*** off topic alert (as per my last post: apologies) *** *** self-indulgent alert -this man should keep quiet*** end of disclaimers A is for Abigail, the girl at the top of the class in primary school. We had the sort of mutual admiration of competitors, except I think she won. A is also for Anna who I went to the pictures with. She had perhaps this passing resemblance to Glenn Close and I remarked at the beginning of *Dangerous Liaisons* that I found this Close woman rather ugly. This didn't go down well. There is another more recent Anna. 'Whatever you do, *don't* flush the loo in the middle of the night because the woman who owns this place really hates noise at night!'. I flushed the loo. Angie, who opens the door to her cabin dressed only in a towel. 'Hi there!' She says with a grin and a wink. She had a higher degree from the Irish Catholic Girls College of Flirting. B is for Bonnie. However, I don't think Bonnie was her real name. She wanted me to take the day off work so that we could go walking in the Hackney Marshes. I went to work. C is for Charlotte. I enjoyed the slight pleasure of wiping some chocolate off her lips in a Turkish ravine, but she was going out with another. She also fancied this mad Estonian bloke, who I suppose had a sort of dangerous charm, especially in caves. I remember this guy enthusiastically explaining to me how he was designing a dairy back home to look like two big tits. C is also for Catriona, who was from the year below but we shared a higher art class. It was reasonably well known that I fancied her but was too shy to ask her out. Still, she indulged my flirting with a sweetness that was fanciable in its own right. Another C is Ceren, who I insisted upon snogging in Belgium. I'd been on a bit of a spree that week and thought I was invincible. We later traded long letters. Long, not as in the number of words but as in extreme length to width ratio. Claudia, who took my arm on the way into Ronnie Scott's, assumed I owned a castle back home and generally made me feel like a movie star. C is also for Catherine. We were at a meeting. I made some comment. She added something vaguely opposite in meaning and we glowered across at one another. For some reason, later that evening, in a bar in the bowels of a converted coal barge, something clicked. The walk home involved a doorway, the middle of the street and some shocked old men as we sat in a late night cafe doing things that didn't have much to do with the croque monsieur and two coffees we'd ordered. D is for Debbie. Two, actually. One was the kind of girl who hung around in different circles in High School but then you meet again, years later, and it's a surprise for each other to discover that, well, she doesn't even mind fiddling with my smelly socks. I always had a bit of a crush on her from a distance, I suppose, and it's not that anything happened on the latter occasion either, apart from the socks bit, and we were both rather pished at the time. Still, it was enough to make one wonder. The other Debbie I've got written down in red biro capitals in a diary entry marked 7th January 1998. I'd obviously written this as I'd suddenly remembered a name from earlier. In another diary I've got a leaf from a willow tree pasted to the page. The leaf is still green and here's her name written down again, with no explanation. Just the name, in the middle of the previous and otherwise blank page. The tree was her favourite one. It's in Islington, just at Duncan Street by the entrance to the canal. I made sure to pick a recently fallen leaf, as it would have seemed to be vaguely violent to pick a leaf off the living stalk. She used to go out with a drummer in a well known rock band. She had a younger sister who was called Hannah, I think, who was equally cute. We all went down to see Shane McGowan at the Water Rats once. Debbie walked me home and we kissed on her doorstep. E is for Elita and Esther. Elita was terribly cool, and Esther was the 10 out of 10 looking violinist in the orchestra. I never got close to either, except for when the former yawned at my camera as I took a group shot in Canada. Last I heard she was going out with a chef . E is also Eli from Bergen, who I whiled away some time with in Brussels Airport which is, otherwise, an extraordinarily boring place to be. And for Eva, but I'm still in touch with her. She is now married to a German. F is for Fiona. There are three Fionas. One of them called me a sex object after I went skinny dipping in the Atlantic one night, but then it was rather embarrassing because I decided to visit her at her flat one day and she offered me a mug of tea. It was valentine's day and her boyfriend was coming round. I hung around long enough to say hello to him then made my excuses. I went shopping for hotpants in Istanbul with another of the Fionas, 'Oh, what do you think?' she says, ripping the changing room curtains back and swivelling her hips. 