Anniversary.

Exactly one year ago, Bluefish's plane was still yet to complete what amounted to more-or-less a full circuit of the earth.

Yet to complete, but I waited up all night nevertheless - it was still no match for the 24-hour flight she was undertaking, and I'd never have been able to sleep anyway.

The weight of months was upon us, for time hangs heavy when the person towards which everything is directed is located so remotely. The paradox is that a gesture made on a webcam or a voice softening the eardrum through a telephone is necessarily less intimate than its equivalent when experienced directly - yet for all that, I would argue that the former means more.

The anguish of separation - even from that which you have always been separated - is profound enough to magnify every action. I remember being heartbroken by the sight (through her webcam) of Bluefish dangling a leg off the end of her bed as she laid down to type to me. I could observe the movement of her foot, fractions of a rotation, and for reasons I've never been able to fully understand, this caused the most intense feeling of sadness I have experienced. Separation is the opposite of the law of diminishing returns: the less reason there is to become emotional over something, the more likely it is to happen.

I recall being hemmed into the London-bound train carriage - standing room all the way, at something after six in the morning, and then the chaos of the Tube through to Heathrow; clinging onto the loops of rubber suspended from the ceiling to stay balanced in the manner of an acrobat or a windsurfer.

Hatton Cross was the name of the last stop before the airport, and this location I felt was the point beyond which there was no return. In an example of linear time, everything behind Hatton Cross represented a break with mere history, and everything after it the limitless beauty and potential offered by Bluefish.

Now I realise Hatton Cross was no more than a dead end, and of course Bluefish herself would sink without trace after eight more months or so. Older and wiser, I mark the anniversary of her arrival as morning begins to emerge. Later I shall light a candle - as a species we represent past love with the hot little glow which is extinguished all too quickly - and watch intently as it burns itself out, because it doesn't know how to do anything else.

Liverpool (I).

With a little smile, I realise that casting off the views imposed on a child by its parents must be a sign of increased wisdom.

I'm only half-serious when the thought occurs to me (is it normal to joke with one's own mind, to deceive it even though the deception was cooked up in that same apparatus?) but nevertheless I have disposed of any number of 'facts' which coloured my formative years:

• if you buy a piece of music by a gay artist, he or she puts a percentage of the money into a fund to promote 'gay propaganda'
• every politician who has ever lived has got their nose stuck fast in the trough;
• it is not possible for 'the likes of us' (working-class northern English stock) to do anything of significance between taking our first breath and our last;
• that bastard Gerry Adams deserves to die;
• them what steal should 'ave their bloody 'ands chopped off, an' all;
• dun't ivver go to Liverpool. A tha listenin', mun? Dun't ivver go. The'll bloody knife thi when tha at cashpoint, an' then the'll laugh abart it. The' reight gets!

When I was four years old, it was the rite of passage in a boy's life that I should choose my football team. It didn't take long - a quick glance at the top of the old Division One told me all I needed to know - I'd follow Liverpool.

Thus ensued my father's ranting about the place, and everyone associated with it. I'm not taking you to Liverpool! We'll never get out alive! As soon as we open our mouths, that's it - well be dead. Dead!

I never managed to sample the dangers of Liverpool for myself until 2008, ironically when I went to watch a football match against the team I'd adopted when I was a child. FA Cup fever had hit Barnsley when Liverpool came out of the hat, and all six thousand tickets for away fans had gone within the space of 24 hours.

I was as angry as I ever become when I failed to get hold of one. What an affront - to lock me out when I've travelled all over the place for 13 years watching mainly dross! All those cold nights in the middle of nowhere putting my own ambitions on hold, only to get back home at four in the morning, disappointed and exhausted!

After weeks of wrangling with my conscience, when I'd already decided to break off my support once and for all, I hit upon one last desperate plan: a ticket tout! To cut a long story short, I eventually coughed up £92 for a £29 ticket - in the wrong area, that is the Liverpool section, of the ground.

Remember - open your mouth, and you're dead. Dead!

Flirting.

What actually occurs when two people flirt with each other?

I ask not because it happens very often - or, indeed, at all - but because I wonder whether or not it is one of a class of behaviours which are similar to each other, even if their intended outcomes differ vastly.

When we flirt, the most important thing is the suspension of disbelief (those words again) with a view to breaking down a fictitious barrier. That is: I must convince somebody who is already aware of their attractiveness (to me) that I am attracted to them - while the attractive other similarly waits to be convinced of what they already know. Flirting is no more than going around in circles, testing boundaries, and withdrawing in shyness (or not) when the offer of a concrete sexual encounter is made.

