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Wednesday 23 July 2008

Lost property

Melissa Kite leads a Real Life

The most interesting thing about relationship break-ups is not so much what is said but what is not said.

For example, last week I parted from my boyfriend of eight months and the thing I really wanted to say was not ‘why has it come to this?’ or ‘how dare you call me co-dependent’. No, the thing I desperately longed to say was, ‘I want my brown trousers back.’

I don’t know why break-ups bring out the territorial in people. There is no natural or primeval reason why human beings should argue over record collections when their hearts are broken. Did Neanderthal men and women fight over who got to keep the extra large stone with the sharp, pointy bit? Do dung beetles ransack the dung heap when their beetle partners inform them they are moving out? I don’t think so.

Why, therefore, am I reacting to a terribly sad break-up by lying awake at night palpitating with fear and loathing over the pair of brown tweed trousers I left hanging on the outside of my ex-boyfriend’s wardrobe door?

Perhaps it is because they were only two weeks old and a size zero. Losing the love of one’s life is all very upsetting. But trying to find proper size-zero trousers in Britain is on quite another level of insurmountability. It made me vibrate with terror that I might never see them again until I received a text to say that arrangements would be made imminently for their safe return.

This leaves me to concentrate on other festering sores, such as the pair of chocolate-coloured Ugg boots he persuaded me to buy. We were ambling in an impulsive, loved-up fashion around Leamington Spa when he spotted them, said he wanted me to have them and invited me to buy them for myself. Now, personally, I can’t help but long nostalgically for the apocryphal time, of which I have heard tell, when a man would spot something he wanted his girlfriend to have in the window of a shop in Leamington Spa and without further ado simply buy it for her. However, I’ve read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and have come reluctantly to the conclusion that I am, on balance, lucky to be living in egalitarian times. Faced with the choice of suffrage or having shoewear bought for me during a trip to the Midlands, I will grudgingly opt for voting rights. So let us put that issue aside. The truly painful thing is that the darn things don’t fit. I bought them in such a co-dependent rush to please I failed to notice that they were too big.

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