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desires and run, but this time was different. In a matter of half an hour I was convinced that this girl was the person I’d been looking for all my life – there was no way I was going to give up without trying.
    At the end of the gig I approached her, using Reverb’s performance to open up the conversation. She told me she thought they were terrible but the singer was quite cute – I was devastated. Right on cue, Simon, guitar in hand, strode across the room and introduced himself. ‘Who’s your friend?’ he asked me ‘casually’. I told him I didn’t know and she smiled, offered her hand to him and introduced herself: ‘My name’s Alice. Alice Chabrol.’ And that was that. I wasn’t so much edged out as completely ignored. Admittedly I did receive compensation by way of a birthday kiss, 2.2 seconds of red-lipped perfection pressed against my cheek with the delicate touch of an angel’s wing.
    Simon and Alice went out for a total of two weeks before she came to her senses and realised that he could never be as interested in anyone as he was in himself. ‘I hadn’t thought it was possible,’ she’d told me over coffee the day after she’d dumped him. ‘Everything he says is me me me .’ Alice and I, however, became best friends. Over the following years I fell in love with her several times but never felt compelled to tell her, there was no reason to – she never seemed the slightest bit interested in being anything more than friends. If I’d seen the faintest glimmer of hope I would’ve gone for it, but faced with Alice’s lack of interest and the memory of her choosing Simon over me I gave up, thus cultivating the following theory:
    Kelly’s First Law of Relationships:
    No woman who finds Simon attractive will ever be interested in me.
    As if to prove this as fact, when Alice went to university at Oxford she fell for Bruce (a surrogate Simon if ever I saw one), a Maths postgraduate who bore more than a passing resemblance to Steve McQueen in The Great Escape . With the exception of his total expertise in every field known to impress man, his most annoying trait was his ability to make me feel like a eunuch without even trying. He wasn’t so much a man as a hyper-man, masculinity dripping from his every pore. He worked out three times a week. He knew what an exhaust manifold was. He owned an autographed photograph of Bruce Lee. Honestly, even Sean Connery would’ve felt like a bit of a girl around Bruce.
    Fortunately my blossoming inferiority complex began to fade once I came to see Bruce as my best friend’s boyfriend instead of six feet four inches of tosspot, and Alice as my best friend rather than the woman I most wanted to see naked. I adapted so well to my new role that my earlier mini-infatuations – which at the time had seemed more important than life itself – now felt like boyish crushes from a bygone age. I still didn’t like Bruce, but it was no longer personal. When you have a friend of Alice’s calibre, you come to realise there’s no way anyone in ownership of a penis will ever be worthy of her.
    After Alice got a job as marketing manager for British Telecom, she and Bruce moved to Bristol and led the kind of life that involved expensive restaurants, shopping trips to Bond Street and weekend breaks in Prague. I considered being jealous of her quite a few times but I couldn’t. Though she earned more in an hour than I used to get in my entire fortnight’s Giro, she was still the same person inside: kind, patient and understanding. As a rule, I disapproved of successful people, especially those of my generation, but I couldn’t resent her. Success not only suited her, it appeared to be made for her.
    ‘Hello?’ said Alice.
    ‘It’s me,’ I replied.
    ‘Will! How are you?’ she said, genuinely excited. ‘How’s the job?’
    ‘Oh it’s crap. Kind of just what I expected only worse.’ I felt a yawn rise up from deep inside me. I attempted to stifle it by gritting my