'Erm... nice.' G is for Georgina. One of my best friends from school knew her family, so the three of us went to the cinema once. She was a boy's sort of a girl; wore pass-me down rugby shirts trophy-style, and was extremely popular all round. G is also for Gillian, who asked me out once. I declined. I was still getting over... Helen. I was the new kid in town, circa primary seven and one day an emissary was dispatched to ask me if I'd go out with her. I didn't really know what 'going out' with someone actually meant, but said ok anyway, because she was one of the prettiest girls in the class. At this time I turned down all the invitations to discos I used to get, until my mum found some of them and suggested it was rude of me to simply ignore them. So after that I accepted the invitations, but Helen rarely came along, so I snogged whoever else was around instead. Finding out the facts of life in first year of High School ('Oh *please* let us be the externally fertilised sort!' went my prayer to God, in biology class) put a traumatic end to innocent French kissing because, after all, it was all leading *there*. It also spelled the demise of my relationship with Helen, who found an Older Boy. After this, we both went on a weekend to the seaside with a Sunday School youth group and I spent my time pining over what I'd lost. I is for Ilaria, from Genoa. To be honest I'm struggling with the I's but she appears in two separate occasions in an old address book. J is for Jenny, from Sweden. We sat up all night at the edge of the woods, discussing life, the universe and everything, keeping each other warm 'till the sun rose. We wrote to each other for years after that. I got a garbled message once about her being in London and wanting to meet up, but I got the message too late or something, so I've never seen her again. I've kept all her letters though. J is also for Jane. We were standing outside her digs. She shared a room and it was about 1am. She says 'Shall I walk you back to your room?' 'Oh, but you're just home now, it would put you too much out of your way...' Idiot-moi, it never even occurred to me what she meant. J is also for Jennifer, with whom I was supposed to be organising a softball match amongst some Clerkenwell architecture firms. She was a girl with an attitude and a decidedly weird edge. Perhaps she cultivated it to make her appear more interesting than she actually was, but I still found her rather fascinating, not that I pursued the matter. However, she did seem to go along with me some way, you know when everyone in a group has noticed that two of their party have been in deep conversation with each other for a whole evening, oblivious to everyone else; nod nod, wink wink they go as we get up to leave. K is for Kate, who I was secretly in lust with while I was going out with Helen. We used to walk home from school with each other, along with Helen and Claire and Jill. K is also for Katy. We'd lie on the floor of her apartment, listening to Rachmaninov's Vespers whilst leafing through the pages of a large book of Durer etchings she'd stolen from the Royal College of Art. 'Now Gordon, L*** is coming over. She's an artist and is having some trouble leaving her boyfriend. I'd like you to set her straight, ok?' 'Ok.' Or walking down Dean St. at 11.30am 'Now if you were a normal boy we'd be thinking about going for lunch somewhere like that place over there. But as it is, there's someone in this bar here I want to catch up with anyway, so come this way.' I was flunking work again, but the woman understood. Katy was a goddess. Karen is, I think, the name of the girl I lost my virginity to. She offered me sex lessons in the afternoons after our initial encounter, but I was scared of getting beaten up by her boyfriend who, I suspected, was a bit of a bruiser. L is for Leigh. Back in primary school, she introduced me to the word 'boob tube', which I though was vaguely naughty. She was also cute. L is also for Lauras. High School Laura left for Australia. She returned to the UK for a week and arranged via Jill that I meet her in a certain coffee shop on Monday. I made some excuses and said maybe Tuesday. She waited in the coffee shop on Wednesday, Thursday and on Friday morning Jill passed on the message that Laura was now returning to Australia, hated my guts and never wanted to see me again. I was simply too shy to turn up to what I regarded as a date. It was a pity, being shy like that. Because If I hadn't been, I'd have met her at the coffee shop and I might have turned out a normal adult. The other Laura I never really fancied, but I made more passes at her than practically any other girl, mainly because I was desperate for some holiday sex. We were standing in a group getting our photo taken and she squeezed my hand tightly, which was subtly sexy in a secret sign kind of a way, but by then it was too late and I was no longer interested. L is also for Laetitia from Portland, Oregon. You don't quickly forget girls when you remember them riding beside you on a camel. 'What?' I say, looking at her rather quizzically. 'Nothing' she mutters, shaking her head and grinning. M is for Michelle, who had a gay boyfriend who propositioned me one afternoon as I sat drinking cocktails at the end of an empty Atlantic Bar and Grill in Piccadilly. He invited me over to their sofa. 'Sorry I'm not that way inclined but I wouldn't mind [I turn my gaze to her] ...having sex with you.' 