“I… I… I thought we had something. I believed in you! I loved you, dammit, I loved you! But you kept this from me – you lied, lied about the most important thing… all those times you looked me in the eye you knew what you’d done…”
I could barely speak anymore – great waves of horror kept building, bigger and bigger, and then smashing over my head until I was struggling just to stay standing. She was still sitting on the sofa, motionless, frozen, numb from the shock. When I think back I imagine her eyes as pleading with me, apologising, begging for me to forgive her, but they weren’t – they were just lifeless. Dead. All so suddenly it was over, and we both knew it.
Please! A little background.
We met on Omegle: a beautiful union of You and Stranger, or Stranger and You, depending on which way you saw it. “Hi!” – the exclamation mark did it at once – that effortless burst of joy which came so naturally to her. I signed off with my Facebook page, just in case, and the next morning there she was, new friend request, new lives together. She posted on my wall. I liked. She tweeted, I retweeted. Tagged you in a photo. Tagged you in a note. In a relationship? (I became mayor of her bed on foursquare.) In a relationship! Lots of love, xxx.
By the next iPhone release cycle I had moved into her place for real. It was a perfect little flat, just off Swiss Cottage, cosy, homely and with an unsecured wireless network from that nice Mr. Papucci next door. We would spend whole evenings together just snuggled up on her sofa, planning our futures together – and then our future together – feeling utterly safe from the bustling world outside. We had each other, and that was the only news feed story that mattered.
“Ding!”
My phone flashed lazily with a new message. I paused from my current task – stroking her beautifully long hair – just long enough to lean over to the table and pick it up.
“Hey, do you sometimes think we’re too dependent on technology? xxx”
I laughed. “Nooo…”
She turned round smiling. “Well of course, I don’t really. But sometimes I think it might be nice to try living without it all for a day or something, y’know, like our ancestors did.”
“Yeah, that could be fun actually. If we went really primitive, just for a day, as an experiment.”
“I mean, obviously I’m not saying go crazy.”
“No.”
“Not kill ourselves doing this!”
“No!”
“But like, there’s something quite noble about the old days really. Take phones. We take this all for granted, but in the past people had to cope with much lower screen resolutions…”
“God yes. No HD screens for them – nothing even close. Sometimes they weren’t even full colour! And polyphonic ringtones…”
I felt a little shiver of excitement run down her spine. “Y’know, my grandfather had one of those phones, or something even older! It was a Nokia, a 3310, yes that’s right, and before he died he gave it to me to keep!”
“Do you still have it?”
“Of course! I think it’s over in that box on top of the wardrobe somewhere. Y’know, the one I need a stepladder to reach…”
I laughed. “Aha, but I don’t, shawty. I’ll go get it for you.”
The box was pretty heavy as I lifted it down, and covered in dust, so I put it down and began rummaging through it in the corner rather than spreading the dust all over the living room. It seemed to be a wonderfully eclectic collection of stuff from over her life: photos from her childhood, a signed Ethereal Fire gig ticket, a human skull from her gap year in Tyrgyzstan. (“It was all so exotic!” I remember her saying to me about it, “and like, so interesting! We got there just as the civil war was really breaking out, so there was so much to do – in their culture when there’s a civil war it’s traditional for the different groups to really go for each other, like really brutally, so there was always room for volunteers to pitch in, laying mines, shooting, executing prisoners of war… and they were so grateful, those guys we were with. It felt like we really made a difference to their world, y’know?”)
Aha, there it was! Laying right at the bottom: a battered old Nokia 3310 lying peacefully at the bottom of the box, frozen in time. I reached in to pull it out, but then something else caught my eye… a little piece of card, tucked neatly between some photographs. There was nothing remarkable about it, and it looked innocuous enough, so I can’t explain why I pulled it out other than idle curiosity. But I did.
And then my life fell apart.
Fade out. Background over. Back to the start.
“I… I… I thought we had something. I believed in you! I loved you, dammit, I loved you! But you kept this from me – you lied, lied about the most important thing… all those times you looked me in the eye you knew what you’d done…”
What could she do? I mean, what could she do? Eventually, after what seemed like an eternity, she did at least try and make a go of it – taking the card weakly from my outstretched hand and trying, at least, to feign ignorance.
