I try and relax by looking at the page of someone I was mildly obsessed with for a while when things started getting bad, @Virginiaginia. She’s luscious, and I don’t use that word lightly. She’s a cultural commentator married to a pop scientist. I go to her Twitter. I realise I am secretly hoping she has split up with the pop scientist. I am looking for evidence of this. Why? Schadenfreude? Solidarity? I start looking through HIS photos to see if SHE has liked them, to work out whether they’re still going out. I’m fucking cracked! But I can’t stop. The compulsion is all-consuming. I require the 360 on this. I deserve the 360 on this. They have liked each other’s posts, but maybe they’d like each other’s posts MORE if they’re not together any more, in that generous, fake way exes do. It’s looking hopeful – there’s no mention of him otherwise for weeks and weeks … I click through to her blog. The most recent post is called ‘Starting Over’. Aha! V. promising! I read, ravenous. Drat, the post is about some recent foray into watercolour. Ah. So disappointing. They’re dreadful paintings, too. And prove nothing. I slide back to her Twitter. There – I find it. Ten weeks ago.

A picture of them at a barbecue.

I console myself with the fact that they could have split up within the past ten weeks.

As I lie waiting to fall asleep I listen to Father John Misty’s I Love You, Honeybear. I wonder whether I will ever love anyone like that.

Like I love Father John Misty, I mean.

(I wonder if he’s still with his wife?)

PICTURE THE SCENE

An eco lodge on the edge of the Sahara. Sounds awful, right? I mean, you could fall in love with pretty much anyone there, even a camel. It was a press trip. Art was some sort of trainee travel photographer on his first junket. I was doing a feature on sustainable lodges for The Nonspecific Nerd. I was seeing three men, one of them the editor at a poetry publishing house, the second the UK’s foremost Alexander Pope critic, and the third ran an indie music label in Brighton and had DJ’d at the BAFTAs. All of them were divorcees. I’d run around Soho with each of them in turn, sometimes two together, hoovering up the summer.

When I first saw Art I wasn’t instantly attracted to him. He bounded around – I mean bounded – snapping away with his Leica camera, the brown leather case dangling proudly. I recall his khaki shorts, his hairy legs, his designer-shabby vest, his blister pack of stomach muscles, his luxury gadgets. There he was: White Male Gonna-Make-It.