My ex-boyfriend

I once had an eccentric boyfriend who tunelessly played sitar and was a Macrobiotic nut. He tried to educate me to his way of hippy drippy thinking, saying I was ‘yang’ and should eat ‘ying’ food. I didn’t know what he was going on about, but pretended to be wildly enthusiastic at his eccentric views on eating. He was very good looking, so I just looked at his double eyelashes, smiled and said nothing. I even pretended to worship the disgusting grub at the local Macrobiotic restaurant he used to drag me to, which was full of longhaired men and women who all looked like they were dying of consumption. And, they way they greedily tucked into their brown rice, they behaved like they hadn’t eaten in weeks. ‘You’re a true Macrobiotic, because you eat such small mouthfuls,’ my boyfriend used to say admiringly. Little did he realise that the reason I pecked daintily at the food, was because I thought it was truly revolting. Give me a juicy steak and French fries any day, but naturally I kept my mouth shut when I wasn’t elegantly thrusting dainty globs of mushy muck down my throat.

I wasn’t concerned about not having a good meal when I went out with him, because as soon as I returned home that evening, I devoured the contents of the fridge to make up for my lack-lustre meal. He was very hippy-drippy, for he loved to predict his fortune every day by throwing some rusty coins on top of his smelly copy of the I Ching, which he described as the book of changes. I didn’t understand why he did this on a daily basis as I could have told him he would never change. I didn't have to be a fortune teller to predict what his future would be: twanging his sitar in bed and picking fungi mushrooms out of his nylon bed sheets. If all that wasn’t dreary enough, he also quoted long incomprehensible passages from another hippy trippy book, “The Tibetan book Of The Dead’ in a reverential tone like he was in a cathedral. If he had recited chapters from a chick lit novel, I would have been interested, but I concealed my boredom by removing a chiffon scarf from his lampshade and wrapped it round my head, so he woldn't see me yawning. But, he was so gorgeous – he had long curly blond hair and saucer big blue eyes - I forgave him everything, and that’s why I went out with him for a week. I might have gone out with him a bit longer, but when he started to light joss sticks, kneel down and chant for hours like a demented, howling wolf, that was the end forever.

Copyright: Frances Lynn, 2006