The most beautiful woman I ever went out with was a veterinary nurse called Lisa. We met through a mutual and began with one of those memorable evenings.
She laughed a lot, touched my forearm every so often, looked like she listened and smiled right through me. I kissed her onto a taxi and skipped home like a 14-year-old, much to the amusement of the whores on my road.
I didn’t know it at the time but she had had a thing for me a few years previously when she shared a house with a mate, but I was at the height of my dog days and never gave her a second glance.
By the time I actually paid any attention to her she had married.
It probably was better that we were star-crossed, because I was a broke student and she still loved her husband.
It was only ever going to have a finite run but Lisa had an ace up her sleeve that had me hanging on until the last feasible moment – she was a part-time stripper.
I was fascinated but torn. Half of me wanted to tell all my pub blokes but half of me wanted to treat this with the maturity it fully deserved and say nothing.
Good oul Lisa made it easy for me, and in a delicious moment of multiple jaw-drop, told them herself.
My social currency went through the roof. Even the burds in our posse thought I was supercool.
However, our opportunities for congress were limited by so many implacable constraints, and if we got any time of togetherness it was invariably limited by whether her mate Janine had been clued up in time. Otherwise, it was a tough adieu before midnight.
So, to spend more time with my beauty, I took to accompanying her on her stripping nixers in the guise of her minder. We had some delightful times criss-crossing the back roads of Hampshire in her big yellow Land Rover.
It was on one of these nights, somewhere outside of Winchester in the autumn of ‘97, that she recounted to me the best advice ever.
Lisa was the product of a single parent family. For obvious reasons I never got to meet her mum but I wish I could have. Lisa loved her dearly and, with a personality that would’ve melted Jesus, was a living credit to her.
They had one of those extraordinarily close relationships and could talk about anything. And I mean anything.
Lisa had told her mum a night or so before about a friend of hers who was shortly getting married and had mentioned how odd it was that her friend had never given her fiance a blow-job.
Lisa’s mum tutted and uttered the pearler that should be in all mother-daughter manuals: “Well, she’d better learn...or he’ll wander.”