lonesome pining

Some people reading this blog must think rather poorly of my husband. How can he leave that poor girl, so educated and metropolitan, so beautiful and charming, so talented and yet so self effacing, up there in the cultural wasteland that is the north whilst he carries on working down in swinging London?' How, they ask, yes, how can I be sure of our marriage when he is living the bachelor life in a city of four million women? Well I tell them that my husband is not like other men and they should keep their personal opinions on relationships to themselves and not post them on the internet every day for the world to read. They say there is no such thing as love at first sight, but when I first laid eyes on those matinee idol looks, those tight Levis, and those cowboy boots I knew right then and there that he was the one to carry me off into the sunset on his white charger and yet also go shopping for shoes with. All he needs is a ten gallon hat and a cheroot and he could have walked right out of the screen during a showing of Blazing Saddles. He’s my lone ranger, my man with no name, my east, my north, my deep south and my wild west and I know that every fourth weekend he’ll walk in through that door with arrows in his hat, a six shooter in his pocket and bunch of Texaco flowers and sweep me off my feet with his lasso of love. But in between those weekends of steamed up windows, sitting in bed taking it in turns reading aloud from the Laura Ashley catalogue until we can no longer keep our hands off one another, when I’m all alone up here in the north with my Black Lace novels, My period home magazines and my printed out posts by Wife in the North, wistfully waiting for his call, my phone in my lap and set on maximum vibrate wondering oh when, oh when will I see my love again, he’s spending his evenings in his flat in London watching Brokeback Mountain with the red Indian from the Village People and thinking only of me.