Low life | 9 April 2011

After Cow Girl abruptly terminated our relationship, there was a long radio silence between us, during which time I was fairly demoralised. I’d thought I was lovable. If anyone could be bothered to look hard enough, or dig deep enough, I’d always thought, they’d find gold. But Cow Girl had struck no pay dirt, knew with an old sixty-niner’s instinct that it wasn’t worth looking any further, and she had got out with an almost indecent haste.

The characters in Sex and the City had a handy mathematical formula for calculating how long it takes to recover from a broken relationship. Work out how long the relationship lasted, they said, then halve it. I’d known Cow Girl for five weeks, and for one of those weeks I was in India. So according to the Sex and the City formula, it should have taken two and a half weeks for the dull ache of rejection to subside — which turned out to be about right.