---
title: "Somebody loves me&#8230; I wonder who?"
date: "2013-12-18T16:59:27+00:00"
modified: "2013-12-18T16:59:27+00:00"
url: "https://rationalists.org.uk/articles/somebody-loves-me-i-wonder-who/"
post_id: 6075
---

# Somebody loves me… I wonder who?

![Endgame](https://rationalists.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/images/1311-82-endgame00011.png "Illustration by Martin Rowson")

There are few things more satisfying than getting up in the morning and firing off a dozen brisk emails. What could be easier? There’s none of that old tiresome business of hunting round for an envelope and a stamp. None of that slogging through the rain and the wind to the post box. And no need at all to worry about the recipient’s sensitivities, to spend time on careful composition, on finding the right adjective, the delicate phrase. Email etiquette positively enjoins brevity, even brusqueness.

*Hi. Sorry to hear the sad news about your father. He was indeed a lovely man. Ciao. Laurie*

*Hi. Always good to hear from a former student. But I’m afraid I have no plans to visit Denmark in the immediate future. Ciao. Laurie*

But there is a downside. A deep downside. Because emails have made communication so very easy, people from one’s distant past who would have been far too embarrassed or far too circumspect or far too lazy to sit down and compose and stamp a proper letter now don’t think twice about emailing you out of the blue with reminders of a past that you’d long since consigned to oblivion. Here’s one that arrived this morning.

*Dear Laurie. I’m sure that the last thing you’d want in your busy life is an email from one of your old girl friends (or do we now say “women friends”?). But I heard you mention Skegness on your programme last week and couldn’t help but remember some of the lovely jolly days we spent together there all those many many years ago. So glad that life seems to have turned out so well for you. Carol x (Carol Hodge. In case there have been other Carols in your life since little old me!!!)*

*P.S. Skeggy (remember how we laughed at our pet name?) is still much the same*

Carol. Carol Hodge. Good heavens. My word. Only yesterday Carol was completely out of sight and out of mind. Forever. Gone. Forgotten. Defunct. But now suddenly she’s alive again. An unanswered icon. Someone demanding a response. But what response? Did we really have lovely days? Did we really laugh together?

We’re all good at comparing recent emotional memories, at knowing that we were so much more moved by the soaring Brahms symphony we heard at the Barbican last week than by the one we heard last month at the Festival Hall. But we seem ill suited to long-distance emotional recollection. Was I truly happy with my first Meccano set on Christmas Day? Did I really feel Jesus enter my heart when I made my first Communion?

And that’s the devil of these unsolicited emails. It’s precisely because Carol is so emotionally out of range that, in the hour since her email pinged into my life, I haven’t been able to stop myself wondering if perhaps she might just have been the one for me, the one who would have allowed me to avoid all my later romantic false starts and disappointment. All those divorces. All that alimony! Perhaps we had been idyllically happy together in Skegness, walking along the seafront, holding hands, riding the dodgems in the Fantasy Island Theme Park, sheltering from the howling wind, making love in her tiny flat behind the Natureland Seal Sanctuary. And laughing together. Oh Carol! Dear dear Carol.

But. But. What exactly did she mean by “jolly days”? “Jolly” was a silly word. And what about that feminist throwaway? Do we now say women friends? Ugh. And how about “So glad that life seems to have turned out so well for you”? Had she herself become some sort of casualty? A passenger in a seafront wheelchair? Impoverished? Deaf? Blind? Little old me. Wasn’t that the give-away?

And then slowly the gears of memory began to grind again. Carol. Carol Hodge. Wasn’t it Carol, young Carol Hodge, no less, who used to like Cat Stevens before he was converted? Who was going to be a novelist but didn’t feel the need to do any writing? Who always used to call the high tide “awesome”? Who didn’t know, yes, this was the clinching memory, who didn’t know that Billie Holiday was a woman. Yes, it was that Carol. That Carol.

*Hi Carol. Always good to hear from an ex-girlfriend. But I’m afraid I have no plans to visit Skegness in the immediate future. Ciao. Laurie*