Here is a flash piece on Obstacles to Love
He was
meant to be a Rhett Butler, a charming rake, or at least landed gentry like Mr
Darcy. Right? That’s what they all said. Loaded with pistol shot, roguish
tongue or a large dollop of pride, a country estate in Derbyshire, a townhouse in
Grosvenor Street Hanover Square
She’d been
stalking romantic heroes all her adolescent life, even problematic ones, the
likes of Heathcliff replete with venom and revenge and an inferiority complex.
To be fair her stalking was usually virtual, before virtual was a buzz word,
apart from the Science teacher.
Her mother
warned her she’d wear herself thin shadowing his every move about the town. She
did. And when she dreamt of riding off into the sunset with her beloved she was
vicariously acting out a sequence from a Robert Redford Western or an Onedin Line
episode, or onstage with Gilbert O’Sullivan who, to her crush- tinted eyes,
bore a resemblance to the victim of her imaginative peregrinations.
It was
hardly her fault. She was fed a diet of Hollywood Greats, Romantic English Classics
and a splice of Mills and Boon. And at least she wasn’t hankering for a Bogart;
that would come years later with the anti heroics of Luther and Dexter. Real
love was a decade or two away.
But once
she acknowledged her condition, underwent a detox programme, refrained from
imbibing books, film or media, suffered the inevitable irritability, sweating, vomiting and fatigue
she was on the road to recovery, deliverance, even salvation.
But she did marry a
man who, even they said, looked like James Onedin.
Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2019
I had never heard of the Onedin Line, but I just googled it and the resemblance is uncanny!!
ReplyDeleteA rough diamond and a sea-faring man... always knew...
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