'Ok.' Ah, nice and simple. She worked in the box office of a theatre in the West End. N is for Natalie. The first day she arrived at my primary school she sat at the opposite end of the table. She was gorgeous, with long blonde hair and the biggest, most cheerful smile I've ever seen, flashing her blue eyes all the while; the only girl who's eye colour I've ever actually noticed, apart from Catriona's (her's were hazelish). I was out for a walk with my mum one Sunday afternoon and there was Natalie, riding around on her bike. She smiled over, put both her legs up on top of the handle bars, and carried on her way free-wheeling acrobatically down the cul-de-sac. Whoar. There is also Nathalie the French au-pair, which would have been nice in theory. N is also for Nameless. I wouldn't say that just because I can't remember their names at the moment that they are somehow less important. It's maybe even the opposite, in a certain way, like in the passage from the *Prime of Miss Jean Brodie* which I'll paraphrase into 'The only reason you keep referring to her by name is because it's the only way you can remember who she is'. Still, for these purposes I'll carry on with the named, 'though I'm banging my head against the wall trying to retrieve certain persons from this nameless category. O is for Orlaith, pronounced Orla. She was a bit of a team with Angie, and had this way of breathing out cigarette smoke (Menthols) so that it would drift slowly past her large, dark eyes, at which point she reminded me of Sean Young in Blade Runner. A bunch of us had gone for a sauna, armed with a litre-sized bottle of vodka. Most of us didn't have any clothes on but she, coyly, kept a towel wrapped around under her arms. Until she got into the shower, however. Then she just had to smile. Somehow then she lost her glacially cool facade and looked nothing so much like a girl that you wanted to hug. However under the circumstances, such a move might have seemed like something of a liberty, so I just smiled sheepishly back. P is for Patricia. Tricia played second violin. Along with Catriona, she was my big crush in the latter High School years. She had the kind of face that I literally couldn't drag my eyes away from. She looked just, so, right somehow. I was completely in love and in lust in that overwhelming way only adolescents seem to be, when everything like that is happening for the first time. I only ever mustered the courage to talk to her once, even though practically everyone in the orchestra considered my supposedly private yearnings as fair gossip after a 'will he? won't he?' fashion, either helped or not by friends trying to 'arrange' things on my behalf. I asked her for a dance. It was one of these slow, cheek-to-cheek dances... I am blustering hopelessly into a conversation about what we've eaten for dinner (she's a vegetarian). 'Argh! My gaucherie oh Lord save me from my ineptitude, I love this girl, make, oh please make my conversation skills improve!' But it was not to be and I never got over my embarrassment. Traumatising, traumatising. Q is for... I draw a blank at Q. Rachael was the daughter of an Australian professor who decided to make money for herself in a daringly controversial way for a girl of her station. Great conversation and wow, she was good at her job. S is for Susann, from Berlin. I leaned over to kiss her goodbye and her lips slipped from my cheek to my mouth but although I liked her a lot, I couldn't say that I fancied her, so I quickly twisted my head up and round to end up smiling at her, then we hugged and I was off. I'm staring at a photograph taken in a restaurant which had a resident storyteller much in the same way that some restaurants have house bands. It is in downtown Teheran, and three girls are posed around a 'hubbabubba' tobacco smoking device. I'm sure one or two of them have names beginning with 'S', but once one starts trying to wrack one's brains it seems as if the mists blow over with ever more soaking density, obscuring the view and blurring the ink. Smiling straight at the camera, very beautiful, with the kind of beauty everyone acknowledges with a mixture of awe and sheer pleasure since it is so clearly beyond that of the common lot... I think her name is Sabadeh, or something sounding like that. Next to her is a girl I actually worked with and knew better, who has the kind of beauty a painter would see, because the bone structure and the eyes and intelligent mouth are all there once one starts to look. She may have been called Shirin, and yet it doesn't seem quite right. Damnit, I've been trying to remember this name for the past half hour. I thought it would come back to me once I'd found the photograph here, but no. T is for Tamara, who later styled herself as Vesna. She sent me a new year's card featuring lots of cigarettes once. Nothing in it beyond that, but she did have style. No, I've never met anyone called Ulla or Ulrika, even if there's a fine Sillustrator going by the former name. V is for Victoria, the first girl I ever kissed. It was in primary two, on Monday morning. I'd seen a film the previous afternoon starring Errol Flynn and had used it as a learning exercise in how to handle women. So Victoria gets up from her desk to hand in her homework. I quickly get up to do like-wise and catch her up about two-thirds of the way to the teacher's desk. I grab her around the waist and shoulders and plant my lips on hers for a lingering embrace. Then I detach myself and continue towards the teacher, who is too shocked to say anything much. At playtime my Action Man arranges to marry her Cindy Doll. Xenia, Warrior Princess,Yvonne and Zoe don't feature in my personal list, yet. Gordon A tree has sheltered one from the storm, but one had better depart swiftly after, lest it start to drip. +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-+ Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+