Dumping grounds

Last night found me sitting under a gorgeous beamed ceiling in a beautiful old pub somewhere in Buckinghamshire, enjoying dinner, drinks and a chinwag with two of my very oldest friends. I’ve known Ivor for over twenty-five years. Our friendship is older than at least one of my friends. I’ve known Wolf for over twenty years. Back at the start he wasn’t called Wolf, but if I reveal his real name he’s likely to come down to Reading and kneecap me and I wouldn’t be much use to you then.

To the casual observer, we would have seemed like three men in our mid-thirties having a companionable time. Anyone looking slightly closer would not have taken long to realise that we were three sixteen year olds playing at being grown-up and not quite managing to carry it off. This often happens and it’s nearly always my fault. It didn’t take me long to lower the tone, as usual, a trend which culminated in me getting a variety of creatively glowering looks from a woman at the neighbouring table while I told Wolf and Ivor about a particularly grisly sexual fantasy I read in a book somewhere once (that‘s my story, and I‘m sticking to it). I still say Ivor started it with those jokes about shagging his mother. Or was it mine? I forget.

Anyway, the other thing about the three of us becomes apparent pretty early on to any bystander who’s paying attention. Ivor plays an active part in running his family business, hires and fires people and drives a car so trouser-poppingly sexy that even I am tempted to give him a blowie after fifteen minutes cradled in the luxurious leather of the passenger seat. Wolf is a very tall chap with long hair, a beard, a black hat, two crutches leaned precariously against the seat next to him and a large and intimidatingly noisy motorbike. I know my way round a wine list, have managed to fool an employer into keeping me on, a woman into marrying me and harbour aspirations of one day describing myself as a writer in polite society without having to add an apologetic cough afterwards.

But you can tell we’re all geeks.

The thing is, it never leaves you: once a geek, always a geek. You can cut your hair, get smaller glasses, get contacts, put your Dungeons and Dragons books in the attic, stop wearing cardigans, start wearing cardigans again, touch somebody’s knockers, have sex, do whatever you like. It doesn’t change a thing. The sign of the geek is on you forever, and we can tell our own kind.

It’s not all bad. The stigma of the geek has slowly faded over the years. Part of this is the way that technology has become so ubiquitous that knowing something about it has no longer become the province of the specky and special. You need to understand this stuff to survive now. But back when I was at school being in computer club was tantamount to joining a club called “Girls: Not For Me”. And that’s before we get on to the Dungeons and Dragons. What it all amounted to was a thoroughly sorry situation where everyone else was heavy petting and drinking cider while me and my friends were sitting in a draughty hut after school rolling plastic polyhedrons and pretending to be a Level 8 paladin called Rufus de Fuckwit or suchlike.

In reality, we were all Level 20 virgins and everybody knew it.

They were simple pleasures which would hold the attention of any teenager today for about three minutes, approximately two of which would be spent swearing. But the thing is, we were the last generation to understand the concept of delayed gratification. Computer games took fifteen minutes to load on a cassette tape, during which time you got jagged lines going up and down the screen and heard what sounded - to all intents and purposes - like a very early and primitive rave record composed on a Stylophone. Whole summers were occupied with a computer game which took up slightly less memory than the average irritating signature on emails I receive every day. If you wanted to own something you had to save up money, sometimes for several months. Whenever you sent off for anything by mail order, it took 28 days. There was no alternative. And in those days 28 days was no time at all.

In that context an adolescence lived in the imagination, in a world where me and my friends could be heroes, be powerful, be important, was the closest to instant gratification we were likely to get. Unless you counted eating a packet of Nice N’ Spicy Nik-Naks in under sixty seconds.

This was all well and good, but being a geek doesn’t prepare you for girls. Not going out with them: all those challenges were a long way off. We had to attract them in the first place, and that was hard enough given our lack of even rudimentary social skills. In many ways, it was hardest on Mike. In the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is king, and in our fiefdom of geekery Mike was definitely the lord of the manor. He was good-looking, and if he could have escaped long enough he might have had a normal childhood after all. He did get his chance though, when we were about sixteen. He was asked out by Sarah, one of the prettier girls in our year.

We all looked on with envy as the big day approached. We knew exactly what was going to happen and it filled us all with dread. He was going to get a girlfriend, become one of them and leave us all behind. We would have one less house to play Dungeons and Dragons in, and someone would have finally left our sinking ship of spoddery. Mike had prepared the date with painstaking attention to detail which was utterly out of character. The outfit, the meal, the feature attraction, nothing was left to chance. He turned up at her house in his brand new brown leather blouson. They hopped on a bus into Reading for dinner at McDonalds. Then they went to see a brand new film which was getting rave reviews. It was called Silence Of The Lambs.

Of course, Mike’s meticulous plans had ignored the fact that Sarah was a militant vegetarian and so after what must have been a nightmare first date for her they never saw one another again. Once a geek, always a geek was suddenly a very comforting realisation for those of us who had feared abandonment and, disgracefully, we all commiserated with Mike publicly but celebrated in private.

