The Ned Wood Archive

Sam

They’re taking a break.  Sam’s got a cuppa in his hand and is singing For Your Love quietly to himself.  Fun fact, pop pickers, that was written by 10cc’s Graham Gouldman.  You don’t remember 10cc, do you?  They were a band.  Just not as old as the Yardbirds.  Maybe they’ll do the Acoustic Tent in 2036.  Lyn overhears what he’s singing.  She sits down on the wooden box they’re using for a bench and asks him whether what he said up at Strummerville was true.

“Are you in love?” she asks.  “Where’s your other half?”

“In the words of Graham Gouldman, or was it Eric Stewart, in fact, while he was still with 10cc, I’m not in love …” he says, trying to deflect Lyn by bringing it back to the music.  She doesn’t buy it.

“There’s no-one else, then?” she asks.  “Have you ever been in love?”

No, he never found anyone who he felt he could stay with.  Well, maybe.

So he told her about Gill who he went out with at school.  That didn’t last.  Stopped when they left school.  And there was Judy at University.  They’d shared a flat in third year.  That lasted until graduation and then they just decided that was it.  It had run its course.  And there was Christine at work.  They stayed together far too long.  At the time he thought he should try a long term relationship, like it was what everyone else was doing.  His heart wasn’t really in it.  That was a mess.  

“Is that all?”

“Well, there was this other woman I met.   It wasn’t love at first sight, but it was pretty close.  This was in Edinburgh.  It would have been 1999 – I was working on the millennium bug – remember that?  She was working at the Uni.  We hit it off right away.  I was in this temporary short term flat let.  She was in this great place with a couple of other women.  Massive tenement flat.  Loved to go round there.  It didn’t get as far as moving in with each other – I guess we’d have needed to find ourselves a place together, but it was good while it lasted.  Julie, her name was.  Then, suddenly after, what 3 or 4 months, she disappeared.  Stopped answering my calls.  Her flatmates said she’d gone back home which was in Glasgow, but when I called her parents, they said she was off to America or somewhere.  I even went to see them, but they couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me anything.  Then the contract finished and I went back to London.  Never saw her again.  Never heard from her.”

“And no-one since?”

“No.  No-one special.  No-one significant.  They say, ‘Martin, maybe one day you’ll find true love’ and I say, ‘maybe’”  He goes back to the music again in an attempt to hide his true feelings.