In reply to Marts: Have I ever fancied someone over the net? Oh indeed I have! Made me smile somewhat ruefully, and poignantly (and doesn't help having bloody Wimbledon coming up to stir up old memories). If I'd have known an after-school game of tennis with my music teacher would have developed into a full-blown unrequited obsession, would I have unsprung my racket press that summer's day and shyly proferred my furry balls (35 years ago)? It's a question I ask myself every day of my life, but it's an essentially futile exercise - 'even God cannot change the past' - that only serves to deepen my moroseness and softens my resistance to the seductive charms of a whisky bottle. Even now I cannot hear Schubert's 'Trout' or Elgar's 'Enigma Variations' (they were always on whenever I visited) without getting absurdly agitated. I visited the grave today. He never knew of my feelings. The love that dared not speak its name. I was so decently thoroughly pleasantly pathetically 'British' about the whole thing. Probably why I grieved so much when the Headmaster announced at assembly that he'd been killed by a speeding car. All this time gone by and I still visit my music teacher, and she gestures with her stick to the photo album with pictures of her guide dog 'Rafferty' her beloved golden retriever....ooh, sends a shiver through me...Not really the thread for this, so I'll put the cork back in the bottle so to speak. Just pray I don't dream of his blonde face with the laughing eyes and the ever-wagging tail.