Fifty-two Days and a Wake-Up.

To borrow a phrase commonly used by American soldiers in Vietnam when counting down the length of their tour. As in x number of days and then I wake up, get the hell out of his nightmare and go back home.

A somewhat over-dramatic comparison to draw with the experience of Beck and I being separated by the Atlantic and a seven hour time difference, but there’s no harm done by going over the top every so often. So, fifty-two days apart. Seven and a half weeks. Almost two months. One-thousand-two-hundred-and-forty-eight hours. And so on and so forth.

It hasn’t actually felt very long. It’s not like when she went to California for a fortnight last year and I had evening of near mental instability which I associated with missing her. Perhaps, in retrospect, it said more about my life beyond our relationship than my position within it. This time I’ve had both more and less distractions to keep me occupied. More things of interest happening, just a whole change of life style, but also less. As in less pressure, less stress, less to be worried about. Aside from whether I was actually going to interact with a real person or go outside today.

Still, this is something of a benchmark. I’m pretty certain that it’s the longest we’ve ever spent apart in the eleven years we’ve been together. When I was studying at Sheffield and she in London we were never one of those couples who saw each other every weekend and consequently imploded by Christmas, but I think we went met up on an average of every five or six weeks. In my first year and again in her third, when the other was living in Solihull with our respective parents, Beck doing an Art Foundation course as a precursor to her degree, me working in the pub and wondering what to do next (you may notice a theme here), we saw each a little more frequently.

Anyway, it’s definitely the longest we’ve been apart in the six plus years we’ve been living together. The initial wrench was strong, I think, given that we’d just spent the longest period continuously together certainly this year and I suspect since 2004 if not longer. But the trauma of separation soon abated,

Incredibly, it’s probably the longest period of time we’ve spent apart in the twelve years that we’ve known each other. From the party just before Christmas in 1995, when my mate Mike first pointed her out as his girlfriend (he was lying, but they did end up then going out on and off for about eight months, so perhaps he was just being optimistic. Beck claims that we actually met about two months previously through my then girlfriend, but I have absolutely no recollection of this and it‘s my blog. Hardly at first sight stuff, though, is it?) to when we finally let go of each other on the concourse of terminal three at Heathrow.

Twelve years ago.

One hundred and twenty four months.

Six hundred and twenty four weeks.

Four thousand three hundred and sixty eight days.

And so on and so forth.

I’m a little surprised that I haven’t written anything about our relationship whilst she was still away. I seem to have subconsciously waited for her to get back. Perhaps I wanted to be sure she actually did come back? No, I think it’s more that, to my complete and utter surprise, being apart for so long didn’t actually feel that strange. I still felt connected to her, yet totally isolated from her experiences for the first time. I don’t know what that says about us, really.

Sigh.

Anyway, she definitely is back now and things are as though she never went away. Well, you know, aside from the fact I manage to fall over the still to be unpacked cases left in the middle of the bedroom floor every morning and on Friday when I awoke to realise that there was someone else in the bed my brain went into a total panic as I tried to remember just what the hell I’d been up to Thursday night.

Seven and a half weeks. It’s not exactly long in terms of the human experience. Seventy-five years, or thereabouts, for the individual or two hundred thousand years for the whole species, but like Pavlov’s dog it appears that we (or me at any rate) are remarkably quick to develop certain habits when our environment or living pattern changes. So without any sense of shame or decorum, here’s seven and a half things it’s possible to start doing when you spend too much time on your own.

1. I’ve taken to drinking a whole pot of filter coffee every morning (plus half a dozen mugs of tea in the afternoon). On holiday in Croatia I managed to cut back my caffeine dependency to two or three coffees a day. It seemed to be successful, but now it’s back and more ferocious than ever:
“What are you doing?” I try to ask nonchalantly.
“Just pouring some coffee,” she replies sweetly.
“You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“It’s my coffee. I made it. There won’t be enough for both of us.”
“This thing holds, like, eight mugs. There’s plenty.”
“PUT IT DOWN! NOW!”

2. I decided that cooking for one was a pain in the arse, that it was much easier to cook for two and then freeze the other half for the next week. It also meant I only had to think about buying food on a fortnightly basis. Strangely enough over a period of time it seems that the freezing process reduces the amount of food to something resembling more a snack portion than a main a meal so I’d have to eat that for lunch and cook something else later. Around the same time my plates started to generate an optical illusion whereby the food I was serving out seemed to be an enormous pile when I’m sure it was the same as I would normally eat. Have I put on weight, you ask? No, no, the scales are broken again. Ah, it’s just this t-shirt…

3. Farting to warm the bed at night seems to be a reasonable alternative to central heating when there’s no-one sharing the duvet with you. You forget how farts always smell worse to other people. In fact, as I rarely feel the cold, I had been dispensing with central heating altogether. If I’m a little chilly I’d just put on a jumper. So what if the thermometer was reading nine degrees Celsius in the bedroom? Our ancestors didn’t have radiators, did they? A big raging fire, yes, but you can’t have everything. Just put more clothes on, all your clothes if need be and stop moaning. Think about how expensive gas is. Actually, it’s quite stuffy in here - I think I’ll open the windows.

4. At some point I decided to listen to all the bands for whom I own four or more albums and then to listen to those records in chronological order to get a sense of their musical progression. E.g: A Hard Day’s Night, Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt Pepper’s, “White”, Abbey Road, Let It Be. Honestly, it’s not weird or obsessive. Everybody wants to listen to eighteen David Bowie records virtually non-stop over the course of three days. Yes, even the experiment with drum n bass from 1997. Why wouldn’t they? No, we can’t listen to the Flaming Lips for the time being. Because we only own three albums by them and besides that begins with F and we’re on M for Manic Street Preachers.

5. Not closing the toilet door. Ever. In fact it’s quite enjoyable to sit on the crapper, at the top of the stairs, watch the post come through the front door. If I wave the postman sometimes does a double take at the flash of movement behind the frosted glass. I don’t have to pause a movie if I need a piss, I just turn the volume up. If I’m reading then I don’t have to stop at all. I just hold the book in my one hand and my appendage in the other. I do have to remember to wipe the seat afterwards, though, as my aim without looking isn’t as good as I think it is.

6. Leaving the standard lamp permanently attached to a timer switch saves the significant amount of time and energy involved in noticing that it has become dark, getting up and switching it on. Plus it also reminds you that its time to go to bed when the lounge plunges into darkness.

7. When slouching on the sofa reading or watching TV it’s quite comforting to slip one hand down my trousers and to cup my testicles. I really had no idea I was doing this and it’s proving to be a worryingly hard habit to break.

7.5. Talking to people who aren’t there is completely normal, even if there really is someone else present and the words coming out of their mouth don’t match the ones I’m hearing in my head. It’s fine. There’s no need to worry.

It’s not just me, though. Beck has, including our holiday, spent nearly a quarter of this year in hotels or on campsites or staying with relatives, eating in restaurants, having people to tidy up after her, anything other than in a normal domestic environment and she too seems to have picked up some unusual habits. She keeps asking for the desert menu after we eat and this morning, as I type away and she is still sleeping upstairs, a “do not disturb” sign has appeared on the door.

Interestingly the anticipated conflict over the use of office/studio room seems to have been postponed. Essentially Beck has arrived back, taken one look and decided that her space is too messy to work in. Rather than actually tidying up (because it’s in her contract that she needs to tidy only twice a year and the next one’s not due till March) she’s decamped to the dining room table. Basically we’ve swapped places. Personally, I think she’s just ducking out of a perfectly good argument.

Mind you, the above may have just provoked one. I’ll let you what the score is next week.