When I broke the news to Nick, that I wanted to take herback to the room, he wasn’t particularly happy. “What are you like?” he asked.“You put one on a plane back to Glasgow this morning, and now you’ve picked upone from Wales! What is this, a tour of the British Isles?”
So, for the second night in a row, Nick found himself shutout of the room, but at least he had a willing partner to have some fun withthis time. After a little persuasion from me, I suggested that he go back withSam, who was clearly keen on him.
He moaned about it to begin with, but when I reminded himabout his earlier complaints about the lack of sex, including my use of theexpression “beggars can’t be choosers”, he relented and went back to the girls’room with Sam.
This left me with barely an hour. I savoured every lastcurve of Sarah’s body for the final time, as she enjoyed mine for the first.
The bedside clock read 4.59am, as I cuddled up in her arms,ready to be whisked away at any moment. I moved in closer and whispered“goodbye” into her ear.
Seconds later, the room vanished, and I found myself on themiddle of the dance floor in a club I didn’t recognise, another huge summertune from The Tamperer blasting out all around me.
She was gone. And there was nothing I could do about it. Itook solace in some drunken, joyless sex with Cathy that night, but nothingcould ease the pain of losing Sarah.
September 1995
My twenties progressed backwards, seemingly one long party.I worked hard and played hard. My body was young and fit and it seemed I couldeffortlessly go out and drink several pints at night and still be as fresh as adaisy for work in the morning.
By this time I was no longer at head office but working asan assistant manager in one of the superstores. I was on about £15,000 a yearwhich didn’t sound a lot compared to what I had been used to, but it was morethan enough for me to get a mortgage on a house in 1995.
So, at the tender age of 24, I became a homeowner. Ofcourse, for me, this meant the end of independence and moving back in with myparents in Botley.
I’d paid just £39,000 for the house, which turned out to beone of the best investments I had ever made. There had been a prolonged slumpin the housing market since a price crash at the start of the decade. With arecession following, houses were remarkably cheap.
It was a completely different scenario from the earlydecades of the next century. By 2020, it would not be possible to buy even aone-bedroomed house in Oxford for less than £200,000, putting homeownershipcompletely out of the reach of most local young people.
I’d had no way of knowing this when I’d bought the house thefirst time round: it seemed that I’d made a remarkably shrewd decision, but thereality was, I’d just got lucky with the timing.
I had lived in my starter home for five years, so it seemedodd when the day of my arrival approached. On the day after I’d moved in, Ifound the place full of boxes containing the sum total of my life’spossessions.
There were records, cassette tapes and CDs galore. Therewere at least four big boxes full of video cassettes which took up a ridiculousamount of room compared to the DVDs I’d later owned.
One series of Star Trek comprised thirteen videotapesalone and took up the whole top shelf of the video cabinet I’d kept them in.According to the price stickers on them, I’d paid £9.99 per tape from somewherecalled Our Price.
This seemed outrageous compared to the DVD box setscontaining an entire season which had barely cost me a tenner on the internet adecade or so later and took up a fraction of the space.
I had got used to prices getting cheaper over the years.Petrol and food were half the price now that they had been in 2010. Clearlywhen it came to home entertainment, the reverse was true.
Perhaps that was one of the reasons why the pubs were sobusy now; there was less to do at home and it was more expensive.
I also noticed that the price of drink seemed to havedeclined rapidly in pubs to a point where it was now quite competitive comparedto supermarket prices.
Nick and I were paying less than 2 quid a pint to drink inOxford now, and it seemed to be dropping by at least 10p a year. The price ofbeer in the supermarkets meanwhile didn’t seem to be getting any cheaper.
Whilst I was sorting through some of the boxes, I cameacross an old Victorian biscuit tin which I hadn’t seen before. I certainlydidn’t remember seeing it when Sarah and I had moved into the big house inNorth Oxford, so where it had gone by then I had no idea.
Curious, I opened it, and inside I found a veritabletreasure trove of letters and keepsakes.
There was a whole bunch of letters bound tightly by anelastic band. It was obvious from the back of the envelopes, smothered inhearts and kisses, and the faint scent of perfume, that they were love letters.
Fascinated, I opened them to discover that they were writtenin French. Fortunately my French was good, I’d taken it at A Level, accordingto my CV, and I had no difficulty at all in reading them.
“Mon cher Thomas,” began the first one, and I eagerlyread on.
The letters spanned a period of about a year, from August1987 to July 1988. They were passionate, romantic and beautifully written inold-fashioned ink upon scented coloured paper.
I had lived my life through an era of social media, textingand email so it was a joy to handle these real, handwritten letters. There werepictures, too, of a very pretty and dark-haired girl who could not have beenmore than sixteen.
The girl’s name was Simone, and it seemed that, just as withSarah, I had met her on holiday, this time in
