Yea, I am Mister Heartbreak

After weeks of being in constant pain with sciatica, my throbbing sciatic nerve is finally settling down and at a certain point over the weekend I noticed I was was actually just watching TV... let me explain. For most of the last month I've been doing everything with my attention being grabbed and shaken by the constant, nagging, toothache in my hip joint, knee and ankle. It was the total focus of my attention. Reading, listening to people on the phone, conversations with the kids and Mia, surfing the Internet... all these things were just things I did while concentrating on the pain.

Sometimes they distracted me a little bit, but never very much, The pain was always foremost in my mind.

Then I noticed it, over the weekend, that first time. For a whole hour I had just been watching TV. I hadn't thought about the pain at all and I realised it was because for a while it wasn't there. I experimentally rotated my hip joint in it's cup. Nope. Nothing. I could sit comfortably upright for the first time in weeks, rather than be constantly favouring my left side. I could lie on my favourite side for sleeping, my right, and not have to move back over because the pressure grew too great.

After a while the ache came back. But for a while there it was bliss. Funny how you don't notice an absence of something. But it's all good. It means I'm definitely on the mend, and that's thrilling. My despondent feelings of the other day are mostly gone and now my focus is the exercises. I do them every chance I get.

Exercise brings an interesting sensation. As I bend my spine in a banana shape to the left, there is a sort of tingling down my right leg. The sensations are coming back, not exactly pins and needles, although I have had some of that, more a kind of heat and a not unpleasant but hard to pin down feeling of release.

It's good to feel that somehow this horrible disability is starting to end. I'm not a very good sick person, and my experiences with walking sticks and wheelchairs are going to stay with me for a long time. My whole perspective on wheelchair use has changed and I will never ignore a person in a wheelchair again.

Being off work for a longish while mean you spend a lot of time introspecting. For some reason when I woke in the night to take some more of the cocktail of painkillers I've been on, my mind was chewing on the subject of broken hearts. I have no clue why, it just popped into my head. I was pondering for no good reason I could figure out how many I've been responsible for.

Gratifyingly I can think of only a very few. But as the night wore on and the dull ache kept me awake I became fixated on the few that I'm sure were either deliberate or the result of selfishness or just juvenile inaction. The worst I can remember, and the one that breaks my heart when I think back is my first real girlfriend, Toni.

Toni was a boyish, bespectacled girl in my class, not obvious girlfriend material, but she was my friend and somehow at some point we end up thinking of each other differently. I think it was a thunderstorm when we were hanging out at some tacky shopping centre in my home town of Hemel Hempstead. I think it was The Heights. BANG FLASH. All of a sudden she was holding my hand, and I liked it. I held it and we jousted, verbally, our interaction while the same as before now subtly different, more intimate. I walked her home.

She was my first real girlfriend, not only because our relationship was physical as well as emotional (although sex would sadly be off the menu because we were as I recall only 14 at the time) but because it was my first adult relationship with someone of the opposite sex. We talked. Okay so we made out a lot too, turning kissing and heavy petting into an almost Olympic sport, but more importantly we got along. We enjoyed the same things, we hung out, we talked about stuff. She was, against all the odds, one of the best girlfriends a goofball like me could have wished for.

She had a job at a local newsagents on a Sunday and used to bring me snooty Sunday newspapers and bags of sweets, and we used to curl up on the floor and read and cuddle. She used to look after me when I was ill. She was around for one of my first weird scary migraines and talked me through it. She used to come into my bedroom some mornings smelling of the cool spring air and sit on the side of my bed and wake me with a kiss. She was the best.

Then came the fateful school trip.

At a certain point it was deemed useful for a group of us to go to another place and interact with kids from another school. We attended Highfield School, a Bauhaus inspired rectangular block on the hill, looking more like an open prison than a place of education. The school we were going to be paired with were Adeyfield, a slightly snootier school which co-incidentally was about 20 yards away from Toni's house and the newsagent in Queen's Square she worked at on the weekends.

Our teams from the two schools were shipped off to Hatfield and cooped up at the old Priory there for a week to learn how to interact with total strangers. We fought, we laughed, we danced, we got along. But what we also did was get ourselves exposed to a group of kids our own age who were not from our neighbourhoods.

Some of the girls were unfamiliar and kind of exotic looking. There was this one girl, Jan, looked kind of Mediterranean or maybe Indian. I got kind of obsessed with her. And one day, out of the blue, I walking into the oak panelled library to find her leafing through dusty old history books. We talked, we laughed. I thought she was stunningly, devastatingly cute and funny. I couldn't stop talking to her. When we were on the way home I asked a girl I knew to ask her if she wanted to go out.

Walking back from the coach stop I was walking on air. And that's when I saw Toni walking towards me. Of course it was school letting out time and the coach had let us out at Adeyfield... she was walking past my house on the way to her house and as she walked towards me I realised for the first time in my young life I was going to have to break up with her. I was in love with this girl called Jan. Toni was not as pretty, not as exotic, not as compellingly unknown as this new girl, and I wasn't old enough to have learned that all important lesson about not judging books by their covers. I was also not old enough to know how to handle a break up, it being my first one and all...

We hugged we kissed. I told her I'd had a great time and I'd tell her all about it later, but I was bushed and I'd see her at school on Monday. I then avoided her completely, and she found out we were breaking up from someone else. How could I have treated her that way? Easy. I was a kid and kids do thoughtless lazy and stupid things. But of all the stupid thoughtless and lazy things I have ever done, this is in the top five that I have regretted the most.

Later on I was hauled out of a maths lesson to apologise to her, I forget why... she was crying and distraught because I hadn't told her in person, and my maths teacher, bless him, raked me over the coals for being cowardly and potentially slanderous by saying things about her behind her back. I totally deserved it. It was a bastard thing to do to someone, and someone who deserved it less than anyone I've ever known in my life. I knowingly cast her aside for someone new. And as we sat outside the class, her crying uncontrollably and me trying to say something, anything to console her, and failing miserably, I learned a very important lesson. People have feelings. If you hurt them it leaves a mark, not just on them but on you. She hated me. She actually hated me and wanted me dead. And I couldn't argue with that. She was right.

I got payback though, and it was a bitch. Jan left me later after a year or so, then after a long time came back when I was about 18. We married when I was 20 and divorced when I was about 22. She ran off with one of my best friends, a scenario that played out several times in my life for reasons I have yet to grasp. Dumping Toni turned out to be not only one of the single cruelest and dumbest things I've ever done, but also set me on a path for some of my own most memorable and lasting heartbreaks. I think it was like about three in a row. Cruel slapdowns of the harshest nature. Fully deserved. I'd like to say I took them like a man, but I'd be lying. Those chicks ate me alive and spat out the pips.

So Toni, wherever you are and way WAY too late, I am truly sorry for what I did to you. You didn't deserve it, and I am almost certain my life would have been a lot nicer had I stuck with you a little longer and parted with you a little easier. Know this: you are still hands down one of the best girlfriends I ever had, and even 34 long years later I still remember your kindness, your wit and your tenderness.

I hope getting shot of my sorry ass cleared the way for the man of your dreams. I really do.

Px