Should the sexual encounter ever take place, then the two people concerned can never again flirt with the same level of intensity and pressure, for the encounter served to prick that particular bubble. Flirtation is, as observed by Kundera, the promise of a sexual encounter without the guarantee that the promise will ever be fulfilled - it is an anti-promise, but no less sincere than that.

Flirtation, then, requires us to dig for things that are already obvious; to exert ourselves by running on the spot forever in order to preserve the thing we cannot vocalise, but which has already been released with smiles, with the subtle brushing of fingertips against fingertips, in a hundred other similar ways.

What other behaviours are there that require us to hold back from expressing the (obvious) truth? There must be hundreds, but the one most obvious as I write is anti-flirting: if the goal of flirting is to fuse two people together, then its opposite is when a couple have sprung apart, and are at pains to keep the extent of their antipathy under wraps.

I see it with my father (the leaver) and my mother (left behind) and how the latter exhausts herself to keep him in 'ignorance' of her loathing whenever he pays her a visit. As soon as the door slams shut when he leaves for work, she'll hiss: thank God for that! I couldn't wait for him to piss off!

If flirting is a tentative light shone into the future, then anti-flirting is more than an assessment of the past - it is its repudiation and negation. It is a long sigh of deep regret; the dismantling of history; the enduring expression of disgust, disappoinment and betrayal.

England.

With more then two weeks to go until the start of the World Cup, the English flags are already multiplying: flying from poles outside public houses; attached to cars; glued to windows.

The time is almost upon us, in other words, to celebrate our arbitrary nationality, and to suspend our collective disbelief, because this is certainly England's time (as is every other tournament since time immemorial.)

The time is almost upon us to heal the tribal rifts which we spend much of our time discussing or thinking about. One nation, bound together by the red cross of St. George, and heading for certain victory in the African winter.

So far, so good - except I want no part of it, at least not as far as England are concerned. The country I was born in, and in which I have lived all my life, has no hold over me. If nationality is indeed arbitrary, then I elect to choose differently. If a man can complain that he's trapped inside a female body, I can complain that I too belong somewhere equally distant.

What does it mean to immerse oneself in the fortunes of a country's football team? If we conclude that supporters are not sheep-like enough to follow blindly, it means that they do so in genuine expectation that a golden age is imminent - an event, like winning the World Cup, of which they can say: I lived through it, and I believed. World Cups are about the arrogant assumption of one nation's superiority over another - distant glory with their name on it, and nobody else's.

I see it for the nonsense that it is. Any success is transient and fleeting, and someone else will most likely come along in four years' time and wipe you off the map, anyway. I see it for the nonsense that it is, but I buy into the same craving for brief recognition with my club side. Standing in a half-empty stadium on a dark Tuesday night, arms aloft as the rain falls, celebrating a scrappy 1-0 win as though it was.... well, the World Cup itself, no less.

Ah, the roots of this arrogance are inevitably selfish - acclaim for that which I believe in, and, equally importantly, effacing the ambitions of everyone else. What is this resonant of? As with everything else in the last three months, I of course think of the ubiquitous Bluefish.

A love deeper, stronger and more committed than any other? One which eats distance and doubt for breakfast? An unrealistic love, a difficult love - the destiny of each of us was the other, and nobody could shake that belief. England World Cup campaigns, and Bluefish and I - rooted in delusion, and ending in disaster, once since the 1960s, and the other since February.

Change.

The worst thing about losing Bluefish, I realise, is that things are never going to be the same again.

Your author is a great believer in the pessimistic idea that some events cut so deeply that there can be no prospect of ever fully recovering from them. Like a shadow, they are carried everywhere.

There's a surplus of expectation here, too, that is sufficient to freeze a person into their past. It is wise to expect nothing from anybody, even if they've gone to the effort of committing the rest of their days to you. As soon as this sentimentality and sincerity is bought into, it creates the potential for disappointment, and this is the worst feeling of all.

Bluefish was always warned: expect nothing. It was repeated so often, this repudiating force that pushed us apart as we tried to cuddle together, that it became a motto, a catechism. On our better days, we would announce - I'm nothing without you! The rest of the time, expect nothing! fell down out of the sky as rain, caught her breath as we were about to kiss.

Like the child who is filled with tales of foreboding as life proceeds much the same as it always has, though, I soon forgot the message. It had been said too many times without Bluefish ever doing a disappearing act, and I soon learned to put it alongside such discarded ideas as phrenology and the steady-state theory of the universe.

