Sex and Sexuality Volume 2- Women and Other Strange Creatures

I’ve deliberately chosen to look at my attraction to women second, because that’s how it happened. As I mentioned in my last piece, I barely spoke to a girl between the ages of 11 and 18 except for cousins, and them not very often- I went from a mixed primary school to an all-boys private school and so didn’t speak to a member of the opposite sex until at the age of about 16, I had a minor part in a school play which was put on jointly with the neighbouring girls’ school. We mixed in rehearsals and I was completely and utterly lost. There were these strange beings I knew nothing about, who looked pretty much like us boys but different in strategic locations, and talked about completely different things. I should add that I was completely self-conscious at this point- all my clothes bought by my parents and no concept of spending any time on my appearance, so I was shy, scruffy and spotty. And therefore ran a mile from any attempt at conversation- for some reason I also shunned pop music after the age of about 12 so didn’t really have any obvious topics of conversation anyway. I just sat at the back of the classroom we used as a green room listening to an audio copy of ‘Inferno’.

The situation repeated itself a couple of years later when I was cast in a similarly minor role- the play was in French, but as the role was non-speaking it made next to no difference. And then I was sent on a residential course for a week to a place in Oxfordshire which did seminar-type weeks for sixth form students, to prepare them for university. From start to finish it was a revelation: coming from a school which kept uniform right up to the end of upper sixth, it was amazing to meet people my own age who had the freedom to express themselves in their appearance with dyed hair, fashionable clothes and so on. I fell in love about half a dozen times over- firstly with a girl from Jersey who was so classy I was lucky when she even acknowledged my existence, then with Lucy from Hereford. This was perhaps my first and only teenage crush. She did all the things you expect a bright sixth-form girl to do- went to concerts, drove to school and home again, supported Amnesty International and nurtured strong political opinions. She definitely changed my life- I remember furtively listening to one of her music recommendations, a Suzanne Vega tape, in my bedroom because as far as my folks were concerned, they had a son who wasn’t interested in that kind of music. I read Margaret Atwood because of her, and I’ve continued reading her books since. We wrote to each other for about six months afterwards, but eventually reached the stage where we couldn’t be friends any more- she had a boyfriend in Hereford and I was trying to get too close.

And so I went to university, looking for a nice well-spoken middle-class Southern girl to take me away from it all. As a Northern boy from a terraced house in the rough end of Birkenhead, I was desperate not to have to live the same kind of life as my parents, but what I didn’t realise was that I’d brought all that down to Bristol with me in my baggage. In general, the girls I fell for at Bristol were better-off, classier and just more at ease with themselves. I’m thinking particularly of one whose dad was so rich he’d bought a big house (we’re talking £100,000 in 1991 here) for her and her friends to live in- after one lecture we were walking back to our respective homes and I remember being desperate to make conversation with her but knowing I wasn’t good enough, funny enough or rich enough for her world. I would have been ashamed to take her back to my mum and dad’s three-bedroom terrace. During my three years, I asked a total of three girls out- one turned me down flat and is now married, one I went out with twice and then there was a misunderstanding as to whether we were going out or not, which ended with her striking up a relationship with somebody from her course (the same course and year as TV’s Vets in Practice) and one didn’t want any emotional commitments as her father had just been paralysed from the neck down in a car crash. In my last year I probably loosened up and certainly started to get on better with people, but I also had one of the defining experiences of my love life so far.

Fern was absolutely gorgeous- blonde, lithe, slender-waisted and coyly flirtatious. She was also a man-eater with no time for an inexperienced nothing like me. I met her through my friend Lucy, who had the room next to her in halls and then shared a house with her. Her room had a coloured cut-out dinosaur on the door and I remember on first meeting her that I thought she was an airhead. Six months later we met again on a night out at a restaurant-cum-disco in Bristol. We danced to ‘Dizzy’ by Vic Reeves, she pinched my bottom and I was in love. The day after I went to watch Bristol City, my ears still ringing from the noise in the disco, and I couldn’t get her out of my head. I tried getting closer, but eventually she pushed me away- she was seeing somebody. The next day I was supposed to have tea with Lucy and I practically had a breakdown at Lucy’s dinner table- she was acting as if it had never happened and revelling in her latest date and I couldn’t cope. From there things would get worse and worse- if we were at the same party I’d be sick with nerves and in the end she said something to me which was so catty I can’t repeat it even now. We saw each other once again, a week or so before I graduated, and for some bizarre reason she was confident that there’d be somebody for me at Canterbury when I went to do my MA.

There wasn’t, and by this stage I was into evangelical Christianity and finding The Right Girl. This went disastrously wrong within a couple of weeks when my attentions really upset somebody, and never really improved. My diaries of the time are full of references to one girl or another, but by the time I had enough confidence to ring somebody up and ask them out, I’d finished my course and was unemployed so yet again had more reason to doubt that anybody would want to go out with me. Then came teacher training and a cute Irish girl who took a shine to me- and more significantly, the fact that I ran from her, I think because I couldn’t handle the fact that anybody could fancy me. Since then, I’ve been living mostly alone and for some reason just don’t have the trigger to spur me on to get to know somebody in that way. I think it’s clear that I tend to idolise the women I fall for, so by definition I’m not good enough for them. What’s worth noticing, however, is the fact that my feelings for women tend to be of a different kind or order. I think I’m looking for something different with a woman- a lifestyle as much as a relationship, evenings spent going to concerts or the theatre and weekends at Ikea. Arm candy? Quite possibly- judge for yourself. I’m going to think up some conclusions for Volume 3.

26th January 2004