I started this blogging malarkey for two reasons

• so that I could keep distant friends updated


• so that I could practise my creative writing and ultimately become as rich and famous as Jeffrey Archer for my riveting reads

If I'm honest, there was a third minor goal in the back of my mind,

• so that slowly, using the power of the internet, my readership would grow and grow, until daily, millions would thrill to the trials of my life (and I could IPO and retire)

And I'm some way to achieving that third goal today. A new reader has been brought to my attention...

(ahem, embarrassed silence)

..it's "him", "the other man" from the tales below...

(shuffle, cough)

...I bear him no ill will, but knowing your "opposition" is rifling through your metaphorical underwear drawer is an odd feeling.

Like an overexcited child, I got back on the rollercoaster and was sick again.

I'm embarrassed to admit to all this after the continual beating I receive from everyone when they've read this site and tell me how stupid I'm being, but I suppose I should stand up and take it like a man.

I went back to her.

More accurately she came back to me. She spent two or three weeks crafting a long love letter to me, splitting up with him (over the phone) and trying to persuade me that I was the love of her life, I was the one that made her happy, I was the one she wanted to be with.

She did a very good job too. She even went to the effort of giving me all the photos she had of them together and all the letters he had sent her (although I didn't want anything to do with them) so that I would truly believe that she had written him out of the book of her life. So, predictably, I succumbed, and we were 'officially', if tentatively, going out with each other again.

Then, equally predictably came the earth shattering lurch, and this time a mere five days later.

On Saturday she had to meet up with him. He had come back to the UK for work purposes and she needed to see him to get her flat keys back so that she could give them to me. And to be fair, I wanted her to see him too, I wanted her to trust herself, to meet him and know that he was behind her, that way I could learn to trust her again.

I had a nervous phone call with her at 10am as she was on her way to meet him, and then....nothing until 8pm. Then she phoned, told me in her small, pathetic, put-upon manner that she couldn't leave him, that all the things she'd said just one week previously had changed, I was secure but not exciting, fun but not exhilirating and that he was the one for her.

If she was a man she'd be accused of thinking with her cock.

I went absolutely ape, screaming, swearing, shouting - a refreshing difference from my normal acts of resignation - I read her letter back to her, I implored her to walk out of the door and into a cab. None of it worked, she's with him now.

Scarily, now, 4 days later, underneath my still bubbling anger, I'm feeling really sorry for her and I want to help her. She's trapped by actions she executes but feels she has no control over, her entire life is being dominated by forces she generates but can't tame. I think it's slowly pulling her apart and it's not pleasant to watch. On Saturday night I was willing her to come to me for her sake as well as mine, to prove she could master herself.

I'm feeling calmer too. I can't take her back now, it's impossible to consider (there's a lurking "unless she...." somewhere, but I can't pin it down) so I can just get on with getting my life back together, and I was doing pretty well before she came back, so it won't take long this time.

My father got an OBE in the New Year's Honours list. I thought I was above this archaic, class-perpetuating nonsense, but it turns out I'm really rather proud.

With a superficially innocuous decision the whole carefully constructed edifice of denial I have built up over the last few months has come crashing down.

Despite all my best intentions to move on after her massive betrayal in August, it's been consistently clear to me that I've actually just been living in hope that she'll see the error of her ways, end her pointless dalliance with the stunted diplomat and pick me. Whilst busy opining that it's over to anyone in earshot I've been fervently wishing for the opposite.

Well, now the wishing has to stop because she's chosen him.

Christmas was crunch time, I had invited her to Sardinia over New Year, my opposition had invited her to Scotland. She told me that although she had decided that she didn't want to go out with me, she was going to spend the holiday with her family, and I could phone her from Sardinia just to prove that she wasn't in Scotland. I wanted to believe her and so that I could continue to do so I didn't phone her, but I knew that she'd prove too weak not to wind up in Scotland.

Upon my return from Sardinia (details of trip to follow) she told me that not only had she gone up to Scotland, but that her and Ben (for that is his name) had decided to give it a go and he was staying at hers until his return to the frozen wastes of Georgia on Jan 7th.

And then came the quiet decision that rammed it all immediately home with the force of a cruise missile. Before my jaunt to Sardinia, I had invited her to a small meal to celebrate my birthday on Jan 5th, involving a trip out to my parents' house and needing her to stay the night, she had accepted the invite. Now she told me she couldn't come. For some reason, that simple statement was enough to crush me more any of her lies and betrayals last year. It finally told me that from now on I'm second on her list, keeping Ben happy comes before keeping me happy.

She's doing the right thing though, if she's to make it work with Ben, then she should put him before me. But I don't give a shit. I'm filled with rage and self-pity like never before at the moment. I want to shout Fuck You repeatedly into the wind and into her face, I want her to regret the decision for the rest of her life, I hope that every time he lets her down in one way or another, every cross word, every thoughtless gesture, every missed phone call, makes her think of me and how I would have treated her better. I hope when she sees me in the office and elsewhere it rips her heart out to know she can never have me. I hope he turns out to be an unutterable shit.

And it's probably the right thing for me too, if she'd chosen me and if I'd chosen to take her back I'd have had to live up to his image as it increased in perfection over time and it would probably have destroyed us. Now he gets to field all that shit and I get to move on. And I get to move out of limbo too, having been too weak to do it under my own steam for the whole of last year.

At the same time as my soul releases this previously untapped and unexpressed bile to consume my mind, my rational mind knows it'll pass at some point. Within six months I'll have moved on, and like all life-changing events this will become another in the series of 'good things that made me who I am' (along with bad haircuts in the sixth form and failing to be good at Inter railing). I've seen enough other people move on after failed relationships (can a year and a half of sex and a couple of weeks of officially going out count as a relationship?) to know that I will too.

