One Another Notes

This is mainly a relationship retrospective - a bid to categorise and somehow contain the mishaps, misdirections and misadventures but celebrate the good things too. Each song has a person in mind who, happily for her, will remain anonymous.

1. Playing for real

I was eleven years old and this girl in my class seemed to know what she was doing, privy to secrets I couldn't yet imagine. I have no idea why she chose me. Naturally she moved on to other things/boys when it was clear I really didn't know what to do. She always was that one experience in front of me.

2. Running

After a period in the wilderness my social life took a great turn for the better when I joined the church youth club on my doorstep. I was about seventeen and soon plunged into a relationship (innocent by today's standards) with a really nice girl about 2 years younger. But this was also in the midst of a sort-of-charismatic religious revival thing that was going on at the same time. Impressionable idealistic minds, and the relationship was just a bit in the way really, so I ended it fairly abruptly I'm sorry to say.

3. Lost love

For the first time I felt I had found a soul-mate. In the upper sixth, feeling a certain amount of confidence, yet the one I identified with was the misfit, the outsider. (And a lovely girl and, I still very much hope, a lovely woman). This set the pattern for the future: I knew what it was like to feel unusual, out of place and I needed someone else who felt that.It was ended by my going to college, and though I tried to engineer a meeting somehow we waited for each other in different places.

4. Grace

This is about a relationship that never happened and my romanticising of the girl ever since. She was lovely: trouble was everyone else thought so too, so there was never any real chance of us connecting. But in another life so much more might have happened...

5. One and a half

Another romance that didn't quite happen. We were the same age, and grew close in the summer after I graduated and was waiting to do a fourth year. I took a summer job and spent my days off and a lot of spare time with her. But... something always held me back. She was too attached to home and family... and I wasn't.

6. Twenty-one

No romance at all this time! Just a very good friend just when I needed one. A fellow student at college.

7. Friendly fire

Still not got to a relationship yet. This was a very good friendship but she wanted more and I was too self-occupied to notice or to want to notice.

8. Transfixed

Being away at college for all but eight weeks a year and a few weekends, I still thought it a good idea to start a relationship in my home town with a very nice young woman. Not long after it crashed and burned I went and did it again with the same girl. I live in the dread that I set her back on relationships many years.

9. Starstruck

Hurrah! At last we have it - the genuine falling in love, it-was-meant-to-be relationship with the orchestra playing, intimacy and everything. This was the one!

10. The point you pass

Or was it? The realisation took its time sinking in but eventually it was clear that we saw our relationship in different ways. But I hung on like a determined limpet and had to be prised away in the end by sheer embarrassment.

11. Stronger

A little bit on the rebound but this somehow became a much more real proposition because I tried to be be honest from the start.

12. No need

Still going, strength to strength, trying hard to keep complacency away.