I keep neglecting this one girl. She lives in London. She’s an actress and so cannot even think about leaving the hustling metropolis of potential opportunities that may be lying in wait for her. I am always thinking about her for one reason or another. Our conversations are the greatest. We had a conversation about sliced bread once, at nine in the evening after we had run into each other as I was shutting the shop up. Forty minutes later and she wasn’t able to get that bread as the shop had shut but I knew that I really liked this chocolate honey. If our rapport is so enjoyable and satisfying then why do I not call her apart from once in an indigo moon?

Then I think about her body. We’ve been to bed a couple of times. She was a virgin and, for one reason and another, she still is. Well, maybe she isn’t, but that was nothing to do with me. She is toned. She has a big ol’butt and she is strong. That is a combination of genetics and ballet. She can flip me over in the sack no problem at all and when she bares her teeth as I bring her off with my knee I am turning this wonderful and intelligent Catholic schoolgirl into a beast and I love it. So why don’t I get off my arse and go and see her?

Well, Bruce, let me see. Long distance relationships are a waste of time. I’ll just end up frustrated or cheating and paranoid that she is doing the same. I am sorry, but my view of human sexual nature is not a rose-tinted one. We are animals, baby, and animals like to GET IT ON! Anyway, neither of us wants that. We’ve discussed it, on the odd occasion that we actually talk over the phone, and one of her friends came to stay in Bude and told me that she just wanted,”a guy down in Bude with a sexy tattoo to mess about with when she comes down.” Which is what I want, or rather, I want a hot tomalley switched-on sex kitten from the Big City to mess around with when she comes down. Which is all cool but I really should call because she keeps calling me.

I send her stuff. I compile CD’s and send them up or videos of me getting inked and talking shit. She always seems so overly appreciative. She writes me emails that I print off and keep in my back pocket until I wash my jeans and forget about the paper and it turns into a paper-maiche slug. She leaves me messages about dreams she’s had with me in. She texts me. She sends me descriptions of what she’s going to do to me, perhaps the most bone-inducing text I have ever read (and I’ve read a lot of that ilk.) The best thing she has ever sent me was for last Christmas. It was an original copy of Playboy dated June 1969. How eminently cool is that?! She knows me so well and yet I treat her terribly.

Perhaps the old maxim is true. Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen.

I don’t deserve her. She should hook up with some strapping actor type in the city.

Wait, fuck that, I do deserve her. I’m gorgeous, intelligent, strange, tall, articulate, gifted, talented, hung and anything else you might like.

If you had dynamite for brains, man, you wouldn’t have enough to blow your nose.