And Then He Said

has picked up an interesting idea from one of her contacts: listing and explaining anything you have in your 'interests' that no-one else has. I have one interest on DeadJournal that no-one else shares, the football team I've supported since I was a kid, Ipswich Town FC – although that could be down to formatting as another fan might have, say, left off the FC in which case it would count as a different interest. On LiveJournal it doesn't count as a unique interest – someone else has gone for it too

I would imagine this could throw up some pretty ideosyncratic interests, given that there are hundreds and thousands of DJ / LJ users so an interest would have to be pretty rare not to be shared. But I won't be looking to see. I've just had the fright of my life in the interests section of LiveJournal.

When I set up my LiveJournal I transferred the interests from my DeadJournal across unamended. When they were set up, I clicked on a few to see how many people shared them. On one of the less obvious ones – I won't say which – the list was fairly short. And one user ID on it screamed out at me. I knew what I was going to find before I even clicked the link to go to the journal. And I was right.

My ex-fiancee.

I won't say her user name, in case some anonymous passer-by decides to stir up trouble. I can't say I was entirely surprised to find she had a journal, as I've seen her website before and I know she's heavily into net stuff. She's also a rabid attention-seeker (aren't we all?) even though, as with some people, she seeks it from behind a mask that says “leave me alone, I want to be private”. So maybe I was even a bit surprised not to have found her on DeadJournal. But it shook me to think that within 24 hours, and completely by accident, I'd found someone for whom there is most certainly not room in my life now. Presumably, she could find me just as easily by the same method. And I was with her, back in 1988, when I started using the name 'Random' so it ought to ring bells.

Whatever. I've blocked her from posting comments on my LJ, and I've ignored e-mails and phone messages from her in the past so I can do it again. (She phoned my mother once and got stonewalled, and she also once e-mailed me to say “I see you've got a website at last” – some four or five years after I set up my first one.)

Maybe she'll see this post. Who cares? Well, evidently I do, a bit – but only because she represents a lot of things in my past life that were bad, and are therefore best left in the past.

When you've had closure, and moved on, it's disconcerting to see something that's been consigned to history waddling past you on squat, hairy legs, very much alive and in the present, in somewhere you thought was your territory.