The most important thing of all had been forgotten in the fug and madness of love - no more relevant than a nursery rhyme or a maintenance manual for a Trabant. Expect nothing; it is more significant an imperative than breathing.

The worst thing about losing Bluefish, I realise, is that things are never going to be the same again: but this need not be the disaster I envisage. I complain bitterly, anyway, that nothing ever changes, and all the while I cling on pathetically to the comfort of routine. Now it is a foregone conclusion that some subtle alterations of the self must occur, and this causes protest and frustration.

Having pinned all my hopes on getting her to England, and having now begun the slow process of realising that it is not going to happen, this new, disappointing truth seeps in between thoughts, startles the unaware self, manifests itself in dreams. Change uproots the comatose self from the mattress, it rattles the letterbox, screams from the front page of newspapers.

For the inert among us, change is not so much accomplished as implemented. Having felt certain she would be here, I now begin the process of unlearning all that had been internalised.

Mute (I).

When we meet, we agreed, it's unreasonable to expect us to speak to each other.

With the pressure of six months' worth of anticipation finally lifted, it would be as much as we could do not to float away into oblivion, like balloons.

(I have been ill in the past. Not life-threatening conditions, but run-of-the-mill virii and ailments. Every time, when I am beginning to feel better, I am stronger and more able than when I have been completely well for a long period of time.

The removal of the virus is such a release that, for a couple of days, I am liberated from unhappiness and uncertainty in a way that no artillery of pills has ever accomplished. No matter how pleasing this enhanced self is, though, the experience of being light-headed and light-limbed is so strange that it takes time to become accustomed to it. By the time I am thus accustomed, it has gone, until the next bout of cold or influenza.)

Similarly, the ballast of time and hope which had been all Bluefish and I had ever known would no longer continue to weigh us down, and the attendant sensation of vertigo would be enough to occupy our thoughts. So, in respect of this fact, she and I planned not to speak for a while on the day she flew in.

Instead, we would sit and look at each other, and if we needed to communicate, we should do so with text messages, or instant messenger running off a couple of laptops, or with a series of cards on which we could write, as well as others which had been pre-prepared:

HELLO!

HI.

I HOPE YOU HAD A GOOD FLIGHT.

YES, THANKS. AS GOOD AS COULD BE EXPECTED.

:)

For months, we genuinely believed this is how it would work, and it caused much amusement as well as demonstrating beyond all doubt the unusual nature of our love. Not speaking but writing, in respect of our own peculiar circumstances and deficits.

Heroism.

Sometimes your author can think of nothing worth living for, and concludes that suicide is the solution to the riddle of human existence.

More often than not, though, I can think of nothing worth dying for. At one time, I'd have said Bluefish - when our love was at its apex, before the decline, before the hospital that broke us. (Indeed, the mental store of romantic images demands that this is the case. What greater act of devotion is there than for my expiring soul to evaporate against the tongue of the beloved, having just stopped a knife?)

At other times, I pick out the white flashes of Danny's fur against the pitch dark, and I imagine that I'd sacrifice myself to save him. Then I think about it a bit harder. For an unappreciative cat? Really?

As with moments of serene happiness, these episodes must necessarily be rare. They are the times when I shed my own skin, like a dirty old snake, and appreciate the universe with the purity of a baby.

Inevitably, I express the small store of things worth dying for in the context of my own experience: this woman, this cat. It is possible to point at them with the finger, like a child - behold the things this individual holds are more important than his own continued existence.

It is different with groups of people, with communities. Whereas I place living, breathing beauty
ahead of everything else, groups of people are prepared to sacrifice themselves for ideas. How many people have died in the name of 'England,' without ever stopping to think that it doesn't actually exist? Like the ever-evasive constituents of the atom, the meaning and significance of the word slips away from us as soon as we begin to think about it hard enough.

If not a war, then a political struggle - fighting in the name of the blue flag, or the red one; the one that will liberate us from our present bastard state through the mechanism of change (which is itself never really defined, either.)

England; The Party; Jesus Christ Almighty; the secret of the Rosicrucians; a collective hypnosis propagates throughout when groups of people put the interests of an idea above their own selfish wishes. The momentary certainty that Danny is worth turning it in for is re-inforced by the madness and pressure of the crowd, but I'd never die for that. Oh, for the idea of Cat, of Beauty, of Numbers, of Poetry, though!

Only that which we cannot grasp is ever enough to obsess us enough to do the deed. Die for a cat, and you are a fool. Die for Bluefish, and you are a (flawed) hero. Submit yourself in the name of politics or truth or the Platonic Forms, though, and truly one becomes immortal.