Eventually, we all managed to learn how to trick girls into liking us, but I think the other thing that unites geeks is that for some reason women dump geeks far more cruelly than they dump normal human beings. Between us, me and my friends have managed to clock up some pretty impressively callous ways to receive the P45 of love. Mine have actually been pretty tame - I remember being dumped just after my eighteenth birthday by a girl called Cathryn. The reason she gave was that she wasn’t in love with me, which I thought was a little premature given that we’d only been dating for a fortnight. It made the way I had lavished her with fine food at the Berni Inn steakhouse feel like a total waste of money, but what hurt more is that she had represented the best chance I could possibly imagine of seeing some real boobs in 3D. It was back to the drawing board.

I got the last laugh in this instance because, last time I heard, Cathryn was married to a man so boorish that he made Mel Gibson look like Noel Coward. She met him at the Rotary Club in her twenties, the Rotary Club being an organisation nobody in their right mind under forty would join. This could logically mean only one thing - that he wasn’t in his right mind - and so it proved. Apparently his party piece was to demonstrate with Cathryn, fully clothed, what their favourite sexual positions were to house guests, to her immense mortification. Poor Cathryn - she dumped me at sixteen because she wasn’t in love with me and her cosmic reward was to be married to a man nobody could love without the aid of a lobotomy. I’m not bitter, but it’s nice to see that karma was in my corner for once.

But the real benchmarks for callous dumping were those of some of my fellow geeky schoolmates. Mike set the standard at university when he went round to visit his girlfriend. She was in the shower but told him to sit in the kitchen and make himself comfortable. He saw a piece of paper in his girlfriend’s writing on the kitchen table, tucked under an envelope. Unable to resist peeking he retrieved it only to find it was a half written letter from his girlfriend to a man she was also shagging asking him to be patient while she got round to dumping Mike.

As a suicide note for the entire relationship, it proved to be remarkably effective.

One of my other fellow geeks from school was called Dan. It’s safe to say that he was probably the unluckiest person in love I have ever met. For instance, he managed once to get dumped by email by a girl he’d started dating. Nothing out of the ordinary there, you might think, except that they met at work. Not just that, but they still worked together. In the same office, three desks apart. Apart from being dumped by fax, or receiving a Dear John letter starting To whom it may concern it was difficult to imagine being dispensed with using greater indifference.

That was small beer to Dan though, as by then he had recovered from the most humiliating dumping I’ve ever heard of. While studying at Portsmouth, he developed a crippling infatuation for a married woman he met down his local pub. They began a torrid affair and Dan harboured fantasies that she would leave her husband and move in with him. He was even prepared to bring up her son in a ready-made family, which is admirable behaviour in an adult and depressingly needy and deluded behaviour in a 19 year old student. Shortly after that Dan dropped out of university and, by the sounds of it, his paramour suddenly realised that their situation was about as viable as a Paris Hilton bid for the Nobel Prize for Physics or Great Yarmouth's bid to host the 2020 Olympics.

There then followed anguished weeks of Dan stalking the woman by phone begging her to reconsider her decision. Eventually, to his joy, she weakened and agreed to meet him in a deserted car park in Portsmouth. Dan prepared, just as Mike had for his trip to see Silence Of The Lambs all those years ago, to the nth degree. He worked out what he was going to say. He worked out what she would say in response, about how it could never work. He took all of her arguments and decided exactly how he would convince her on every single point. It was like the job interview of his life and nothing was left to chance as he got on the train.

It was a dark miserable night when Dan got to the car park. There was no sign of her as he waited in the drizzly gloom. Then, from the distance, he saw a pair of headlights approaching. He ran his speech over in his mind one last time, getting ready to use it. But the headlights showed no signs of slowing down.

If anything, they were speeding up.

Dan only realised at the last minute that the driver was trying to run him over. He stumbled out of the way in the nick of time, landing in a grubby puddle. He saw the woman’s husband in the driving seat. That explained everything, he thought, the husband had obviously found out what was going on and turned up to thwart the path of true love. There could be no other explanation.

This theory only lasted as long as it took for the car to swing round and try to mow him down again. Dodging again, he saw his lover’s face sneering in the passenger seat. She appeared, if anything, to be cheering her husband on.

I’m sorry to say that at the time, I found Dan’s story more than faintly hilarious. It was entertaining just as Mike’s heroic failure with Sarah the vegetarian had been entertaining. I wasn’t at all a nice person back then and I was living proof that there was no honour among geeks.

It took me many years to realise that every funny story hides a heartbreak, because you don’t begin to understand that until you’ve been on the receiving end of one that‘s been custom made, precisely designed and specially delivered, just for you. For most people, tragically, it's the most bespoke thing anybody will ever give you. What’s more, you don’t fully understand it until you’ve been the person dishing that heartbreak out to somebody else.

In my case, to my eternal shame, that involved telling a girlfriend I was going to London to “do some thinking” only to return a week later shaking, grey and cowardly, in the passenger seat of a removal van driven by my mother to pick up all my stuff. But that’s another story, for another time. And on this occasion, for once, “another time” probably means “never”.

Because I’m more disappointed in myself for that than I ever could be for being in computer club.