how to stop being obsessed with a crush?

Here's your weekly update.
The only page in my blog that ever gets any pageviews is my very brief and disparaging review of that french film intouchables. Perhaps I should do more film reviews in that case?
So the other week i wrote shitloads of letters and got no replies from family or friends. Lazy lazy people I say. I'm trying to avoid resorting to facebook for superficial contact with my dear humans, but it seems that there's no other option since everyone is rejecting the old fashioned methods as a viable form of communication.

Sorry for rambling, I'm hysterically tired.
So I had a brief depression the other week, perhaps prompted by receiving no attention in my mailbox... only kidding... Saturday and Sunday forced me out of it though. But I'll tell you about that later. Today is Sunday, and after having had a nice stroll around the town with Marta I'm now sat on my red comfy beanbag in my room listening to a youtube playist I've made of songs that i've recently discovered or liked for a while.

So I think I'm going to talk about the roots and solution to my depression, as well as throwing in any news I have that people have given me. I might have to dash off in a bit because the Emili whom i spoke so highly of in one of my previous posts, is going to talk to me on skype after she's finished eating. I like the thought of her doing totally ordinary things, like eating.

Well, I think the roots of my problem is probably a crippling insecurity, which developed for various reasons- although I always think that victims of abuse and bullying allow themselves to become victims by taking on a victim mentality. But how to be assertive without being forcing your will onto others and becoming hateful and domineering?
I have realised that my behaviour is really doing me no good. By which I mean my tendency to jump directly from one relationship to another, which seems to have been the pattern recently- at least for the past couple of years- and before that I think i behaved too outrageously for anyone to even want to have a relationship with me.
It's clear to me that I use sex to make myself feel better about myself- to feel desirable and wanted, and just for a general kick- to shake up the everyday pattern of things.
And yet, women can never be so casual about these things as men are- it's perfectly understandable that after having spent a night of intimacy with someone- perhaps delicate conversation and sharing of feelings as well as delicious physical delights- that we should want this to continue. It makes no sense if after those sweet and tender beginnings your messages go unanswered and he doesn't invite you to further the friendship and develop the closeness that you thought you'd forged.
And yet, it's completely naieve and stupid to think that he would. The lesson from this is not to have casual encounters with anyone that you're actually fussed about.
Of course, I'm talking about a specific experience but trying to cloak it in anonymity.
I really don't take rejection so well, and I am prone to outrageous obsessions. Here I am starting to accredit this boy lots of character traits and values that he probably doesn't really have. I even fucking DREAMED about him. And i started to google things like "how to stop being obsessed with a crush" in the middle of the night.
Of course, I need to calm the fuck down and take a calm and measured look at the situation from a distance. There's no need to feel like I'm crap cos he doesn't want me. He probably doesn't want any girlfriend- and if he did want one, he could do a lot worse than me. So, we shared a sweet moment and that's all it was. I need to bury the natural feelings of rejection and humiliation which threaten to strangle me, and accept that what I thought was the beginnings of an exciting adventure was infact a mistaken dead-end wrong-turn.
The last thing I want to be doing now, if losing my dignity is my greatest fear, is be sending him pointless messages and begging for another rendez-vous. I shall return the book he allowed me to borrow, and not offer myself to him again. Two can play at being aloof.
(this is someone English by the way, since I really haven't managed to find anything resembling love or romance over here. I had broken up with the ex-boyfriend a couple of days before, and after having got each others numbers at at the pub, I accepted his invitation to go to his house a couple of days later. I was full of nervous anticipation and excitement before I went round, like a teenager with a crush, fantasising about him and the delights to come while sat in the dark cinema.
I have always liked this boy, and every time we crossed in the street by chance, felt a strange complicity with him and an almost painful stab of attraction, like Juliette when she foresees that her romance with Romeo will only lead to death and doom. I knew from the look in his eyes that he felt the same, and in such a relatively small city as mine and with us having acquaintances in common, knew that eventually we would end up seeing this attraction through to it's logical conclusion.
I'm not sure what he thinks of me. Probably doesn't preoccupy his mind as much as he has been preoccupying mine. He told me he feels "overwhelmingly depressed" and also told me that i should be warned he is a "directionless loser". But, naturally, this just endears me to him more- since he is so sweet and attractive and sarcastically aggressively shy.
Besides which, when at his house, we drank lambrini out of wine glasses and talked about our feelings, what we believe, our lives up til now, and a whole host of general topics. It would have been better not to allow him to start kissing me, but my willpower is so weak, and it's hard not to do something that you actually do really want to do.
So- in order to get a love which is genuine, or rather, in order to trick boys into falling in love with me, I'm attempting a year of celibacy. You can come and suck on my soul cos my body is out of bounds. I really should be doing this for myself, not for any gainful ends. Because, the way I treat myself is really no good for my self esteem. It's as though I think i'm good enough to be used, but not good enough to be loved, and thus behave accordingly.
What do you think of my experiment? How long do you think it will last for? If this boy- who we shall have to give a psydemym (how the fuck do you spell that word?) let's call him Kev, since that's his actual real name, well, if he asks me to hang out, what should I say? Would I be letting a good opportunity pass? If he doesn't call me I know I shall be upset. But I won't have my holidays and my precious days back home ruined by my mental obsessions.
I should probably see a shrink about them or something- giving another person so much importance and value in your life that they don't merit- perhaps this is caused by thinking you yourself are not worth very much. I don't think I need a shrink cos I can psychoanalyse myself with my pop-psychology.

