Waking up, I wasn’t sure which pain was worse – the searing, smarting, cut in the palm of my right hand, or the dull throbbing hangover about half an inch behind my eyes. I rolled onto my back, and was suddenly conscious of a petite naked brunette beside me in bed. I lifted my right hand and squinted against the morning light to take in the scrappy bandaging, then looked to my left to drink in the naked back and pert arse that lay snoozing beside me.
Through the dull fog of the hangover, I shook my head as much as I could without rattling what few brain cells weren’t already in agony. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember how I received the wound or who the young lady was. And this, good reader, was how I woke up on the day after my 40th birthday. This was the day I realised that I had to start writing down my past decade of debauchery. What brought me to this bed, staring at this ceiling in bewilderment?
My eyes closing, I can vaguely remember drifting off again before feeling a hand running up my thigh. In my half-awake, still-befuddled state, the sensation awoke me with a start.
I‘Mmmm, bon matin birthday boy”, an unmistakably French accent purred at me. Looking across, I was pleasantly surprised that the naked brunette was actually also very very cute. Not always a true state of affairs after a drunken encounter. She pushed her body against mine, and I looked her over. Slim, petite, evenly tanned, pretty and impressively svelte. So ticking all my boxes, in other words. Clearly a hallucination, as things rarely work out this well.
She took my right hand in hers and kissed the bandaged palm. “I’m so sorry for this, darling”, she whispered. Oh hell, yes. Of course, it was all coming back to me now. Too good to be true, indeed. Ticks all my boxes, including the psychopathic violent tendencies. But I’ll get back to that.
First, let me take you back to the beginning.
Two.
So let me start again. An introduction is necessary. My name is Jonathan, but most people call me Jon. As you may have gathered, I’m forty, and right now I live in France, where I’m the chef-patron of a tiny little provincial restaurant and a huge 8-bedroom gite. The journey that brought me here was pretty circuitous along some very bumpy roads. But I can sum it up in three words: fun, food & fucking.
At this point in my life I’d spent a little over a decade as a founder and CxO of various technology startups, making (and losing) more than one fortune along the way. Mostly I’d lived in London, but had also spent a four-year spell in New Zealand, a year in Switzerland, and almost three in New York City. At 40, I was just beginning a decade-long stint in France, renovating a huge farmhouse in Normandy into the aforementioned eight bedroom gite, or holiday home.
But right now I’m whisking you back exactly ten years to the very start of my fuckboy era. It’s the morning after my 30th birthday, so here I am waking up and conscious of two different sensations of pain (clearly the beginning of a pattern). My brain had undoubtedly swollen and was pushing against the interior of my skull, also known as that old friend, the hangover. Stop me if you think you’ve heard any of this before. The white heat of pain was from a cut in the sole of my foot, a charades accident involving an attempt to pirouette which ended up smashing a floor-standing mirror (the answer was ‘Dancing in the Dark’, by the way). I suspected there was still a shard of glass stuck in there. In fact, to this day, I’m pretty sure it’s still in there somewhere.
Now if you asked me today, that morning was both the pinnacle of my existence, and the beginning of the end. I lay there, next to my partner of ten years, having eaten my birthday meal at the first incarnation of Gordon Ramsey’s Pétrus restaurant, where head chef Marcus Wareing had come out to talk to us, and doubtless regretted it after I chewed his ear off about his pan-fried foie gras. Then drinks with all the people I cared about at the software company I had co-founded three years earlier. Finally, champagne (Krug, if you needed to ask) at home with some of my closest friends, leading to a drunken game of charades that created not one, but two, injuries, and ensured that one guy missed his trans-Atlantic flight the next day. What’s not to love, right?
Had you asked me that morning, however, this was the low point of a life that was cruising inexorably towards marriage, family, career, and (god forbid) surburbia. A tipping point in a life that was actually far from pedestrian, but somehow had started to feel that way. Staring at that ceiling in a North London borough, looking across at my partner, bored with the monogamy of ten years, indescribably tired of work, and bizarrely hating the comfort of my existence, I’d had enough. As I’d find out, however, sometimes, just sometimes, it’s best not to actually get what you wish for.
I pulled myself out of bed and hobbled slowly down the stairs to the kitchen. The usual detritus that clutters the morning after the night before lay around the place. Discarded half-empty champagne glasses, the odd shard of broken glass glinting in the morning sun, the smell of spilled wine filling my nostrils. The clutter lay all over the kitchen surfaces, too. Cleaning up, however, is quite simply not the business of the post-birthday hangover. I picked up enough of the crap to clear some chopping space and placed it (carefully, I think) on the floor.
Now you need to know something else about me at this point in my life. I could cook. A little. Curries were my speciality, but most other things I was merely competent at. All the sort of staples middle-class millennial 30-somethings spent their lives eating, pasta, mostly. But I loved food. No, I adored food. I had a passion for flavours, orgasmed over the right combinations, did loop-the-loops over an assembled plate of complementary textures. I would marvel at the skill involved when someone with more knowledge than me set my palate alight by suggesting a glass of cool crisp Loire white wine, like Touraine, would react the way it does on the tongue immediately after a fresh oyster, and would have minor aneurysms over a well-chosen cheese plate.
This, however, was my new beginning. Time to take the inspiration that a passionate and talented chef had imparted to me the previous evening, and cook like I meant it. In this particular case, this meant poaching some eggs.
After my first two attempts, which both looked like baby ghosts drowning, I finally had two reasonably poached eggs on toast, which I trotted back upstairs with, and presented to my partner much as I might imagine a caveman would his first solo mammoth kill. She was awake, and pensive.
“What did you mean last night?” she asked, as immediately as I stepped into the room.
“Sorry, what did I mean by what?”
“You said you felt like you were drowning and needed to find some air”. Uh-oh. Obviously this new beginning started earlier than I thought.
“Erm, look, I made poached eggs”, maybe distraction would help.
“So what is it you want? Do you mean you want an affair?” Oh hell, nothing good is coming here. “Is it just about spicing things up?”
“Eat your egg”, I plonked down the tray, “let’s not worry about this now. A premature mid-life crisis, that’s all. Plus, I was drunk. I love you, you know that”.
“Because if that’s what it takes, I’m pretty sure my friend Kate is up for a threesome”. Stop the presses. Sorry what? Possibly the most melodramatic double-take of my entire life.
“Sorry what?” It pretty much needed repeating outside of my own head.
“Kate. She has a bit of a crush on you. If it’s just about spicing things up, I’m game to try that”. In my imagination, my face did a combo of all the best cartoon expressions. My eyes popped out, my lips wobbled as my face shook side-to-side, and, just for good measure, my cock became instantly hard pressing against my boxers. As it turned out, that last bit wasn’t in my imagination.
She was tucking into the eggs now, as if she had just suggested nothing more than an interesting picnic. Another nifty fact about Jon the 30 year old. He had only ever been with three women in his entire life. Two dubious one-night stands, and the partner. Ten years on, and that number had increased just a teeny tiny bit. From three to just shy of triple figures in ten years. That appetite, that curiosity about tastes, clearly stretched beyond the dinner table (although there may have been a few who were bent over it).
