Faith. The perennial hope of that handsomest of devils, George Michael, and the refuge of the desperate and the misguided? Perhaps. It’s easy to judge people, isn’t it? Even easier to pigeonhole them for possessing something that may be either temporarily or permanently beyond our own reach.

Time, as has often been noted, is a peculiar beast and it feels like an opportune moment to take a brief detour from the main narrative and slip forwards in time from where we were and take a short hop back from where we are...confused? Yeah, it's a bit like being in my head.

Things happen for a reason, that’s what I’ve come to believe. A few years back, a long time after I had moved on from previous events, I was at a loose end on a Friday morning. Can’t remember why, but that’s not really the important bit. However, for some reason, I decided to take a trip to Horsham from Burgess Hill. Maybe I had a bit of cash to splash and was looking to fill a couple of non-existent gaps on my already bulging DVD shelves. Even so, it was an unusual decision for me to take but I guess that I made my way there after dropping the children off at school. Once safely ensconced within the walls of Swan Walk, long before they had issues with glass roof panels, I nipped into WH Smith and again, completely out of character, decided to purchase a copy of the West Sussex County Times. Still not that unusual, is it? Hardly the stuff of legend. And neither was the rest of the morning but once I was done I drove home and settled down to lunch with my newspaper spread out on the table before me.

It took time to adjust and I think for a while I resented having to leave behind the home that we had made for ourselves. I’d finally found somewhere where I thought I belonged and had built up an environment where I was comfortable. I’d left behind people that I considered to be friends, although some would show their true colours in years to come. Louise settled into her new job much more quickly than I did (I’d met her new employers briefly, namely Bob and Anne Pope, who seemed pleasant enough), although I was hampered by a lack of assistance given that my deputy manager was a young lad who was incredibly inexperienced and was very nervous about being left on his own to run the shop if I wanted to take a day off. Living above the shop also made it very difficult to escape the shackles of work and I would regularly get phone calls when I tried to step away, even on lunch breaks. One such phone call led to a potentially damaging situation.

Married life seemed pretty near perfect for a while. We spent a week in Looe on honeymoon, relaxing after the stresses of planning a wedding and adjusting to the changes of a situation that neither of us had experienced before. Soon enough, we returned home and went back to work while basking in the glow of what should have been one of the happiest days of our lives. Time, and of course our choices, have tainted that day beyond recognition now and I often feel for people whose fairytales and dreams have come to an end through no fault of their own. Not that that was the case here, as already mentioned I take my share of responsibility for the break-up of my first marriage. But we’ll come to that.

Slowly, I began to pull my life back together. Going back to work was tough and everyone was very supportive. Friends were sympathetic, as one might expect and I gradually began to adjust to a ‘new normal’.

It was a totally and utterly unremarkable Monday in November, 1994. The remarkable ones only come along so often, so it was no surprise. The day before, I’d received a call from my eldest sister, Carole, who was visiting my youngest sister, Ellie, in Horsham and they were planning on a night out. Carole asked if I wanted to tag along. And I lied.

The date was set. After four turbulent years away from Plymouth, I’d made the decision to move back to Devon, where my Dad had a spare room waiting. Still working at McDonalds, a transfer had been arranged, my bags were packed and I had said most of my goodbyes. Still not the most outgoing of souls, I’d been invited to show my face at a friend’s party just around the corner from where I’d been living and I figured it would be the last chance I would have to say a few last farewells to some people I’d not managed to see previously. I was happy with my decision and it was entirely possible that it was at least partly in response to what had happened with Amanda - it wasn’t my main motivation but it’s fair to say that I hadn’t been the luckiest in love in Sussex. A couple of brief flings had done little to tempt me to stay and I’d reached the point where I felt it was better for me to walk away.

With little to do but lick my wounds following recent events (see Alone Again (Naturally)) I plodded through the next few months working as many shifts as possible. People might knock working at McDonalds, but I quite enjoyed my time working there, with the exception of the failed romantic liaisons and a couple of other incidents that I’ll come to shortly. I had little to challenge me elsewhere in my life and while I continued to write any submissions were more often than not ignored.

We’ve all got them, haven’t we? Songs that we really love to sing along to while driving in our cars or songs that mark individual moments in our lives. I’ve got a whole library full of those, multiple compilation tapes in old money. A whole archive of lyrics and tunes that stir these inept, clumsy feet when nobody’s looking or lift this tired, old heart, teasing out memories, both good and bad for me to soak in.

To say that things were frosty at work after this latest discovery (see previous update, Road to Nowhere) was an understatement. Not only was I still public enemy number one given what had happened with Sarah, but I now had no idea where I stood with Amanda. I didn’t object to the fact that she didn’t want a ‘relationship’, but I certainly wasn’t keen on just being a backup for when her ‘ex’-boyfriend wasn’t around. As for walking past my home with him…careless or cruel? I was undecided.

While a move to Southampton represented the chance of a fresh start for me, it was far from ideal. Mum had moved in with Brian, which I think gave Lydia and Hannah their own room to share, while I was sleeping on a tiny landing on a wafer-thin airbed. It wasn’t a particularly harmonious time and things were quite fraught. After a short time, I moved in with Brian’s mum, who had a spare room, but I felt increasingly lonely and cut off from everyone. I hadn’t managed to find a job and had no friends so at the first opportunity I agreed to return to Horsham to visit Lizz, who by this point had moved out of her parents’ house and they kindly agreed to let me stay there during my visit. What hadn’t helped matters in Southampton was the ridiculous argument with my mother prior to my visit to Horsham and I had very much left under a cloud (as detailed in the post ‘We Might As Well Be Strangers’).