Because I just set them up to knock them down

Our Director Writes

Diary of a Mature Student: Semester Two, Week Twelve

It's probably time to talk about The Girl.

It's been about eight weeks, after all.

Mature students get an odd perception when it comes to the opposite sex, dating and further such alien concepts. On my first go on the merry-go-round, there was a mature student - who ended up an object of mild ridicule thanks to his strange pony-tail and trying to relate punk to Shakespeare, sometimes bold, sometimes just odd - and he ended up dating what was One Of Us at the time, and they seemed... Very happy together. It helped that they were both functionally the same personality type, i.e. Alphas, really, ignoring anyone else's point-of-view if it didn't mesh with their own.

I don't know what happened to them. I hope nothing particularly tragic.

I have no romantic expectations upon my return to university, because being an Old Man surrounded by eighteen and nineteen-year old girls is a strange enough experience to begin with. Seriously, it is; it's difficult to put into words, somehow.

Maybe it's because I went back to university to, well, study; friendships are great, I've met a lot of people on roughly the same wavelength as me, and that's really good. But romance? Love? Tales of the heart? Oh no. No, no, no.

Part of this is because - charitably - I'm really not a catch. Chunky body type, prematurely grey temples, broke, student; ladies, I know the line stretches around the block, but you'll just have to wait your turn, because, obviously, I'm a busy man. [/sarcasm]

So it was kind of a shock when I ended up the object of some strange mildly romantic fascination, albeit all-too-briefly. A friend - a good friend, the sort who you can make laugh with only a few words, and who you can make light up with the right sentence - went from being friendly to being complementary, then being overly complementary, about my looks, my style (hah!) and various other personal attributes. Don't worry, I did check if she'd had a sight test recently.

After this, there was a day's grace, then the always amazing Let's Just Be Friends email.

And, curiously enough, I was okay with this. Because, as I say, Not A Catch as far as prime male rib goes. So I thought that was that done with, and we could just go on in some altered form and live with it.

Except, not so much.

I don't want this to be the sort of tale where I make myself sound perfect and the other person sound broken. I really don't. So in all honesty there were two awkward weeks where we still talked to each other - stilted, strange sentences, for the most part, with nothing personal or open to misinterpretation. At the time, my main thoughts were, well, such is life.

So when I thought it would thaw out after a while, I didn't realise quite how much of an error that was.

There then followed six weeks of the most blistering awkwardness I have ever experienced. It was like going straight from meeting someone and getting along to the post-divorce inevitably difficult interations without anything in between. For choice, she would not speak to me, and when she had to, I often wished she hadn't bothered. While helping a friend on a short film, we ended up in the same room for twenty minutes alone. In the words of Don Mclean, 'not a word was spoken'.

This continued up until the easter holidays, and I'm assuming it's continuing now because I haven't seen The Girl since then. Technically, before the end of the semester I will have to interact with her - i.e. be in the same lectures - three times. Which is going to be difficult, frankly, if things haven't changed at all. It would be nice to think that absence would make the heart grow fonder, but... It's just not going to happen.

It's been eight weeks of towering awkwardness, which is do-able; but the idea that I can't make this person that used to matter to me laugh anymore, or light up like she used to, is even more difficult to live with.

But live with it, obviously, I must. Let's put it to song;




Besides, what would my employers and my patron think if they thought I'd just gone back to university for the dating opportunities? That's a hell of an expensive dating service, even when you amortize the cost of camera hire...