Advice to my dilemmas in the comments section below. I know no one will, but might as well ask.

ode to Emili / Rumination on friendship

Good evening- for the first time in a while i felt the need for indulgent self expression and sharing. Couldn't sleep so got up and switched on the laptop. After a whirling few days of hopeless blues and directionless depression, finally seem to have hopped right out of my lethargy and confusion and onto the road of purpose and excited questioning.
Had a good skype session with my little best uni friend after not having spoke to her for ages.
She is currently doing night shifts in the library, hiding her confused little frowny face behind piles of philosophy books and alternating between drawn out periods of hesitation and inertia one minute to scurrying outpoarings of spontaneous ideas the next. Or so i like to imagine. It is nice when you feel that you know someone so well that you can picture how they would react and behave under certain conditions.
 I often find myself captivated by mannerisms and expressions that are particular to an individual and find myself unconsciously copying them. When I am pretending to be Emily, I tend to put a certain amount of absurd focus into what I am doing, say, making a cup of tea, but with an equal balance of carelessness, but as though the very carelessness were part of the ritual, perhaps flinging the teabag away with a practised disdain. We often used to throw them out of the window when we lived in halls. Her room overlooked a secluded little overgrown garden, and there must have been a veritable compost heap underneath her first floor window by the time we moved out- although i like to imagine little birds coming and feeding as an extension of the ritual- nourishing themselves during the harsh north east winter from the litter of indian leaf cigarette butts and camomile teabags, chirpily accepting their little offering.
I really feel that we are both as chaotic as the other, but help each other to bring a certain equilibrium to one another's lives. And that even though we are apart, physical distance and even time makes little difference to the hum of connection, like a radio station tuned in, be it from the other side of the world or from the next room- although that is not to say that I don't feel the occasional sickening nausea brought on by living in this state of being without. Perhaps it is just a normal friendship? There are many anecdotes I could recount, but they are just tales of ordinary things. I think when someone reveals dulldrum everyday life to have a hidden almost spiritual dimension, then that is something particular. But really, it is just yourself who is creating this magic and these changes, only perhaps sometimes we need another person to act as a trigger. Lonesomeness is far overrated.

formula for success/ being an outsider

I'm cheating again. I'm typing up an abridged version of a letter I wrote before i put it in the post box. It's an interesting one though cos it's to a friend that i can't help being pretty much completely honest with (Can one be completely honest- even with oneself, since the human psyche has a tendency to squirrel things away into your subconscious in order to protect you?)

