoughts creeping in. Maybe it’s some perverted desire to validate their emotional existence. Perhaps it goes along the lines of “I will listen to you while you give me the gory details of the “…and then he said…so I said…and she said…why doesn’t he like me…I’d be so good for him…then he did…so I did…and she did…will he call…won’t he call…his mobiles switched off…he called, he came, he left me” saga, and I’ll discuss it with you like it means something and when you’re done, or at least have exhausted every single significance you can put into the fact that he wore a blue shirt which was almost exactly the same as the one that he wore the first time you decided you wanted to obsess about him, you’ll do exactly the same for me because that’s what women do. We support each other.

I never got that. Still don’t get it and like an issue of Grazia- I won’t ever get it. As far as I’m concerned, climbing out of the abyss of emotional confusion is not a team event and even if it were, I’m far too busy clinging on with my fingernails to offer a helping hand to anyone.

Love to me was always really simple. It was never that I was one of the pretty blondes at school - you know the sort – called Andrea or Michelle with a proper hairstyle that a hairdresser had done and not your mum with the kitchen scissors when you couldn’t see out of your fringe and an outfit that looked like it came straight out of a Gratton catalogue and all the boys chasing them. It was just that I had a theory. I was never sure whether or not it was right but, like Stephen Hawkins it was the only theory I had, so I decided to stick with it in the absence of any proof to the contrary. Of course (like Hawkins) I reserved the right to call it all ratshit if I got a better idea but since none came along I stuck with what I’d thought up. It was an extremely simple theory, based on books and observations and a gut feeling and it went something like this…

I believe in true love. I believe in that first glance when lives click together like magnets. When you know, with the nearest thing to complete certainty that your ever going to get in this life, that this is the person you’re going to spend the rest of you days with. I’d say that this is the closest thing to divinity we paltry mortals ever experience. I believe in for better for worse, for richer, for poorer, forsaking all others, in sickness and in health because I believe that love grows from the bad times and not from the good. I believe that you stick it out and when the going gets tough you pull a little harder, you don’t pull apart. Whether you do it in a church, a registry office, on a beach or in the privacy of your own head, I believe in making a commitment to someone. It’s a silent strength. You don’t need to talk about it. You don’t need to examine your emotions to check if it’s the real thing. You don’t need to do anything. When it’s right the universe realigns itself to make it happen. I knew that then and I know it now. Not just because I live it. But because I’ve watched other people, people who are better, truer, stronger than I could ever hope to be live it and live through hell because of it and deal with all the shit, actual, emotional and mental and still come out strong at the end of it all.

I believe in the whole shebang. I also believe that she can bang whomsoever she damn well pleases until she meets Mr. Right. (This is where most women and I part company) I’ve got no problem with no-strings sex between consenting adults so long as you lay your cards on the table before you leave your knickers on the floor. There’s nothing wrong with a booty call – it’s cheaper and less fattening than a pizza. And, although I maligned the obsessive behaviour of women I don’t even have a problem with an obsessive infatuation. There’s nothing wrong with obsession. You can’t beat that sweaty palmed, stomach churning, blindingly incapable of concentrating on anything else, searching for synchronicities that will justify your emotion sort of high that’s a lot like speeding your nuts off. It’s wonderful. I recommend that everyone try it at least once in their life– even if just as a slimming aid. But it ain’t love, it shouldn’t be confused with it and it doesn’t warrant the emotional bulimia that the majority of women seem to suffer from, this binging and purging on the crumbs of a ‘he said, she said, I fancy him so much…’ saga in which only the names are changed to denote the passing of time. I don’t get that, I’ve never got it and I don’t want to get it. It’s just self-indulgent. For Christssake if you fancy him that much, fuck him already and then shut up. It’ll either be the start of a beautiful relationship or you’ll get him out of your system or it’ll all end in tears but at least you won’t have wasted time.

You can’t say that of course, well actually, you can say it but they either think that you’re joking, or they thing you’re a slag, or you risk getting the whole whining ‘but if I do that then he won’t answer my calls’ routine. Too bloody right. If someone called me five times a day for the week after I’d shagged them I’d think they were a psycho and ignore them too. God help you if you do it. Educated, uneducated, intelligent or as thick as pig shit, if they’ve got ovaries then they’ll be twirling those double standards like they’re at a majorette’s convention. Whether they admit to it or not, most women behave like crabs in a bucket. No woman is allowed to climb out of the sticky morass of female morality, if she does then she’s tried and executed, not by some patriarchal society, but by her own sex. If you disagree with that statement, take a moment to examine your attitude to Jordan or Pamela Anderson or any woman who defies the code. Look beyond the preprogrammed feminist definitions of your disapproval, you know, the ones that goes along the lines of them suffering from low self esteem or being exploited, cos there’s only one sex they’re exploiting and it ain’t the fairer one. Got past it? Good. Now glance behind you and wave to the ol’ green eyed monster.

