I don’t give a shit about Johnny Depp. Not a toss. Can’t stand him. Looks like he needs a good scrub. Never seen the attraction. He was brilliant in Scissorhands but then his career has been in nose-dive along with his love life. Divorced his long (Hollywood relative) term wife, blond skinny waif, married an American blond skinny waif and after just about 10 minutes started beating her up whilst simultaneously getting a divorce. Do I care?

Nor Europe. I’m so bored with it now. “If you leave Europe WE WILL ALL DIE!!!!! IN AGONY AND SUFFERING!!!!” Whereas “if you stay in Europe “WE WILL ALL DIE!!!! IN AGONY AND PAIN!!!!!”

Yeah, right.

So in the absence of football (I don’t count the Morinho inevitability, nor the 12 million a year), I thought I’d instead talk about my favourite subject. Me.

Because in about 2 weeks time its my 60th birthday. Fuck. Me. How the hell did that happen???

And its also our 30th Wedding anniversary. I’ve put up with that woman for three decades. How either of us has ‘survived’ relates only to your definition of ‘sanity’.

This pic is from back in the day. When we met. Back when we worked together. Ahhhhhh…

The day I started work for a long-gone company, Mel was there. I received a phone call: “Andy, its your girlfriend on the phone”. Which it was. And she was. Emphasis on the ‘was’. She’d called to tell me that, after going out for about 3 months, she’d been proposed to by her long-term ex and agreed to marry him. Probably a good idea if we kind’a finished, really.

I was thrilled for her. But really. She was a fab girl and we’d had great fun. But it was never a ‘forever’ kind’a thing. There again, I’d never met anything vaguely beyond ‘maybe tomorrow’. So, bizarrely, I was genuinely happy for the gel, and in part relieved that this relationship would never need to fizzle or end in a horrid, messy way. “Bye then, love you… til… hmmmm…”

Mel and I just kind’a sparked. She had a boyfriend. Long term and, because she was (and still is) a female, it was ‘serious’. Work was fun, and we had fun. Lunching together, talking, laughing. There was something there. The boyfriend thing wasn’t going well. So we started to kind’a ‘see’ each other at odd times. Which became ever more frequent. It was exciting. I had other girlfriends, decidedly non-serious in nature, but we found time.

Eventually the boyfriend proposed. She accepted. Says a lot that having anything to do with me will make you marry someone else. So we agreed to ‘cool it’. Break. No more. That’s the plan.

But, as they say, ‘man plans, God laughs’. So after a few months, by which time my then girlfriend, The Dane, had moved in, Mel & I bumped into each other on the escalator (I was walking up, she was standing, which is very important) at Bank station. At which point everything else really just followed its own momentum driven by inevitability.

She’s a very lucky girl.

Happy Saturday

A xxxx