To all the guys I've loved before....I'm sorry! (and I really really mean it)

I love how the world has become a smaller place with the advent of the internet. Any smaller and it will probably implode but for now I quite like the “village” feel it has to it.  Recently I was traced online by my “Lust Muffin” from high school, which was a nice surprise.  I was 16 when we were going out and it was the love affair of the century – which lasted all of 7 or 8 weeks. I even thought his braces were cute.  I think it ended when I called him on the phone one day and his brother answered by saying, “He’s not here and it’s over!” How quaint. These days he would have probably got his brother to text me.

So I got thinking about another guy I went out when I was in fifth form (let’s just call him “GIlbert”).  I thought I’d hop online and look him up on oldfriends.co.nz. which  took about 30 seconds.  We met at the school disco which had a fancy dress theme.  I was wearing a home-made harem girl get-up with tassles on the boobs which, combined with strobe lighting in a dark corner, obviously made me irresistible.  Now in case anyone doubts my devotion to Beloved, I need to clarify that my intentions in tracking down this guy were totally noble.  I know this might seem a bit far-fetched, but back then I was a mean girlfriend. Although he was tall, dark and as he put it himself, didn't "look like the back end of a bus", I didn’t fancy this poor sap at all, I just wanted to have a guy-accessory so that I could look as popular as all the other girls who only went out with their fellas just so they could appear as popular as I was attempting to be. Appearances are everything when you’re a spotty 15 year old with frizzy hair and nobbly knees. So this poor boy was subjected to oodles of eye-rolling, dodging of hand-holding and not a lot of snogging (which as it turns out I’d saved up for the Lust Muffin).

I did try to do something nice for him once.  Before leaving for a church camp he’d hinted very strongly about girls who send home baking to camp through the post to help their fellas ease the heartache of their enforced separation. So I thought I’d give it a shot. It’s just a pity that I mistook the cornflour for icing sugar and that’s all I’m going to say on the subject.

Anyway, it seemed like a nice gesture to flick an e-mail to this man last week and send him a bit of an apology for the way I treated him thirty-two years ago.  Hopefully he’s gotten over me by now.

From here I could go off onto a tangent either about my kitchen mishaps (I can tell you exactly what happens when you put 1 cup of baking powder into a batch of shortbread) or the boys that have had the pleasure of being in my company during my much younger days – but perhaps I’ll spare the details. You’d never be able to look at scorched almonds in the back-row of the movies in quite the same way again.

Long before the internet came into my life, I went to a primary school reunion where I was able to catch up with a much more grown up Pete. He had been a bit of a delinquent during his childhood and I’m pretty certain he got the strap in Mrs T’s class even more than I did. But he certainly didn’t deserve to cop the blame for when I hurled a brick through window of a house being demolished in Victoria Road. Of course it was totally out of character for me because I was a “good” girl. Don’t ask me what made me do it but once I heard that glass shatter I was out of there. I seem to recall hearing some old guy yelling out Pete’s name and threatening to either call the police or give him a good thrashing.  I felt bad about that for decades, which is why I blurted out a garbled apology as soon as I saw him (minus his hair) at the reunion.  He seemed bemused. “Oh was that you? I didn’t notice. Me and my cousin were too busy stealing the copper from the place to even notice you were there.” You mean I’d been stewing all those years just to find out that he had been up to no good in the first place?  

Do you suppose Gilbert has forgiven me yet? Only…it’s just that I haven’t had a reply to my e-mail yet…