If any four words managed to unwittingly and negatively confine the nature of my early relationship with Marie, then 'no bites no scratches' were they.

Marie and I were clearly cultivating a relationship for ourselves but at that time we were both seeing other people.  I don't remember talking much about the other people we were respectively seeing at the time and the passing years may have faded my exact memory of the course of events.  But we both knew of the other people and largely ignored the fact that they existed whilst we were together. 

I think also that there were a number of elements of our respective pasts which we chose at the same time not to mention to each other and not ask about. 

An example of this, trivial as it may seem, was that I always told Marie I was a different age every time she asked.  There are 12 years difference in age between Marie and I (I think !!) and I never enjoyed owning up to that (still don't).  So I would always make up some number which I thought I could get away with (sometimes still do !!).  I remember very clearly being woken up by the telephone one Sunday morning whilst I was still living in Manchester and Marie and Paul were filling in the papers for your legal adoption.  She explained what she was doing and that she needed to know my date of birth.  I knew immediately that the game was up and that I had to give her the correct information.  I also realized just what an enormous hole I had been digging for myself over all those years while I had been making up my age.

Well I took in a large breath of air and told her that of course she knew that it was the 11th December.  But what she really needed to know was the year.  I thought I could let her down gently by telling her that there was a 5 in the year, hoping that she would think 1965 (not a long way away from her birth year), but then I had to tell her that there was in fact another 5 in it as well.  Silence at the other end of the phone.  Then with the realisation that my birth year was 1955 she repeated it back to me with a certain amount of incredulity.  Clearly Paul was overhearing this conversation at which point he broke into fits of laughter and, quite rightly, proceeded to lay into Marie for molesting an old age pensioner !!  We all enjoyed the moment and each took there opportunity to make as much from this confession as we could.  I have to say though that at that point I had known Marie for some 7 or 8 years and it had clearly gone past the point of being SO important, but it just seemed more fun to continue 'the game'.

To be completely fair though there were other things that each of us chose to ignore which I think had an ultimate bearing on some of the misunderstandings regarding the true feelings which we had about each other at the time.  We didn't lie to each other, we just didn't volunteer the truth.

Had we been completely honest with each other I think that things would have been different.  Conversations which we have had with each other long after we stopped being lovers would bear this out.

In order to understand why I said 'No Bites No Scratches' I think I need to briefly explain a little of my relationship history up to that point to set things in context.

Ever since my late teens I had 'done the right thing' as far as relationships were concerned.  I met a girl when I was 18 who I would eventually marry.  I went to teacher training college, qualified and immediately got a job at a very good comprehensive school just 1 mile away from where I lived with my parents in Fleetwood.  I was 21, teaching 11 - 16 year olds mathematics and computing.

So very shortly after I was 22 I married and bought a new house in a nice area of Poulton-le-Fylde.  Everything seemed to the outside world as if everything was perfect.  I was on that nice steady road of respectability and traditional values.  And I was a willing victim on that journey.  But by the time I had got to 26 I was beginning to think that maybe there was more to life than I had so far experienced and, in all honesty, wondered if I really did love the girl I'd married, perfectly nice as she was.

This really was the beginning of the process which saw me leave teaching and start working with ICL (as it was at that time).

I started a relationship with a girl who I used to teach, and at that point I really did know that whatever it was I felt for the girl I married, it wasn't love.  So to cut a very long story short I left the marital home, left teaching, started work at ICL in Manchester and was soon divorced.  Moving house is supposed to be stressful.  Heaven knows what getting divorced, moving house and moving jobs is supposed to be, but I have to say that it was a great move for me (all of them) and I don't really remember stress playing a great part in it.  Besides, I don't really do stress.  I tend to get on with it and deal with it as it occurs - of course it could just be a lack of understanding of the true gravity of a situation, so it wouldn't worry me anyway !

Well, I spent 5 very happy years with my new love but sadly it wasn't to last longer than that.

With the ending of that relationship I decided that as my work was in Manchester I had better move there.  I was staying more and more in Manchester after work and the journey back to the coast was beginning to get too much after a days work.  Besides that, the friends I had at the coast were largely those of my ex girlfriend and me, so it was easier to move away and start again.

