June 10th, 25 years ago, I got dumped by my then girlfriend.
It was a traumatic time for me, so much so that I found out later that my parents had me on suicide watch. Not that that was something that was on my mind. But I know that I became moody, I did after all go five days without sleep. (Looking back, I’m sure I did sleep some!) I just lay in my bed listening to sad songs while wearing a large pair of Headphones.
The girl at the time, let’s call her Y, wasn’t my first girlfriend, that would have been Victoria Mellor. She wasn’t the first girl i kissed, that would have been Sarah Wright. She wasn’t the first girl who dumped me, they all dumped me. She wasn’t even my first teenage girlfriend, that would have been Tina Kershaw. She was however, the first girl whom I loved. Now I use the term love loosely. It wasn’t love like they way I love my children, it wasn’t love like they way I love my family, it wasn’t love like the way I love my wife, but it was the love of a 15 year old boy, who was just starting to form the concept of love. She was the girl I would pine over, over the next few years, the one who got away, the girl I would start writing bad poetry about. Really bad poetry!
We hadn’t been dating that long, just a few months, and in fact she had been on holiday for the previous few weeks, and that had been the start of one of my best summers. I met new friends. I started hanging out with Jason Tweedy and his posey at the time: Mark Butterworth, Mark Warbuton, Brian Rostron, and Chris Harding. It wasn’t even a relationship that was ever destined to last. We were very different people after very different things. But it was a time in my life that I was developing and thus susceptible to so many of the things that plague a young adolescent.
So, on that sunny June day, sat in the living room of her parents house, with Ian and Caroline out of the way in the kitchen, while I was staring out onto the family garden, she said that she thought we should split up, and all i could answer with was, “if that’s what you want.“
She teared my heart out and firmly fixed herself into my memories for the rest of my life. I walked out of her house and took out my frustration on the fence across the road. It wasn’t all bad. It was definitely life forming for me. The bad poetry lead to my English teenage spending more time with me as she encouraged me to write. This in turn improved my English and thus my ability to write. Any aspirations that I may have of being an author must come out of that time.
So, that all happened on June the 10th. I don’t remember the date because of all those things, and I don’t remember all those things because of the date. I remember all those things because they happened to me and they had a profound affect on my life. I remember June 10th as the day I got dumped, because it is Simon Hunter’s birthday.
Simon was one of my school friends with whom I hung out with, quite a bit at the time. We spent a lot of weekends at each others house. We were both into computers and we would spend a lot of time working together on computer related projects. As the following few years progressed, he was one of the friends within the inner circle. We drank a lot together. We clubbed a lot together. We had a great deal of fun.
Simon’s birthday is the only friend’s birthday, old or new, that I remember outright. I know that certain friends have birthdays around a particular time. The only other friend’s birthday I remember is Lindsay’s, and even that I only remember because for some reason, that I have never been able to fathom, I can’t untangle it from my brother Andrew’s. Lindsay’s is March and Andrew’s is May, and the dates are the 23rd and 27th, but I can never remember which way round. As March approaches I have to do this mental jig thing to try and remember the correct dates. For the record, and for posterity, Lindsay’s is the 27th!
But on June 10th 25 Years ago, I got dumped, and I happened to know that it was Simon’s birthday, I don’t even know why I knew that on the day. It was a Tuesday ( I’ve just looked that up on t’internet), so we must have made something of his birthday at school.
So because those two things happened on the same day, the neurones in my brain formed some pathway that in turn was much stronger that the two individual events. Had the two events not occurred on the same day, then I am convinced I would remember neither of the dates.
Memory — it’s a funny thing.