“Look, it’s nothing… yes, it is a wedding invite, and yes, it is my wedding invite, and yes, Dave and I were engaged once. But you knew that, or near enough: I told you all about us, remember? I don’t know why I kept it really, but it doesn’t mean anything, I promise…”
She trailed off. I stared at her. She stared at me. I started to well up, and tried as hard as I could to stop the tears from coming as I forced out more words.
“Please. Don’t do this. You know as well as I do that this is nothing to do with Dave, nothing to do with you being engaged… fuck it, I wouldn’t mind if you had forty two children living in a shoe somewhere. This isn’t about that. This is about you.”
She looked down.
“Look, I just need an answer to one simple question.”
She said nothing, but nodded slightly.
“This invite…”
It was so hard to speak. So hard.
“You… designed it?”
She looked up, avoiding my eyes.
“Well, um, I mean, I can’t remember exactly, I think, maybe, maybe Dave did some of the work, I don’t…”
“It was you. I can tell. It’s you all over. Look, you’ve even included your website on it. This was you.”
Silence.
“But… but…”
“STOP IT!” she yelled. “Yes, it was me. YES, OK, IT WAS ME. There, I said it, I confessed, I’m guilty. I designed that invite. I designed that invite down to the very last pixel. And I…”
I took a deep breath, and then finished her sentence for her.
“…used Comic Sans MS?”
“Yes. Yes. I used Comic Sans MS.”
“For your wedding invitation.”
“For my wedding invitation.”
I breathed in deeply, again.
“And the WordArt?”
“At the time, it just… seemed… so… zany…”
By then I was already backing out the door, re-arranging the furniture of the flat in my head to be without my stuff, mentally packing up my Blu-ray discs and USB cables.
She remained still. And then…
“So, this is goodbye, I guess…”
“Yes. The end.”
Now she was crying too.
“Look, I hope we can still be friends. Y’know, on Facebook and stuff. LinkedIn.”
“We’ll see.”
It was all I could manage. My voice was cracking. I had to get out of there.
We was over. Finished. Sans serif, sans us.
And then I was gone.
From: Dominic Self
To: macer.hall@express.co.uk
Sent: Tue 13/07/2010 16:55
Subject: Request for comment
Dear Mr. Hall,
I am writing in advance of publishing a short comment piece on my blog about your front-page article in today’s Daily Express, headlined ‘ONE IN 5 BRITONS WILL BE ETHNICS’.
In particular, I was wondering if you could let me know what you envisage the remaining 80% of British society as being composed of? I had always assumed that human beings were universal possessors of ethnicity, but clearly I am mistaken in this regard. Could you identify the key characteristics of ‘an ethnic’, please?
On a personal note, I trust you will understand that any critical tone which I may take in my coverage of you will be purely in the interests of sensation and the courting of controversy. So if, for example, I were to describe you personally as ‘nasty’, or ‘revolting’, or ‘cowardly’, or ‘squalid’ – or, indeed, all of these things and more – rest assured that this would all be in the public interest and should be taken in a warm spirit of open dialogue and discussion.
Wishing you a pleasant evening,
Sincerely yours,
Dominic Self
Sadly, no response from the nasty, revolting, cowardly and squalid man at the nasty, revolting, cowardly and squalid newspaper has yet been received. Shame.
