Love and loss | 2 February 2008

Tom proudly showed me a video clip on his mobile phone of his latest girlfriend doing a striptease. Confident girl. The tattoos must have cost a fortune. ‘So who’s this one?’ I said. 

‘The first time I woke up beside her, I thought, “Oh no! What’s this?” But I’ve got to hold both my hands up,’ he said, holding both his hands up, ‘she’s grown on me and now I want to spend the next 45 years with her. Jerry, you must meet her.’

Tom is a self-employed painter and decorator. The last time I met him he’d moved in with a customer, a Swedish businesswoman who lives in the sort of Devon cottage one sees depicted on the lids of shortbread biscuit tins. She contracted Tom to touch up her woodwork, one thing led to another, and from Tom’s point of view the essential human requirements of sex, food and a thatched roof were met overnight.