I’m sure that part of my attitude stems from the fact that I’m from Newcastle. It’s a strange place – possibly the only town in the world where if a man goes out with the intention of meeting girls, his mates call him a poof. Anthropologists would have a field day there – mating rituals are still of the head clubbing hair, pulling variety except that evolution didn’t so much occur as invert and so now the head clubbing, hair dragging behavior is carried out by the girls. It’s kind of feminism in action. Rather than sitting round in a circle discussing the fact that “that bastard” doesn’t answer her calls, a Newcastle lass (and we’re all lasses, until we get married and then we become ‘wor lass’) will put on her face, her heels and hide a half bottle of Vlad in her pump action hairspray container (or the false lining of her handbag - if you unpick the lining behind the zipped purse then a flat bottle usually tucks in no problem) and get out there and in full view of all his mates hold an intelligent and mature conversation with him that goes something like this.

Newcastle lass – “ye divent anser me calls ye fooking bastard. Is yer mobile fooked? Or are ye avoiding is?” Newcastle man “Weel pet…” Newcastle lass (starting to get a rhythm going) “divent ye weel pet me ya twat – ahm not lissening te yer crap. When ah fooking phone ye, ye fooking anser is back, reet. If ye divent then ah’ll rip off what’s left of yer nuts and that winnit tek ‘is much cos they’re nah greet baalls of fire, an feed them to wor Sheba” (all dogs in Newcastle are called Sheba unless they’re called Prince – no I don’t know why either) “Now get yer lazy arse back to the hoose ye pathetic lump of shite, the bairns need a babbysitter and I’m oot with me mam, yer mam, Auntie Sheila (all aunts in Newcastle are called Auntie Sheila unless they’re called Auntie Pat) and me mates… “

And so it goes - or at least so go the men (quietly…very, very quietly).

One of the reasons that I don’t really have that much time for feminism is that working class women have never really needed it. The right to work was never refused them, in fact it was demanded that most of them went into service at 14 and supported their families. They may not have had the option to become doctors or lawyers but then neither did most working class men who had to leave school at 14 to go down the pit or into the factory. In any case the rich did what they wanted to anyway. It was only the middle classes who wanted emancipation – they had the time on their hands to think about it and even they wouldn’t have got far without their maid or tweeny to set the fires, do the shopping and dust the aspidistras. I know that I’m simplifying the argument somewhat, but if there’s a whole class of people being oppressed I’m not going to single out the woman as martyrs. From my working class roots, listening to the stories of my great grandma I learnt a girl doesn’t need to fill her head with a host of hypotheses when she’s known from birth that men are not scared of women with brains but a woman wielding a rolling pin (or my great-grandma’s particular weapon of choice – a clothes line doubled and then doubled again) usually gets what she wants.

Any Geordie girl sees equality as a step down. It doesn’t stop the mindlessly tedious female conversations but there’s usually one person there who’ll tell them to “get your Shaun to gie the fucker a swift kick up the arse, now shut yer whinging an get that doon ya”. It doesn’t stop them being as judgmental as the rest of womankind but there is a subtle difference (well actually not that subtle as Newcastle women tend to think subtlety is something to do with letting out your council house). They don’t tend to apply these unwritten laws to themselves, or their friends (or anyone they might meet in the toilets or the queue for the nightclub or on the bus on the way to the town or that they just like the look of) although they will apply them with alacrity to anyone they think is looking down on them. In the nightclubs of Newcastle a woman is usually only catergorised as a slag if she gets off with the man you want – not like London where everything is so bloody meaningful and grownup. As all Geordie women have an ego the size of a small planet (especially if they are the size of a small planet) they’re also not usually as down on attractive women as the rest of us because they don’t think that other women are attractive. Once they discovered that the cap wasn’t something you used when you walked the whippets in the rain but could be got free from the NHS they didn’t have time for all that languishing “he loves me, he loves me not” petal plucking pensiveness and became free spirits. Usually the spirit comes out of a bottle marked 80% proof (which means that when the fairy tale romance turns to ratshit you can always blame it on the djinn) but let me not to the marriage of bacardi and coke admit impediment. So what if Aphrodite’s temple is now a gin palace? Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker and 80% is not only more proof than we’re given for the existence of God; and religions are pretty damn vehement that He exists, (sorry about the capitals but I am an otherwise unapologetic Catholic – if slightly lapsed) but also better odds than on any other decision we make in life. Ah Newcastle, Newcastle, where despite the fact they can’t spell it – matriarchy has been alive and well and kicking ass since before Hadrian built his wall (“fucking pathetic job that waz as weel like, ‘e didn’t even build it straight – should have got wor Darren te de it – ye should have seen is patio – its dead good an they’ve put decking on it as weel – like that Alan Titchmarsh on the telly”) Yes, Newcastle, Newcastle, so good I had to leave… still I’d love to see Wolf or Dworkin go a round with any girl from the Bigg Market on a Saturday night. That would be one hell of a feminist debate.

