I have a lot of exes. Well, we all do. Ex-friends. Ex-girlfriends. Ex-people we hooked up with a for a bit but it didn't get to the point of significant others. And I think that it's unusual that I'm still friends with the majority of mine.

I got an email from Jenny a couple of days ago reminding me that it was 11 years ago about now that we met, in a McDonalds in Munich at Oktoberfest. It should never have happened. First off, McDonalds in Munich? There's so much other incredible food, but I was with a couple of Americans, Leif and Clinton, and they wanted McDonalds. Clinton was lamenting the fact he can never meet women, and Leif and I were consoling him (and I was lamenting too, only to myself). Somehow Leif starts talking to this girl, Jenny, who is there on her own and is walking in the same direction that we are. He starts talking to her and introducing her to Clinton, and we're all talking until it turns out that even though the three of us are drunk off our tits, I have the better German and Jenny and I hit it off. We exchange contact information (all the while Clinton is cussing me out), and I visit in two weeks time and Jenny and I are officially boyfriend and girlfriend. (There's a little more to the story that involves 'accidentally missing my train' and telling her parents that there was nowhere else I could stay that night, but that's a story for another night).

One of my first exes is an ex friend called Hamish. I knew him the first year I went to school back in 198. . .hell, I don't know. A long bloody time ago. But he moved away, and when your age is still in single digits you're not fantastic at keeping in touch with people. For that matter, there's Becky Cooper who was sort of my first girlfriend. She was my first friend who was a girl, back in a time when the only differences between girls and boys was girls had longer hair and boys had cooler toys. I remember when I decided to take the scholarship to Chafyn she would barely talk to me and I would pretend that it didn't matter, and all our mutual friends were telling me it was a mistake cos it was her and I. Shit, we were six years old, but people had already picked us for each other.

Becky and Hamish, I'm not in touch with any more. Hamish, I haven't spoken to since the day his family left Salisbury-- but I still remember the cake we had for his going away. I've seen Becky a couple of times in the intervening years, the last time was in 199. . .6?, a year after I left England, when I was visiting Salisbury and she was dating a good friend of mine. Jenny, as I said, just emailed me a couple of days ago. I have exes who are pregnant, married, still stalking my dreams, and among the last people I want to talk to. There are scenarios I played out in my mind that never happened, and things they talked about with me that didn't come to pass.

So what exactly is an ex? Is it someone you once shared something with but don't any more? I shared something with Jenny that I don't any more, but we still share the same memories from experiences from our time together, and we still keep in touch. Just because they're in the past it doesn't mean those memories have ceased to be-- that's not going to happen until we're dead, or have altzheimers.

One of the best and worst relationships I ever had, with Melissa, is definitely an ex-relationship. But the memories are still there, and the realizations I made about myself and things I learned about other people are still very much relevant to my life now. She's one of the exes I'm not in touch with, and deliberately-- that's how badly I took the breakup-- and while I'm unusual in that I maintain relationships with several exes, I lose no sleep with the decision for her to remain in my memory rather than my life.

I guess my point behind this whole rambling, look-at-what-a-great-guy-I-am-cos-I-still-talk-to-exes post, is that time is what fucks us up. Yes, the exes I have, whether they be friends, lovers, partners, or work aquaintances, have all moved out of my life to a greater or lesser degree, but they still have helped form it to what it is right now. In that sense not a single one of them is an ex, because each has a presence in who you are, right now.

This was all triggered by a good night with good friends that I don't get to see often enough. And $2.50 draft and dogs at sherwood bar in the Excaliber