Needless to say I was ridiculed mercilessly by Amelia and I didn’t get the girl either. My parents still laugh about that story now and it’s one that usually gets rolled out over the Christmas dinner table.
That was my first ever taste of heartbreak. Even at that tender age my heart was still rather bruised and my mum said I was upset for days about the fact that Emma would probably never want to marry me now.
I still know Emma to this day; she’s a dancer in Southampton. Our paths cross every now and again but thankfully I don’t think she remembers a thing about the snake episode. She’s still lovely but there’s never been any romance between us. Maybe the snake killed our love before it had even begun? Sadly I feel like that incident kind of set the tone for the next 20 years or so when it came to my love life.
It took a little time to recover from, but I wasn’t put off by that incident and so I went in search of the next young lady who would be sure to fall for my undeniable charms. Weirdly, this story also involves an animal (not in a bestiality way, dirty bastards!). The girl in question was Patricia Harris. We were both aged five when we first exchanged glances on our first day of prep school. I walked into class, probably wearing dungarees because I used to rock them, and there she was.
She had pigtails and freckles and she was American, so she seemed quite exotic. It took a while for sparks to fly, but eventually we bonded over our teacher’s missing hamster. Now, I wouldn’t normally advise using rodents as a way into a girl’s heart, but it worked in this case.
Mrs Bonham-Smith’s pet had been on the missing list for nearly a month and after a long grieving process for Bamster, everyone had given up hope of ever seeing her whiskery face again. It was widely assumed that the hamster had decided that being terrorised by children week in week out wasn’t what she wanted to do with her life, so she had escaped to try and find a better one.
We never expected to see Bamster again and I imagined her trying to make her long journey to the sewers of London with some sawdust tied up in a spotted handkerchief, dreaming of the big time.
One day Patricia and I were so bored we decided to have one last search around the classroom just in case she was hiding out, and amazingly we found her snuggled up to another fugitive hamster underneath a disused sink with what looked like about a thousand baby hamsters (dirty bitch).
Patricia and I were so excited, and it seemed like such a profound shared experience at the time that I honestly thought Patricia and I were meant to be together forever (of course the Green Card would also be a massive bonus). But unfortunately, as much as she appreciated our shared interests, she was still at the stage where she found boys annoying.
I recently tried to look Patricia up on Facebook to see what she’s up to these days, but I failed to find her. It may be 21 years later, she could be living anywhere in the world and look like Shrek’s arse by now, but one thing I’ve learned about romance is that you can find it in the most unexpected places with the most unexpected people.
I have never been one to live in the moment when it comes to relationships, even though I’m spontaneous in lots of other ways. Even when I was a child I was always fast-forwarding and thinking about marriage and kids and living happily ever after within days of meeting someone. I just loved the idea of marriage, which might have had something to do with my sister’s childhood fixation with Home and Away.
OK, so my love obsession didn’t make me the coolest kid in school, because the cool ones were often rebellious and rude, but I was a sensitive dreamer. I was pretty much the anti-poon. The other kids in my school used to take the piss out of me because I was always desperate to look after both people and animals, and I could often be found in the playing fields gazing at squirrels. Once I even took home a dead squirrel I’d found so I could put it on the nature table at school the next day. Nothing says nature like a rigamortis squirrel. My parents were horrified, but I just wanted to help. The poor little thing deserved a proper grave. I also once tried to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a moth. I really wish I was making that up because it sounds utterly ridiculous now I think about it, but I remember it so clearly. It happened on the same momentous day that Britney Spears released ‘Baby One More Time’ and whenever I hear that song it always reminds me of my attempt at giving CPR to, let’s face it, a fucking ugly butterfly.
OK, so I have always been, and probably always will be, a hopeless romantic, which has been my downfall time and time again. When I was about eight I was living in a place called Abbott’s Way in Southampton with my parents and Amelia. To all intents and purposes we were very happy in this fabulous house that had an amazing garden and tennis courts. My dad worked in property and my mum was a housewife. It was very much a cosy family home. Aside from my animal obsession, I was kind of like any other normal 8-year-old. I watched Pete’s Dragon on repeat and had unsuccessful tennis lessons. I thought myself incredibly lucky to be living in this amazing family and I didn’t really have a care in the world – my life was stable and wonderful. Or so I thought.
My parents were never that affectionate with each other when I was a child, to the point where I often used to try to sneak up on them after bedtime to see if I could catch them kissing just so I would know for sure that they loved each other.
So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when, on one grey, drizzly autumn day, everything changed. Amelia and I were sat watching Pete’s Dragon on TV when Mum and Dad walked into the sitting room. They sat down on our two pink pouffes – the height of early 90s chic – and Amelia and I knew straight away that they had something very serious to discuss with us.
I think it was Mum who took the stand first and announced in the kindest way possible that they were going to get divorced. At that age, we didn’t really understand what they meant at first and it was all very confusing, until they explained that although they were still going to be friends, they would no longer be married to each other.
They had seemed so content that it made no sense to me at all. I remember sitting very still and taking it all in. I just stared at them with a blank expression while my sister cried beside me. I think I was too young to really get my head around the enormity of what they were telling us, whereas Amelia was that bit older so she knew what it meant in the long term.
They tried to help us get to grips with the fact that they were going to be living apart, but I couldn’t understand why they didn’t love each other anymore. It took a long time for it to properly sink in, but once it did a small part of the fairytale had died.
I was worried that they wouldn’t be happy any more, and I wondered how they could bear being apart from each other when they had shared a house, a bedroom … everything. It seemed like a very odd thing to do, and in my eight-year-old mind I thought that maybe they would just start loving each other again and it would all be fine.
My sister and I used to watch the film The Parent Trap and discuss how we would use the same tactics to get our mum and dad back together. We thought if we could set up some cunning situations where they had to spend time with each other, they would fall back in love and live happily ever after. But of course that’s not how things work. It’s funny how a child’s mind thinks.
After the initial shock and sadness wore off I was secretly slightly happy when I realised that I would now have two lots of presents every Christmas and birthday. In fact, despite the divorce initially being a huge blow, I realised that the whole thing was actually going to work in my favour in the long term.
A new, weirdly exciting phase of my life was about to begin, and with more presents and two houses, I would surely look cool enough to pull any girl now … But while I was already mentally writing out extravagant gift lists, my sister was still distraught. In my child’s brain, I saw it as the start of a new chapter, whereas she saw it as the end of one. I guess everyone deals with divorce differently, and I think the best thing parents can do is to keep the kids out of it as much as possible.
My parents said they would make sure that both of my new houses had