Give me a break...

Good ol' Xmas is the time of the year when one receives those loving, albeit predictable, seasonal greetings from family & friends. Now and again in the blossoming 21st century, you actually get some wonderful surprises via cyber-post. Just yesterday I got one of the surprises in the form of an e-mail from Emma...

My relationship with Emma was effectively a brief, non-consummated, fling during my teenage years while I was working as a supermarket checkout person - for ridiculously low pay I might add (you can't beat the enthusiasm of a 16-year-old working their nuts off for a miserable pay rate which, ultimately, converts to 2-possum-shit-pellets for every hour of slave labour)...

As for all of us I'm sure, the rise of the Internet & e-mail culture has allowed us to catch up with many folk from our former years / lives. Personally, my own gaggle of friends and schoolmates seem to have adopted the 'Old Friends' website as their designated posting board. And so it is through that site that, over time, I have been nicely surprised by some old girlfriends writing to me.

Like any natural soul this is all very flattering and it is genuinely wonderful to hear how they are all getting on with life, especially as the years roll by. As a single bloke, having missed out on the first round of marriages, I figure may actually meet the girl of my dreams (well, woman - since she is obviously aging now, admittedly) as she divorces from her first failed marriage (or second I'm not fussy), via some quirky online encounter / reunion like this...

Well, during the last couple of years, without the joy of any of the 'thunderbolts & lighting' moment that is normally associated with this kind of event, 4 of these ex-girlfriends have ended up pregnant during the course of our correspondence!

Now for god's sake, it is lovely to catch up with folk, even indulging in idle fantasies of  putting to rights those missed opportunities of purile youth - but give me a break man!

The first time it happened I thought it was funny, the second was bizarre and by the 3rd I was getting pissed off, pure and simple.

The fourth in this ever fattening list was Emma. She had written to me completely out of the blue via 'Old Friends' and we had established a degree of correspondence over the following months. She was now living in Australia with her long term Aussie boyfriend of some 12 years (although they had never married nor had kids, so I was informed). Reading between the lines she seemed a bit dulled by her life and enjoying the freedom of the Internet, which enabled her to dabble into old friendships and, perhaps (I enthusiastically imagined), indulge her own fantasies…

So a few months go by and you could say the conversation became somewhat more 'personal'. Nothing serious mind, just some idle banter from a keyboard a million miles away. When, all of a sudden, one day she mentions that she feels a bit guilty - which seemed odd since our e-mails had, realistically, barely breached platonic...

Upon enquiring why she was feeling troubled, she, all of a sudden, blurted out that she was actually pregnant with twins!

Nice one!

At least this time, admittedly, it happened before I impregnated her through the keyboard. I really have given up hope on meeting up with old girlfriends / future wives, through one of these services. I feel I should change my post on the ‘Old Friends’ website to carry this disclaimer

WARNING: "Do not contact me unless you have been sterilised or want to have children"