Hey M,

I really appreciate your letter and I don't mind that it's in various parts cos that way I get a broader view of what you've been up to and your changeable moods!

I know how you feel when you say you start thinking that you might have too little in common for a relationship to work. Whenever I meet a boyfriend's circle of friends, it usually gives me all sorts of weird feelings, because it's an already established clique and in order to become part of it you feel like you're gonna be forced to change or to pretend. For example, meeting all B's up-their-own-arse friends made me feel full of doubts, because for it to work in the long run, I would have been forced to integrate myself with them, and I wasn't sure I was prepared to do that.
I think that the important thing is to be strong in who you are. You don't have to change or act differently for anyone.
When I was friends with Becky, it always involved hanging out with all those chav-kids from her neighbourhood. I was never gonna fit in with them at all, but after a bit of time they seemed to decide that I was alright, and accept me as a bit of an oddity attached to the group. (but I really didn't care what they thought at all, since I only wanted to be friends with Becky, who despite being all heavily mixed up with them and their drug-taking, drunk-and-disorderly antics, to me was an entirely separate and special individual)

I know what you mean when you say you prefer the company of fellow "freaks and weirdos", although it's hard to define exactly what makes someone a freak. I suppose someone who doesn't easily fit in with the group- be the group a bunch of chavs or a bunch of snobby Newcastle-Uni-private-school girls.
I guess i can associate with such "misfits" better because i feel like one myself, and I've always found people who stand out from the group have more imagination.
There's a bunch of language assistants in the next town, about thirty minutes by train from here. Right at the beginning- perhaps in October? I went on a really horrible night out with them, and decided that i'd just really rather not make the effort with them. (shrieky, cliquey posh girls who never bother to text you back) In the group I automatically searched for other "outsiders"- and thought that in the frizzy-haired Christian girl called Grace I'd found one, but the friendship I tried to start with her never really took off. Perhaps she saw that I wasn't to be converted? (only joking, she always kept her religion to herself)

Sorry I didn't help you with your film-project. I'll definitely be up for doing filming-projects and stuff like that in the summer when we have more time. Maybe we could do a documentary about B's (ex boyfriend's) "rise to fame?" which in fact reveals him and his friends to be completely self-absorbed and vacuous?
He says he's met some girl that he may be "falling in love with" that he found on New Year's Eve, but who lives in Manchester. She's 29 and is doing a doctorate in philosophy, and he described this as a "really exciting meeting of minds". Not so much a meeting of bodies though, since she already has a boyfriend.
I pointed out that he used to get annoyed with my vaguely philosophical chit-chat (B: I love you ME: "but what IS love?") and complain that I over-analysed everything. He replied "Yes but you used to go round in circles. I don't mind philosophy chit-chat when it actually makes sense"
I can't believe he's actually found someone full stop, never mind that she's some intelligent bitch who can therefore be "better than me" in some way (aside: I think i have an inferiority complex) I never exactly thought he was the sharpest knife in the draw, so I'm surprised their minds can even meet on the same level.
Aparantly, she believes in faeries though, so she can't be that clever. She's writing her doctorate on charisma or something, and has told B some "formula for being a successful performer" and the secret behind creating an impression on someone. (Sounds a bit Derren Brown to me. I would have thought he would have wanted to leave all that witchcraft shit behind)
Perhaps it's her advice, or perhaps it's his coping-mechanism after the "break-up" but now he's going around putting on airs of being self important and arrogant. He says performers are rarely themselves on stage and he must develop this mask in order to trick people into believing it's the truth.
He claimed not to be doing the "act" to me, but he still seemed stupidly arrogant. He told me he's been texting Brian Molko almost every day. He added that their new material is crap compared to their old stuff and that he was "going to remind Brian how to write a good trashy pop song, since he seems to have forgotten"
I don't know why I took offence at this, but it just riled me up the wrong way- what arrogance! (Placebo's last album was actually pretty good- give "Bright Lights" and "Ashtray Heart" a YouTube.
He's even given up being friends with R. because on his quest for success he doesn't have time for these "parasites" describing her as selfish and malovelant and saying he was fed up with her attention seeking phony suicide attempts (the last one comically saw her threatening to throw herself into the canal in Manchster) I guess he can't have anyone else stealing the limelight, or trying to read poems while he's playing his out of tune guitar.
It's two o clock and got to get up at seven am. AAAAAHHH! Got nowt prepared for class either. The cat is asleep on my bed and the town is covered in that freezing fog. It's so unbelievably silent here- so far from home.....
Ps. I saw a dead cat today at the side of the road, a big grey stripey one. It had a stream of blood running from it's head.
Lol, sorry to end on such a downer. Well, the cat in my room is alive and furry, if that balances things out.

