The Blast from the Past

On New Year’s Eve 2008, I met up with a man from my past who had got in touch via FaceBook earlier in the year. I was on my way to see Ruf and stopped off at a service station for coffee. It was the most bizarre reconnection and totally unsettled me for the next few days.

The Blast is probably the most romantic man that I know. The closest thing to that knight on the white charger that I’ve always looked for. And yet he always seems to turn up at the wrong time.

He is the first boyfriend that I actually remember with clarity. His name, his face and small snippets of interaction. A tiny piece of my childhood memory from those halcyon days when I wore long hair and short skirts and skipped about in the sunshine playing kisschase in the cornfields. A time when there was a nudist camp in the woods behind our primary school and a weirdo who, word had it, had exposed himself through the fence. A distant image of warmth and belonging and safety.

It all ended when we went off to senior school and different classes and then he moved away very suddenly.

Five years later, he and his brother turned up on my doorstep, although we now lived in a different town. He had found us through the telephone directory and they had ridden the 80-odd miles from their home on their new mopeds for the day, just on the off-chance that Little Sis and I might be in and we all spent the day together.

I was dating someone else. I can’t remember why we didn’t stay in touch, although he says he has letters and I certainly have a photograph of him looking particularly dashing on a larger proper motorbike, wearing unforgettable cowboy boots.

Three decades on, he contacted me via Facebook and we got talking again. He’s one of those people that you feel as if he’s never been away, even though there was lots of catching up to do.

He reminded me of carving our initials into a tree – a demonstration of romantic attachment that I thought was just one of my fantasies, but now proves to have its foundation in the action of this latterday romantic.

If you had asked me ten years ago about ‘my type’, he fits that bill absolutely. Tall, dark and slim with a romantic soul.

And yet, other than my husband, my type to successfully get naked with has proved rather different. Still dark, but shorter, stocky, earthy, hairy men with the hint of animal about them – these have provided the most memorable sexual encounters.

However, in its most recent incarnation, this has also included the softest, most romantic side that contrasts so keenly with the beast that can so easily be released.

The existence of Ruf is the only reason that I have not jumped immediately into bed with the Blast and, as a result, we have rebuilt the most amazing friendship.

But it doesn’t mean that, occasionally, I don’t wonder… what if…?