LARGER THAN LIFE: Baring all about my affair (From Oxford Mail)

LARGER THAN LIFE: Baring all about my affair

10:00am Thursday 2nd February 2012 in Columns

IHAVE found over the past three months that writing this column has been a most cathartic experience.

It culminates today when I let you into the deepest, darkest and most unpleasant secret of my life.

I am having an affair.

I am using this article to let the world know and to beg for your understanding and forgiveness. Not least because this weekend my wife will meet my mistress.

Anyone who has had an affair will tell you that it is most energy sapping and far from easy. I should know. For the past five years I have been having my cake and eating it.

Set aside if you will for just a moment, the moral conundrum.

After all let he who cast the first scone, err, ate all the cream and jam, or however the parable goes.

For what it is worth, this tryst does cause me deep feelings of guilt. It follows me everywhere I go. I’m forever checking how one is, while in the company of the other.

I spend hours practising answers about where I was and who I was with. I look straight into the eyes of my loved ones and blatantly lie. It’s for their benefit not mine.

Knowing I am the sort of chap so willing to be free and easy with sacred emotions would hurt those close to me and destroy my public image.

Could Oxfordshire cope with that? I’m not prepared to take the risk. Not at a time when we’re all depressed enough about the economic downturn.

I’m also convinced that each time someone says “Can I have a word with you?” they’ve discovered my dirty little secret. My heart races.

Of course they’re ignorant of my deceit. On top of all that, there are some very annoying practical elements to this subterfuge. I spend ages checking diaries making sure I can spend as much time with both as possible, and of course that there’s no way the two can be in the same place at the same time. On Saturday that changes.

Why the affair? When I moved here six years ago from where I was born in North London, I had no intention of any of this tangled web I have woven.

Yet it was exciting, it was fresh and so passionate it was difficult not to be seduced. There was nothing I could have done to have stopped it.

I managed to keep them apart for the longest time, collecting so many amazing memories with both. The kind of moments that you remember forever, that create an everlasting loving bond… But at three o’clock on Saturday my wife, Barnet, will meet my mistress, Oxford United, at the Kass Stad. You didn’t really think I was having an affair of the flesh!?

Heck, I can’t find one woman prepared to do that with me, let alone two...