Strange Correspondents

It's some while since the tail lights of my twenties disappeared from view. Yet life is good at providing strange reminders of former times.

The other day I received an email out of the blue from a former (married) colleague who asked if I could possibly do him a little favour and send a message to his former married lover to say how much he missed her and ask if she was happy. Oh and by the way, she had a restraining order out against him. Naturally I declined. Most people would accept a restraining order as proof that an ex doesn't want to see them. Worse still, whilst I didn't know the lady in question, I had once known her husband quite well through my then-work and he was a really nice guy. S knew this, so how could he possibly think that I would have contributed to hurting the husband, let alone get myself into trouble on S's behalf by interfering with a restraining order? I was forced to conclude my former colleague S must be having some sort of breakdown. In fact I told him so and encouraged him to seek help. I haven't heard from him since. I did find myself quite shaken by how my former respect for him was eroded by this episode though. He was quite a formative figure in my twenties.

Another correspondent who puzzles me is the ex (think echoes of the late Mike Smith) who emails me every so often with 'How are you?' and then if I don't reply for a few hours sends quite a frantic 'How are you? Are you alright? Please email me back as soon as you can', yet when I reply he goes completely silent for another few months, with maybe one or two cryptic lines about how he is/how am I? at Christmas. I've even suggested we meet for a coffee, he with his partner, me with mine, since he lives almost in the next town and it's nigh on 20 years since we dated, but he seldom replies, except to agree, and then goes silent when I email date and venue suggestions. Yet when I moved to Brighton, I had this impassioned email about how he had struggled to make friends on the South Coast and couldn't wait until I was in the area. Whilst a highly intelligent chap with an engineering degree and law degree which he has now combined into his own business doing something rather worthwhile, I know he's always been insecure about his literary prowess. But it's not as if I ever asked for Shakespeare from him. Just a tad of consistency would be nice. I remember when he ended it, sobbing down the phone line to him in the public call box outside my grandmother's house; 'But I'm not ready for it to end!' (we had only dated for a couple of months). In retrospect I can see he did me a favour. I would have been a basket case by now to have ended up with someone so flaky and uncommunicative. Probably we didn't have that much in common either. Nevertheless, it's nice to know what became of him. We Brits are sentimental souls.