Anyway, before I left, I learnt one valuable lesson which was this. The best way to chat up a guy was to take a deep breathe, walk up to them and say… (listen girls this will show you how to get any man you ever wanted)… hello. Now I know this doesn’t seem too much of a trick but then you follow it up with this…”do you have the right date please” Believe me, it doesn’t fail. If they’re thick (but fit) then by the time they’ve worked it out then you have them hooked. If they’re clever (but gorgeous – a rare combination but it does exist) then they’ll appreciate the way in which you gave a chat-up line a post modern twist and you’ll be discussing Derrida before you know it. In any case, by the time they’ve worked it out you have them hooked. If on the off chance they do know straight away, then asking them why it was significant means that by the time they’d come up with a reason you accepted you have them exactly where you wanted them to be. On the other hand if they’d just flown in from the west coast then it may take them longer to work out but that’s ok because they a. have a Californian accent which a. makes even inanities sound good (although for sheer dreamy sexiness try the accent of a Frenchman who lived on the West Coast for 10 years - believe me, I’ve seen women in my office hot flush through 3 HRT patches just transferring the call) and b. jet lag works even quicker than Rohypnol.

Now all this may not seem to have much to do with F. But it does. For two reasons; firstly he was faced with the dilemma which affects every (sober) man confronted with the object of his desire. How to approach it. (I’m being deliberately none gender specific here although really I have no idea how men chat each other up and one drunken snog in the Newcastle Mayfair does not make me an expert on same sex relationships).

Loads has been written about the psychological impetus behind our choice of partner and it’s all crap. Wilde quite rightly pointed out that we choose our partners in a light that we wouldn’t use to pick out an overcoat (although judging from the sartorial choices of most of the population I’m not convinced too much care is taken over our overcoats either) Jong in her seminal (no pun intended) Fear of Flying suggested that woman go for men who grab their ass rather than their intellect. That does get results, but it’s a whole other post (and no he wasn’t the one who’s jaw I broke).

So there is problem of how to approach the object of your desire. Cautiously doesn’t cut it unless your fetish is role reversal. Drugging them’s illegal, and the old  fashioned method of clubbing a woman over the head and dragging her off to your cave isn’t practical now. This is not because woman don’t appreciate direct action, its just that  woman now spend so long straightening their hair, (unless of course it’s straight to begin with in which case its 3 hours with the heated rollers and a ton of hairspray and it still goes fucking frizzy), that they really wouldn’t thank you for putting a kink in it. All that’s left is the old fashioned, tried and tested method of the chat up line.

I’ll let you into a secret. There is only one chat up line in the history of man that stands a cats chance in hell of  working and even that would only work for one person In point of this fact, heed well the following sentence. Chat up lines don’t work. Now I know that many of you will disagree with me. You’ll cite the immortal line that made her knees go weak, her stomach turn somersaults, her brain turn to jelly and the blossoming of the rose of romance unfold before your eyes. Bullshit. Woman will kill me for revealing this; but the truth is that before you uttered a word we had already sized you up, worked out whether you were a suitable genetic mix, estimated your income, checked out your ass and your friends (and you can take the grammer of that as you find it) and remembered whether or not we had our best knickers on (and if we didn’t then you stood no chance) and we did it all without even realizing it. There are no conscious decisions there. (Well not unless you’re a certain sort of American woman nearing 35 – the type of which if Sauron had instead of the black riders would have had the ring snatched from Frodo before he’d crossed the threshold of Bag End). Now you may think that I’m being bitter and cynical. You’d be right. Just call me Angostura. Mostly my loathing for corny one-liners loaded with knicker removing intent is the fact that they’ve never been directed at me.

Being an eternal optimist I did harbour a secret desire that one day I’d be the chatted rather than the chatter. It never happened. Partly because the one liners with knicker removing intent were so bad that they almost induced a state of eternal celibacy especially after the one time that I did allow someone to chat me up, the guy turned out to be a psychopath (Of course I only found that out after I’d lived with him for nearly 3 years but that’s not the point) but mostly because the one chat up line that may possibly have piqued my curiosity wasn’t directed at me.

The phrase; “”hey chick, is this guy boring you - why don’t you talk to me instead, I’m from another planet” ranks alongside Descartes “I think because I am” as a perfectly encapsulated insight into the human psyche. Leaving aside a small girls unhealthy fascination with a two headed four armed man (a fascination I only really understood when I was older) it has it all. Enough Chutzpah to repopulate the lost tribes, the promise of excitement in far flung lands and a healthy does of Alpha male to boot. There’s only one snag with this chat up line and that’s the fact that anyone actually using it is revealed as the sort of person who quotes from sci-fi programmes. .

It does make my point though. How we approach a member of the opposite sex is due in part to our cultural values. What works on Betelgeuse won’t necessarily work on earth. What works in Newcastle won’t work in London (you had to pretend to be interested in their minds) and what works in America (being all foreign and mysterious) won’t work on the street of Paris. With love you can’t judge. You can’t justify and you can’t explain. Which is why, despite the fact that F knew that she was the one, as soon as he’d stubbed out his cigarette he walked straight past the object of all his earthly (and a few heavenly) desires and approached her owner.

“How much?” he said gesturing his head to where she stood.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 3rd, 2005 at 3:07 pm and is filed under While My Guitarist Gently Weeps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.