NANTES trip, and a night out with a FRENCH SINGER

This is a letter which i wrote to a very good friend who also reads this blog. I hope he doesn't mind me reproducing it here. It's just that I described all my recent activity in it, and I don't want to have to repeat myself. There's nothing too personal in it about him.

Dear Mr K,

Why do you not reply to me?
Do you even receive these letters? You are a vague but essential source of hope and communication to the outside world. I sit here, on my barren desert island, and cast these messages, rolled up and pushed into an old bottle, into the ocean, hoping that the waves will carry my words to you.
Only joking. The situation isn't that extreme, but every day I do run to my metal mailbox only to find it full of letters which arn't addressed to me.

I've only been back here a week and it feels like forever. My Spanish au-pair friend has yet to surface. She was due to arrive back yesterday, but her phone has been going direct to answerphone.

The other day, I mooched to the little primary school to face three hours of hovering around awkwardly next to the teacher (who is the one really leading the lesson) occasionally being used to demonstrate the "proper English pronunciation) and then have her get confused because my accent doesn't correspond with the crisp newsreader pronunciation she learned from "Teach yourself english" CDs
Sometimes I feel quite superfluous in the classes, but hey, I'm getting payed for it.
The cute children always cheer me up though. I always leave school at the end of the day feeling bouncy and happy. I don't know how they do it. I guess you can't stay unhappy when surrounded by such sweet innocent cheeky little people who ask the cutest questions.

At the weekend, I was determined not to just spend all my free time in grubby chain smoking isolation, so I called up a sweet boy called Renan who I met on the train one time. He's twenty on, has a certain playful innocence, very blonde hair and very brown eyes, and lots of muscles, which contrast with his baby-face.
He wants to join the French air force, but must do lots of rigourous exams and training if he wants to get selected.
At the moment, he's unemployed, and so has lots of free time to show foreign girls around his city- which is Nantes.

Unfortunately, as he lives with his parents, I couldn't stay over, so it was there and back in the same day. Nantes is almost two hours from my dull little town. It has a magnificent castle, and a big, but not exceptional cathedral.
We ate at a fast-food, "pasta in a cardboard carton" type restaurant, and he showed me all the perfumes he owns in a cosmetics shop. I've never known a boy who owns so many fragrances, and all the expensive ones too.
He didn't try anything with me, was I was grateful for, since I didn't really fancy him. He kept getting phone calls from an irate sounding female, so I assumed that was probably his girlfriend.