They'll go too - the tight, twisted knot of desparation that chews my guts and puts a crazy gleam in my eye (I can feel it, even if others can't see it), the voice that says "There'll never be another like her, you're too old, you don't ever meet anybody, nobody likes you anyway, all your other friends are happy and settled and you're in limbo again", the internal alarm clock that goes off to make me stare blank-eyed at the 5am bedroom wall. They'll all melt slowly back into my psyche. Hell, I'll probably even stay friends with her, I'm a nice guy.

Here's to 2002.

A weekend sailing on the Solent.

I've made a big decision, I don't really like sailing much. Actually, more specifically, I don't really like sailing with my boss much. About 4 times a year, my dimunitive (some might say stunted), Napoleonic, goatee-wearing boss (who is really quite important and is potentially being lined up as CEO) decides to put his sailing knowledge and experience to some use and charters a boat and invites some friends down for the weekend. It's a chance for him to invite some young graduates from work who might be impressed by his posturing. I get invited, partly because I sort of get on with him, but mainly because he needs some experienced crew on the boat.

It's always stressful. The thing about Gary is that although he may be little bigger than a 50p piece, his ego doesn't fit comfortably in anything smaller than a medium sized African republic. He thinks he's the best sailor in the world (based on a week's sailing course and a few weekends in coastal waters) and is prepared to shout loudly enough to prove it. Unsurprisingly, he's not a very good sailor, he has neither the patience or experience to skipper a boat full of novices, he cannot anticipate the wind and weather and I certainly wouldn't trust him to take me any further than a few miles.

My main complaint is that while he understands the basics of sailing, and the concepts therein, when he skippers a boat full of 8 people, concepts alone aren't good enough. It's not enough to say "we're going to tack", you have to say "we're going to tack, the following will happen, you pull on that rope, you let go of this rope and then...". It irritates me immensely, and will at some point prove to be dangerous. He thinks I'm an over-anxious jessy, I think he'll get into serious trouble unless he wises up and don't wish to be with him when he does.

The slightly odd thing is that I always accept his invitations. I have a deal with another friend who also gets invited that we have to both go (we're both pretty competent and capable of running the boat whilst giving Gary the illusion that he's in charge) or neither of us will go, but even so I get wound up and fed up. I think I must be a bit sycophantic at heart.

Anway, enough whining. The weekend passed off without incident, and apart from being bloody cold, we had lovely weather. The most entertaining moment came when Gary decided we'd have a sail in the dark ('cos it's pretty innit) at about 4pm on the Saturday. Everything was fine, right up to the point where he decided just to head straight for Cowes. Cue much beeping from the depth sounder as we get down to 40cm of water beneath the keel as we approach the huge sandbar that is clearly marked on all the charts. Cue also me wearily (to derive maximum coolness) telling them to turn the boat round and follow my directions as I go downstairs, find the chart and guide us in.

Gary's pride was sufficiently dented that he has challenged me to a sailing race in March. I'm a good enough sailor to know that I'm not good enough to race boats, so I just need to search for a ringer to skipper the boat for me. Bring it on.

I was in Frankfurt last week delivering a training course. The return plane made its descent over central London after night had fallen. Clear, cold air and no clouds to interrupt a magnificent view of glittering lights as we slowly tracked the Thames from 5000 feet up. Canary Wharf, Regent's Park, Baker Street were all laid out like tiny versions of their normal selves. Everything seemed 2-D, buildings that normally tower and arch above my craning neck and slack-jawed face were puny and inconsequential on the bigger patchwork blanket of London at night.

Bizarrely everything was sparkling, occasional blasts of light appeared at junctions below, green or red or yellow puffs of flame balling into the night and dying. It looked like a Bladerunner clone - fireballs against a neon backdrop - and I could not work out what was going on, the only theory I had was that it was some sort of celebration for the fall of Kabul, but that seemed unlikely. The pilot later informed us that it was a celebration of Diwali (the Hindu festival of light).

Later, from the Heathrow Express, the fireworks were all around and not below. More impressive in their immediacy, less imposing in their scale.

Up to the Lakes for the weekend and all was beautiful.

270 miles in four and a half hours on Friday night - one day we'll get busted. I'm so anal that even in my stupid car I normally obey all speed limits (give or take) but there's something weak inside of me that bends like a paper-clip when the 100mph peer group of Gus n Baz are sitting in the same car as me, so I gun the thing and don't drop below 90. I feel so...naughty.

We camped in the Langdales, pitching tents at 1am and instantly dropping off to sleep. It rained gently during the night but was pleasant and dry when we woke. Baz made infinite cups of tea as normal, Carla was slow getting up, as normal, and we talked constantly of kit, costs and buggery, as normal. We blasted off to walk a 10 mile horseshoe, up out of Ambleside, onto Fairfield and back down and the fitness test started. Gus won. He stormed off into the encroaching cloud, his shadow getting vaguer as we rose and he stretched his legs in front. When I'm feeling slow and unfit, each step hurting, calves burning, lungs straining, sweat dripping and condensing all over my body, I hate everyone, especially people who aren't obviously struggling. The hatred burns and spurs me on, but it always dissipates by the time I reach the next stopping spot.

It was a perfect autumnal weekend and the whole of the Lake District was on fire. Every tree consumed by shimmering waves of yellow, brown and green, leaves dropping like consumed ash and swirling around the paths. All the colours were somehow right and so perfect that each change of light - from the occasional blast of bright, cold sun to the warmly enveloping mist - brought out a different set of complementary hues. Even when thrashed by 60mph winds on ridge tops, water blasting into the hillside and any exposed skin, even when the visibility dropped to 20 metres and the world just dropped off into blankness, all the colours were appropriate, crystalline, correct.