From Major to Minor...

99.9% of the time I enter an airport with Jeremy it's to say goodbye, and almost always I have Ella Fitzgerald in my head - singing about dying / crying / wondering why-ing a little.

While the dying bit is melodramatic, even for me, the song has become something of a theme tune for these goodbyes, with snippets of it weaving their way into the final days of every visit. (I'm aware that theme tunes are all a bit too Ally McBeal circa 1998 but we've already established that Ally and I have an affinity, although I would like to claim the edge on sanity and I don't plan to stay with the show until it becomes embarrassingly unwatchable.) And with the song comes the anticipatory sadness - about a day before the Goodbye (I'm getting better at it - in the early days of our relationship I got sad before we'd ever said hello)- every joke, smile, touch of hand, underlines the knowledge that tomorrow we'll be 3000 miles apart again.

Today I said Goodbye to Jeremy for what is quite probably the last time. All the usual feelings were there right on cue - the aching at the back of my throat, the tingling up my nose and stinging in my eyes, clinging to him like a limpet and then when it really is time to peel myself away, crying unashamedly in public until I finally pull myself together right before sitting down on the plane next to some poor soul who has probably witnessed the whole spectacle and is probably terrified I'm going to spend the whole journey snivelling into my sleeve.

However today when I walked away, Ella wasn't singing, The Rolling Stones were (I just had to google it as actually had no idea who the song was by), with 'This could be the Last Time' (also in my googling I read the rest of the lyrics - the only applicable ones are in the chorus and the general gist of the song is opposite to what I'm talking about...not a particularly good theme tune choice, but it was in my head all the same). And through the tears and snot and spectacle, I smiled to myself and started bopping my head in time to the imaginary music as I walked down the travelator, past some slow moving bemused spaniards whilst Vonda Shepherd took over the song.