On the train home, two guys came and started playing cards next to me. We were sat on one of those "four seats and a table" places.
After repeating the sentence anxiously in my head, I asked them "What are you playing?" I hoped it would be blackjack, I remember I had a bit of talent for that, when we gambled together on that machine. But it was poker. I tried to join in anyway, and did indeed have beginners' luck, beating them several times in a row.
One of them told me they were headed to Quimper, (a fairly big town on the end of the railway line) He was a rapper/singer and had a gig in a club.
The other guy was a childhood friend, who was coming to see his mate perform for the first time.
They invited me to accompany them. The rapper dude had that air of superiority and self-assured confidence tempered with a vague hint of aggression. I didn't think he was a bad person as such, but someone who might fly off the handle if provoked and challenged. He had that look in his eyes.
I thought, why not? So I agreed to go with them. I got off the train in my town, dolled myself up, and then got on the next train to join them.

And so followed a night of only half understanding the rapid and very slangy conversation (in French). The rapper said his producer paid for him to stay in a hotel, and for him and his entourage to eat out in a fine restaurant. I now formed part of this entourage, which was an interesting situation to suddenly find myself in.

(I have to go and teach an eleven year old boy in a private lesson now- so see this as a little interval, like they used to have at the cinema)

I'm back. Now it's the evening, and I'm sat in my attic. I'm going to make some "slop" as Miss James always used to refer to her slapdash cooking. Rice, vegetables and curry sauce out of a jar all mixed together. I know, I know, it's not very French.
I wish you were here and we could eat together. Drag my desk into the centre of the room. Sit on unmatching chairs, and position tea-lights seductively around the room.

Anyway, I was telling you about my weekend. This rapper called himself Tj (Tee-Gee) Soundz and I've never met anyone so pretentious (aside- ok maybe that's a bit unfair. I hope he doesn't come across this piece of slander after treating me to dinner and all). Since I had no idea of his vague fame, I treated him like anyone else. The club was in the middle of the dark countryside, and we had to drive twenty minutes down dark country roads to get there.
Our driver was a gorgeous french woman of albanian origin (I only found this out later by facebook)
She had dark blonde hair and fake tan (or maybe real?), impeccable make up (I later found out she works in Sephora on the make up counter. Which is the shop where my friend in Nantes was going mental with all the perfumes- we left that shop stinking.) and stylish clothes (dressed all in black in jeans and a tight-fitting jumper)
I overheard and half-understood a conversation in which I think , but am not sure, she said that she was safe from the tainted batch of "toxic" implants which have been causing such a stir on the french news, because she had hers done in Tunisia. Boobs, that is. She looked older than her apparant thirty years though, probably because of her unfortunate hairstyle and tan, which made her look like a "Desperate Housewife".
I'm always shy of older women, and often I'm right, they do scowl at me. But she was brilliant. Driving to the club TeeGee and she sang to whichever song came to mind, often in French so I couldn't join  in, but there was a sweet rendition of "Let it be" as we swerved along country roads.
She told me she neither drinks nor smokes, because she "doesn't like the way drink changes people", but despite her sobriety, when we got to the club we had fun together, although we didn't really chat at all.
We either danced, or slumped in the corner re-gaining our energy. She was right, drink does change people, and soon enough we were being harassed by a Turkish dude, who kept saying "I love you" to me, in heavily accented English.
TeeGee himself tried to persuade me to kiss him "just for a laugh, between friends" but I refused. Then this horrible little teenager who he was sat with turned her malicious little face to me and declared that she wanted to kiss me too, in an almost bullying way.
I ran away to dance, and did an obscene little performance on the pole. The night ended at half seven a.m. and I was glad.
So there you go. There's always more to write but I'll save it til next time. Now i want to hear all your news. How are you my precious, unique and sparkling Paul-cake? How is your health doing these days? What have you been reading? What have you been writing? Does your brother have a date for the wedding? Do you have a crush on anyone? Are you still going to university? How do you feel?
Please write back, whenever you find the time,
Here's sending you good vibes, and ducks

Susie (I might as well admit that that's my name since it's in the blog address which i can't change now)

bitching about my ex/ cinema trip in Sheffield

I'm really not doing very well at updating this diary- for that is what it seems to have developed into. I get a couple of pageviews per day. I wonder who these people could be? Perhaps it's people who stumble upon it by mistake after typing in a particular combination of words. It's probably mostly women called susie who like cats. These views are probably solely down to a friend who i gave the blog address to. Maybe I should give him a psydeuym. (I can't spell that word). Let's call him.... J.....Ok I give up, we'll just call him J.

