A weekend in need of cleaning

Last weekend I went to Whitby for a dirty weekend. Rough Stuff observed beforehand that the phrase "a dirty weekend" does not translate into any other language; that our friends in Europe would interpret our break from the city as a weekend in need of cleaning. He may be right literally speaking, but it turns out that it is Girl on a Barge who needs a good rinsing clean of the questions floating round in her emotional maze of a brain.

The weekend itself turned out to be anything but dirrrrty. Despite the torrential rain that had me anxiously checking the forecast for four days before our trip, the sunlight was radiant from the moment we got up and it stayed with us throughout the three hour car drive. On arrival at our blissful seaside abode, we began to explore. Walking along piers, climbing across cliff surfaces (particularly rewarding in ballet pumps and a sparkly top) and sharing scampi in many a seaside cafe made for a rather innocent yet extraordinarily intimate weekend. He was honest with me about The Ex (who rang him while we were away. What is it with ex-girlfriends wanting to be "friends" as soon as their exes are happy again?). He has told me more about his past than I will ever be prepared to tell him about mine. He bought me a flashing keyring with my name on that is guaranteed to last for ten years without changing the battery (how DO they do that?)

So why did the questions continue to rain down on me?

• There are the completely unjustified questions such as When Will He Hurt Me?


• There's the plain stoopid questions which focus on something completely insignificant which I manage to blow out of all proportion. These tend to start with an assumption based on a fact. For example, Rough Stuff is in a band. Rough Stuff is fit. So When Will He Cheat On Me? (this is particularly unfair because - do I dare immortalise these words in print - I trust him implicitly to never cheat on me


• Then there's the downright inexcusable questions which centre around whether he too will change into a knife-wielding psycho like an ex of mine who would hold a knife to my neck if the kettle "boiled too noisily"

And then, something altered. The shift in me was so small that I barely knew it had happened, and yet it couldn't be ignored. Sitting in the corner of a traditional tea-room sharing a cream tea and a coke float, I felt it click. Pachelbel's Canon, a piece of music that over the years has sewn itself into the fabric sleeve of the soundtrack of my life, was playing softly in the background. Rough Stuff was slurping the remaining ice cream out of his coke float. It was an enchanting moment. Click. It's time to remove the quotation marks encasing the word boyfriend, it's time to stop being hung up about events goneby. We're a blank canvass, we are delightfully new.

We are clean.