JILL 1994
It's 1994, I am 46. The launderette opposite the Builder's Arms had closed and become an Estate Agent, despite me running a 'Save Our Launderette' (SOL) campaign on local lamp posts, so I was forced to go further afield to the one in Marloes Road behind the Devonshire Arms pub. She came in to do her washing, and after I noticed her I synchronised my visits with hers. She was just my type, tall, willowy and wistful in Laura Ashley dresses. Eventually I screwed my courage to the sticking point and asked her for a drink in the pub, and she said yes.
After our washing was done we went next door to the pub, and sat in the garden at the front (it was high summer). She said she had just been harassed by a totally unsuitable man who had asked her out and she was avoiding him. This struck me as rather a compliment! She lived in the opposite direction from the launderette to me, on the top floor of a Victorian house on the Cromwell Road. We got on like a house on fire, she was, I seem to think, a computer programmer, and I arranged to take her in my Java green Mini Clubman for a meal at Strand on the Green -
But I was just on the second date with Berthe as well! What to do? I liked both of them physically so I had to choose between compatability and excitement. I chose Berthe, and like a coward wrote Jill a letter saying so. As it turned out six years later, the wrong choice; a very wrong choice.
So in 2001 I went back to her house with my tail between my legs and looked at the bells. No Jill; she had gone, and was unfindable; not on the electoral roll, in the phone book, on social media or married. I wrote her a letter assuming it would be forwarded to her, saying what a dreadful mistake I had made, how much I regretted it and could we take up where we had left off? No reply.
And if she got it, who can blame her, it was too much to expect after how I treated her.
But I do regret it, things might have been so different.