We met up a few times in the holiday, J and I which was really nice. It's good to see other people who are also sort of in the same situation as me- drifting off in term time, but being pulled back to Sheffield every holiday like a meteor being kept in orbit ( in orbit around Sheffield)
We went to a nice little tearoom, and I drank coffee. We chatted about a film which I have STILL yet to see. And it makes two people who have recommended it to me and highly commended it. (that's a very french way of constructing a sentence).
 It is called "Another Earth". I'll tell you what it's about when i've seen it, cos otherwise it's second hand information and probably some of the details will have been lost or forgotten in the re-telling. Maybe it wasn't called Another Earth after all? Maybe it was "two worlds" ? Who can say. So much gets degraded by memory. Who can say what really happened? That's probably why i have such a mania for taking photos, although it's really cooled down recently. Even though i've got a new camera for Christmas, so far I've barely used it.
We saw an amazing film at the cinema. Actually, I'm not sure if it was amazing or not. But it did have an anthropomorphic cat in, which is ALWAYS a bonus. (The Future)
I was somewhat on edge after a bizarre night the night before, and my heart kept going really fast, particulaly when emotive music invaded the auditorium, I felt like it was invading me, but i managed to keep a grip on all this. Added to this, I was hobbling around as the previous night I had raced down a dark garden path and gone flying, landing with my foot on one side in ankle-breaking fashion. (It is not broken but is still swelled up today).


And so I broke up with my boyfriend too. I question whether i was ever really in love with him (I don't think I was). 
This is not entirely due to me being cold-hearted, it's also the fact that he seems a person already very fixed in his ideas and opinions, and closed off in a certain way. (Although he would probably deny that)


In the summer, we fooled around and it was all idle conversation, cups of tea and walks in the sunshine, all karaoke and mischievous fur-coat-and-nothing-underneath nightime woodland wanders. 


Then the separation, which made us emotionally drift apart, although he insisted on continuing to tell me he loved me, in a way which i frankly didn't believe, or couldn't believe. 
The silence between us now (despite the fact that we're supposed to still be amicable) suggests to me that his love for me didn't run too deep after all, or was made of very dissolvable stuff.
 I think he wanted someone who would truly care about him and love him. I feel sorry that i didn't end up being that person. Maybe for a bit he thought that in me he had found that thing that we're all searching for, poor romantic soul that he is/was (I have a habit of destroying people's belief in the true-love myth.)
Maybe for a time I believed it too. I fooled myself. All this talk of buying a little houseboat together and living in canal-bound matrimonial idyll. Him being a musician, me being a teacher, life rolling on joyfully, mutual friends, all seemed very unlikely to me. (Except the part with me being a teacher)
He has all these wild delusions, and although conversation always rolled along nicely, we really are/were never on the same wavelength. I'm a down to earth realist (honest) and he seems to me completely deluded. For a bit I shared in his delusions, but the separation only pushed us further apart and made the void between us more of a crevasse.
At the moment, he is bent on chasing his musical dreams, and spent New Year and a few days after in London, hanging around with "all these rock star types" who he really venerates, claiming that famous people, or "people obviously on the cusp of becoming famous" (isn't that how all these creative types want to be seen in London?) have something special about them, that differentiates them from normal people. He says he felt happy that they seemed to accept him as one of them. Everything he says these days seem to be, if not gloating, heavy with a swollen self esteem. He seems convinced that success will be his. I surely hope that it will be, cos otherwise he's going to have a heavy fall.
His mother, at least, will always be his number one fan, and in their typical saccharine "love you!!!" manner, she has filled her facebook profile with links to his songs, and pass-the-bucket "so proud of my darling" comments (that is whenever she isn't heaping self-congratulations on herself in promoting her e-book and gloating about sales figures.)
Is this getting a bit bitchy? I should probably stop. 
I haven't really finished but i'm tired. Time to sleep. I shall update you more soon, and hopefully bring you up to date.

