So why didn’t I see it coming? How did I allow my emotional satnav to send me into a ditch?

Answers on a postcard to the usual address.

At least a small part of my mind had some inkling where this was going to lead to.

Recently I had been using the phrase ‘carrying a torch’ to describe my predicament, without being fully aware of its precise definition.

Looking it up, the most frequently listed description is “to secretly love someone who does not love you”. Now I certainly didn’t / don’t love R, and it probably is just a silly phase I’m going through, but my understanding of the phrase was that you covertly liked someone and they were simply unaware of it, not that the feeling continued in the face of rejection.

It’s never pretty, rejection, and at some stage almost everyone will experience its sting. In the past month I’ve been rejected and accepted by the same person in the same evening (try and work out which emotion you’re going home with that evening), and the acceptance certainly didn’t balance out the earlier rejection.

From my own experience, some rejections have been pretty obvious and almost wilful on my part. However, the ones that sneak up and mug you are another story. I still remember vividly being dumped by an ex in 1999 and a vertigo-esque feeling gripping my body. You try desperately hard to control your facial expressions at those moments, but it’s a losing battle. The worst is the walk of shame away from it all. Walking down the street last night on my own was pretty demoralising, especially so as my sciatica decided to reawaken from its alcohol-induced slumber and slice through my hamstrings.

As anyone blessed with more than a trace of empathy in their character who has been in the only slightly less depressing position of rejecting someone knows, there aren’t any comforting words to say at that point. You don’t want to hear anything about “putting all your eggs in one basket” (even if it is true), and you certainly don’t want to be asked “are you going to get angry with me?” I’m certainly not going to do the latter, I thought at the time, but I will be kicking a lot of lampposts on the way home and tossing my cigarette lighter onto someone’s roof.

Making a play for someone I work with was always going to be a high risk manoeuvre. As R only does weekend shifts we don’t actually work together that frequently, but it’s deeply unfortunate that we have to do a shift together this weekend. I get the impression I'll still be feeling quite raw when we meet.

Right now I feel stunned, in much the same way I did for 80 minutes of this year’s Champions League final. After seeing United rip into Barcelona for the first ten minutes it was devastating to see Eto’o suddenly score in Barca’s first attack, and then spend the rest of the match thinking ‘this really wasn’t how I was expecting the evening to turn out’. The walk back to the tube station from the pub at the end of the evening was like seeing that Eto’o goal going in again, and again, and again.

To try and shake off the blues I am going to cook one of my speciality chili recipes this evening, which I’ve christened voodoo chili, in honour of R’s juke box faux pas from last night. As we were making our selections she decided on a Hendrix number, pronouncing the Chile from Voodoo Chile in the same way the country Chile is pronounced. I was in such full-on gentleman mode at that point I resisted the opportunity to take the piss, although I no longer feel bound by such decorum a day later.

PS

I registered at a GP practice this morning in order to get my sciatica pharmaceutically treated. While there, I had the obligatory healthcare screen for new patients by the nurse. Towards the end of our consultation she asked if I needed any condoms...

I just smirked and said probably not for the foreseeable future.