A thoroughly pleasant weekend! Yesterday was QPCS’s Summer Fair, and as usual they held some mini-debates between student members of the debating club (an innovation since my day, *sniff*) and parents. Being too old to qualify as a student of any sort (*sniff*, again) I was rather delighted to be invited onto the ‘parents’ side this year, despite my obvious failure to reach the sole required qualification. We had been assigned to argue the proposition for the motion that Britain today is a more civilised country than 21 years ago – it is, I tell you, although maybe not for much longer! – and thankfully, what with Britain being all civilised and that, no-one seemed to object too much to the fact that my mum was also one of the judges. (Not that it helped, anyway 
) Anyway! It was fun, is all, as was the fair itself. To mark the school turning 21, they had a little exhibition up on its history, which was actually quite moving when you consider the circumstances into which QPCS was born. Brent in the 1980s was touchingly ahead of its time in many respects, but the idea of a mass exodus of students from its schools is pretty chilling…
Yes, so anyway, after the fair I went to Joshua and Niamh’s for dinner / drinks / rehashed debates about how to make a White Russian. All very enjoyable, except at about 11 I realised that I was dangerously close to just curling up on the sofa and contentedly dozing off, which probably would not have been greatly appreciated. So forcing myself to get up, I moved on to join the rest of my family at the Fox household’s multi-birthday bash, a house which I haven’t been to in years but which is instantly warm and comforting as a place where I spent many happy childhood days. (Including, let it be noted, the place where Tash and I were left to play whilst Katie emerged into the world.)
(You could tell it was a party of the great and the good, because everyone from Twitter was there! @charlottespeech, @giantlawnmower, @theyspellalice … all real and speaking in more than 144 characters at once. Excellent. I think if @alextrafford had shown up, I’d have been so overwhelmed I’d had have to run into the garden at once in order to get reception to tweet about it.)
(Oh, and the chocolate cake was superb. Happy birthday, Jack and Charlotte!)
And then today was Saoirse’s eighteenth seventeenth birthday picnic in Green Park, which was also suitably well attended by further delightful people: Saoirse, obviously, DF, Tash, Abbi, Paul, Sanna, Robert, Emily, Lucy, Alice, Jamie, Eliezer – have I forgotten anyone? – plus a very decent amount of food and drink. But after a great time, I still made sure I got home in time for the World Cup final – I know, weird, right? – reflecting an immense softening of my heart this time around. The tectonic plates have now shifted in our household, however, since dad has also joined in with the football – and as a result, the old reliable family quirk about the boys completely ignoring the World Cup while the girls sit around the TV has been forever broken.
(We’ll have to come up with something new now!)
OK, so if you’ve been reading this blog for long enough you might remember that Oliver and Abi have a reputation for pretty awesome birthday presents. But I have to report that this year they have completely outdone themselves, and with such panache that I have no way of ever making up for lost ground in return. But never mind. Last night I travelled up to the distant shores of High Barnet to be presented with the Secret Project (TM): The Doctor’s London Underground Adventure Game*.
That’s right: it’s a handmade, lovingly crafted board game. Based around my life. And with its own unique set of rules. This is, hand on heart, the coolest thing ever:
The beautiful game board
Official playing pieces
Some of my favourite cards from the ‘Deck of Cool’
And some of the worthy adversaries…
So, come on over and face a universe which includes: London Underground, Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, Merlin, True Blood, Twilight, mango beer, the collapse of Metronet, the ‘RSS Feed’ deck, Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson, Hume, Marx, Hegel, Tybalt Capulet II, the perils of eating fruit – and much more besides! You know you want to…
*Private, non-commercial use only. Only one set ever made, so don’t sue. That includes you, St. Botolph. Take it as a compliment.
I’m easily bought. A chocolate brownie on my birthday (cheers, Mairi), free drinks (Niamh, you’re awesome) and an entire mouth-watering picnic (all you Märak-Freemans totally rock) are only the latest examples of the ongoing auction for my soul – and honestly, if any of you need any serious crimes committed for you in the near future, just ask*. But it’s not just food and drink, oh no! It turns out that e-mailing me photos of (now bygone) merry studenting times will work just as well. And so, in this journal of record, in the year of our Lord two thousand and ten Anno Domini, I would like to take a moment to officially declare to the world that Laura Rouse is a wonderful wonderful person 
Feed me photos, and I will feed you blog love in return
Right, giving a speech tomorrow** so the next task is an urgent examination of what I might actually say…
*Dear law enforcement agencies: stop taking the world so seriously – it’s not good for your health.
** Just to graduating QPCSers. I mean, I say ‘just’ – graduating QPCSers are also wonderful wonderful people. But it’s a niche audience.
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