Manchester

So the first part of my few weeks of english-bliss started in Manchester. I met my (ex)boyfriend, in the train station at Picadilly. (Grr.. my landlady is on the phone next door and is nattering away really loudly in her irritating voice, i can't concentrate like this!)
We met on the windswept platform, like in a Tolstoy novel. I think windswept freezing train platforms are a good place for dramatic happenings and significant meetings.
He was wearing a silly furry hat with earflaps, furry coat and glasses with useless plastic frames in. It was pleasant to see him, and i had to quickly shove away niggling doubts:
"where is the spark of heart-pumping, butterfly-churning excitement one should feel at seeing one's lover from whom one has been separated?" I asked myself.
 Does it die after a certain period of relationship security and monotony? I began to doubt it ever existed. Except perhaps on our initial date which was a spontaneous midnight rendez-vous. I sneaked out of my house into the dark, lamplit streets, unbeknownst to my sleeping parents. I didn't know a thing about the boy who i was off to meet, not even his real name, and my heart pumped with anxiety and an eagerness to impress while appearing calm and natural. I remember it was raining and puddles glittered on the pavement like black ice. We had a cigarette in a bus stop and under the yellow light stole glances at each others faces shyly. His was pretty and made up like a girl's. I never really felt that intense stab of attraction, but i thought he was a beautiful thing- like a fine cat, a snow leopard perhaps. Just as one should never kill as snow leopard to make a luxurious coat, one should never seek to possess another person- and yet it seems to be human nature to want to do so.
That evening in Manchester, however, stumbling under the weight of my heavy backpack, we walked to Salford, a simple hop over a bridge to cross a slow-moving river and you're in a different city. We ate a delicious indian takeaway while sat cross-legged opposite one another on the bed in quiet contemplation and silly chatter, but my eagerness to go for a midnight wander was swiftly quashed by his steadfast reluctance.
His room smelled of damp washing, since he had just returned to the house that night, after an exhausting early-morning schedule of setting up christmas market stalls in various cities' shopping centres.
The following afternoon, we strolled around the city centre of Manchester, myself shivering and drenched in the rain, him quite gleeful albeit a little stressed, taking multiple phone calls from his boss (his best friend's father)
We sampled the delights of the German market, sipping mulled wine in a draughty shed, and then went to dry off in the local Wetherspoons. The clientele was an interesting mixed-bunch, but upon leaving we found a middleaged man with what i might describe as "serial killer eyes" standing in the doorway muttering to himself. Since my boyfriend passes his days smoking endless cigarettes and chatting with people he doesn't know (utterly convinced that he's doing them a favour with the gift of his company), he broke into conversation with the man.
It turned out that he had been on a date with a rent boy, who, when sent to the bar with a crisp twenty pound note, had taken it and scarpered. I didn't blame him. My (ex)boyfriend then went on to ask the man whether it was easy to find  that sort of paid company in Manchester, and he assured us, with a sort of misplaced pride, that indeed it was a piece of piss, but only if one knew of the right places to go. Cigarette lit, we stepped back out into the freezing lashing rain.
But at least Manchester, for all it's puddles, was sparkly and embracing. We were embraced by a shisha bar on the curry mile, and by a cute little cubby-hole of a bar that sold hot lemonade with whisky in it.
That night, i arrived back in Sheffield to find all the fairy lights at the Peace Gardens completely extinguished, and the city centre almost devoid of life. Manchester, I suppose has bustle and hustle- whatever those things are, it is the bright lights towards which i am perhaps headed- who knows? The rest of my holidays however, reinforced my adoration for my beloved Sheffield. But that chronicle shall follow.