Life lessons. Valuable things. Without them we couldn't grow into who we are but some of them are tough and some of them are harsh. Today I ruminated on one that taught me a lot and it made me laugh and wince and twitch to remember.
What was it?
This morning I saw someone who looked a lot like my ex wife
Perhaps because my daughter has chicken pox, my mind was on being ill. Maybe it was the lack of sleep. I am so tired that my eyes look like *dugs baws.
dugs baws - Glasgow vernacular for Dogs testicles. Not in the good way either.
Seeing this apparition made me hark back to one of the most disastrously bad decisions of my life and the life lesson behind it.
Let me take you back. Take you back through the mists of time.
I was in College. Plugging away at the mysteries of coding and resisting the lure of beige/brown clothing that seems to infect the IT crowd.
One day, mid-term I woke up feeling as rough as a *badgers chuff.
badgers chuff - a badgers bottom.
So dreadful was I feeling that I made an appointment with the doctor convinced that the sands of time, for me, were running low.
I went to the doctors. He was a jolly fellow. With a large belly and a larger moustache which instantly put me at ease knowing I was in the hands (so to speak) of a fellow gentleman.
After a perfunctory examination he bade me to follow him out into the conservatory where he lit a cigarillo. We shared it in amiable silence before he harrumphed and said.
Well old fellow, I believe you have glandular fever.
I exhaled slowly sending a dragon like puff of smoke to the ceiling.
Speak sense man, I haven't been to the tropics for months, is it the pesky dengue?
He assured me swifly it was nothing like the dengue and that a man of such stature as myself should shake it off in no time at all.
I left with his instructions to have plenty of hot baths. As I stepped out he cheerily called after me...
They call it the kissing disease you know!
I wrinkled my brow in some disgust. I hoped that our shared cigarillo did not mean I was indebted to some sordid moustachioed dalliance with him at a future point.
Many weeks of night sweats and enfeeblement passed. I was a shambolic state of a man. Despite the hot baths my condition was reluctant to improve.
I admit dear reader that the bastion strength of my mind was starting to weaken due to this abominable illness.
I had been seeing a lady for some months. Our fledgling relationship was put to the test by me being a poor humoured and quivering wraith of what I once was. My previously god-like physique was succumbing to the ague which relentlessly ailed me.
She was a rock my sweetheart, always ready to bathe my brow and soothe my fears with her honeyed words.
One long dark day after further weeks I awoke from my afternoon nap sweating and feverish, it dawned on me that this might be my last hurrah and that my body was preparing to shuffle off this mortal coil.
I was gripped by fear. Truly was this it? I had achieved so little? What of the sonnets I hoped to compose, the books unwritten? What of the little booms that had seemed so far away and were now receding into dark depths of never.
I couldn't do it, doughty and strong I may be but this damned illness had robbed me of my hardiness. One thought coalesced in my mind.
I would not die alone.
Yes, that was it.
So, eyes bright with fever, still damp from my fourth steaming hot bath of the day, I proposed and she said yes. It was not the most romantic affair. I felt though, that I could rest easy now. I had someone to accompany me right up to the gate of shadows.
Youth and vigour being what they were I got better remarkably quickly. In another couple of weeks I was back to my morning rituals of stripping naked and fighting the chickens in the garden.
Some more weeks after that my mind was once more laser sharp and I pondered over the situation I had now found myself in.
Did I really propose? Was it but a fever dream?
But no, I had and in no time at all I was wheeked up the altar and ringed into marriage like a recalcitrant cow pressed into the abattoir.
The story does not have a happy ending. We were dreadfully incompatible but seemingly neither of us had noticed in the rush to get married.
We lasted barely a year. Although the soul destroying divorce afterward took a further 13. I kid you not. But that is a tale for another day.
So let my tale be taken as a life lesson and a warning.