'Starting again' meant that I had to go out and make new friends which definitely is easier said than done.  However I'm quite a confident kind of guy at times, mindful of not trying to dominate a situation and generally I can get on with most people for at least an hour.  After that you really do have to have something in common with someone if you're not going to get bored.  So I am quite happy to throw myself into situations where you need to meet new people and find some common ground.

In order to do this I joined a kind of club which basically organised lots of different events each month which you could just turn up at.  It could be motor racing, water skiing, hang gliding, volleyball or just going for dinner.  It seemed just what I needed.  Unfortunately the vast majority of people who also attended seemed to need it much more than me, and in the main were a little socially inept and although perfectly nice, they mostly tested my hour timeframe on numerous occasions.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to put myself above them, after all at that point I had few friends, but they just weren't my kind of people in the main.

However I did meet three girls who I ended up having a long and happy friendship with and although I have lost touch with 2 of them, the third is like a sister to me and her Mum and Dad like mine.

Well, the point about all of this is that I was starting to enjoy being a little mysterious with these new people who I would come across at these meetings (not my three friends though, they knew the real me) and not quite telling them everything about me, because frankly I didn't want them to know.

I guess that there was an element of this with Marie and there were just a couple of things which I never told her until it was a little too late, as you will discover.  But as well as never telling her my age, I never told her that I had been married.  This isn't unusual though, as I don't tell many people.  I think I felt that there is some kind of stigma or acknowledgement of failure associated with being divorced and as there are no children involved in my case, well I don't see the need to wear it on my sleeve like some kind of badge.

I think also that I don't want to be categorised.  I never tick the box labelled 'Divorced' on those forms asking for marital status.  To date I always tick 'single' and will continue to do so until I am married.

So, the experiences which I gained when I moved to Manchester allowed me to be a little more elusive and frankly, I had a good time. 

My friendship with my three girl friends from the club continued to grow and one Christmas we decided that we would go on a skiing holiday to America.  A place called Keystone in Colorado.  The reason I mention this is because on the journey back I met an air stewardess who was working on my flight back from Chicago to Manchester.  Unusually for her, we chatted lots all the way back and as I was sat right by the galley, had lots of opportunity to do so.  Well the top and bottom of it was that we exchanged telephone numbers and she would then come over each week to see me. 

Just imagine, someone, who happened to be very attractive, articulate, intelligent and lived in Chicago was changing her schedules so that the one flight a week which she worked, she would come to see me in Manchester.  She could go to Hawaii, Aruba, Paris or Milan, and she chose Manchester.  It wasn't love, but it stroked my ego and, if I'm honest, was probably just what I needed to let me know that I was an OK kind of guy.

I had become very friendly with 3 or 4 guys at work and one in particular had been going through marital problems, similar to what I had.  However he had children and couldn't be quite so cavalier with his lifestyle.  However it didn't stop him having a relationship with a girl we worked with, who also happened to be married.  We would confide in each other about our various activities and it became more about two naughty little boys telling each other just how naughty they'd been.  I'm not Catholic, but maybe it was some kind of confession type experience.

Well, my friend coined the phrase 'No Bites No Scratches' in order that he and his equally married lover would be able to go back to their respective partners with no physical evidence of the activities they had been up to.  I guess it also had an interpretation that there was an understanding and acceptance of there being more than one person that each was involved with.  A kind of unfaithfulness by mutual consent.

For whatever reason I hung on to this phrase as being representative of the type of casual relationship that I wanted at that time.  Despite being very much attracted to Marie, I don't think I felt that I wanted to make a commitment to her.  But equally, I never quite knew if that was what she wanted from me.  I knew she was still seeing her boyfriend but I chose not to question her too much about it as I was happy to be her lover, rather than her boyfriend.  And besides, it seemed to add another dimension to our relationship - that of forbidden fruit tasting the sweetest.

So the experiences of the immediate past led me to be a little elusive, slightly enigmatic and more than a little cavalier with relationships.  So much so that when a real one turned up I didn't really recognise it and treated it like all the others.  Now that really was stupid !

What I didn't realise at the time was just exactly what Marie thought about me and how, if I'd only been a little more confident, things would probably have turned out very differently.  It was to be a few years down the line before I knew that what I had felt for her, she had also felt for me.