My recent trip to the UK to rebuild contacts missed out some groups.
First of all, back in the nineties, I was rather active in the UK Citroën Car Club. I used to love, and indeed still appreciate, big old Citroëns, and owned a couple of interesting models. The people were fine. However, I also have something of a negative feeling towards the memory, which is nothing to do with the people, but is merely a reflection of my state of mind then: my photography was stuck. With a couple of exceptions, I only took photos of the cars and the club. The underlying issue is the cars were great, but I could make no contribution towards them. With poetry, with photography, I don’t just reflect the art of the time, I make my own small contribution to move it forward. Of course, like the great majority of creative artists, that contribution is extremely minor, but it’s there. With the car club, my activity and my appreciation made not the slightest difference to the state of cars: I could make no contribution.
I also missed out my home village, but that's for practical reasons: the point of communication is the village museum, which only opens once a month, and cannot be easily accessed from public transport. I will return.
I missed all work groups. Most of my professional life was spent in the UK contracting, which consisted of going in to help solve a problem, doing my bit and being paid for it, and, when the problem had been addressed, moving on to another company with another problem. My usual contract time was a couple of years, in multiples of three months. The longest in the UK was five years. As a result, I had many workplaces. I kept in touch with very few of them. Given companies are never static, they are constantly changing, this means I have no means now of reacquiring contact.
There was one company, though, over which I have a strong personal regret. It is the memory of that regret, which reappeared during my recent trip to the UK, that prompts me to write this blog post. I won’t regain my inner peace until I write it down (again). In the early 90s, at this one company, the original Dorling Kindersley, I was contracted to write some multimedia software, which eventually became part of Microsoft Musical Instruments. I, incidentally, remain rather proud of that work.
There was a woman who worked there, in a creative team, which whom I shared an intense chemistry. I’ve never felt anything like that, before or since, with anyone else. Despite this, though, we never got together. After many months of attempts to start something, and always being (very gently and very kindly) refused, I’d had enough, and refused the company’s kind offer of a further renewal of my contract. I didn’t tell the company why, incidentally, I didn’t want to risk anything falling back on the woman. I still regret that nothing happened, and my feelings of the time still sometimes resurface.
I went to a reunion a few years later, and she was there. We spoke: she said we should have been married. I agreed. But she then actually blamed me for us never getting together. This was wrong, of course, but I simply, and quite rightly, walked away: I wasn’t going back there. Looking back, I still think that, had we got together, that intense chemistry would have held us together whether we wanted it or not, but our basic communication failure suggests we had a personality clash in the making, which would have made the situation extremely difficult.
I ought to give a little more context. I knew, then, that the intense chemistry would have held us together had we united, so I knew that I had to warn her something very personal about myself before we got together, so she could make an informed decision on whether she still wanted to do so. I had to ensure she could make an informed decision. She never let me tell her: she actively refused to allow it. In the end, after many months of attempted to make sure she was informed, I gave up and did what I know she wanted, I actually asked her for a date. I know she got the message. Her response: not a yes, which would have been rather nice; nor another no, which I expected; not even a ‘let’s discuss this’: instead, she did the worst thing possible, she did not reply. She snubbed me. That’s when I reached my limit: I couldn’t handle the situation any more, I knew I had to get out. That’s why I changed job.
As is normal with such regrets, looking back, I see a little more clearly was went wrong. But, due to the slight absence of time machines, there’s fuck all I can do about it. All I can do is live with the regret, and express it when it rears annoying its head again (hello). There is also the slight detail that I am now attached, and that’s not changing!