“I didn’t call you Fluffy because you had curly blonde hair,” a very old exboyfriend just contacted me to tell me (old in terms of how long ago our relationship was, not because he’s currently collecting his pension).
“You read my blog?” I said, surprised and a little bit smug at the same time.
“Sometimes, when I’m bored silly at work,” he answered. “Don’t worry, it’s pretty far down my reading material list. Usually just before I start doing Suduko via The Sun online.”
I ignored him, because it’s more flattering to think that he’s stalking me a little bit than that my life marginally pips a small grid of numbers in entertainment value.
“So, why did you call me Fluffy, then?” I growled.
“Because you’re a bit… well.”
“A bit well?”
“I hadn’t finished. A bit… well… ditzy.”
“I am not ditzy,” I said, drawing myself up to my full height even though our discussion was online and he couldn’t see me. I’d like to think I was writing a bit taller, though.
“Hols, when I asked you once to give me an example of a definite article, you said ‘cat’”.
“Well it is a definite article! It’s definitely a cat!”
“That’s not a definite article, Holly. And you thought Peru was in Asia.”
I would argue against this, but then he’d ask me to tell him where it actually is, and then I’d be in even more trouble.
“You’re without exception one of the fluffiest people I’ve ever met.”
I retaliated with a stream of very unfluffy curse words.
“And,” he added once I’d stopped swearing at him, “your nose is sort of fluffy.”
“My nose?”
“It has little tiny fluffy hairs on the end of it.”
There was a silence while I digested this, and then I gasped, horrified:
“I. Have. Little. Tiny. Fluffy. Hairs. On. The. End. Of. My. Nose?”
“Yeah. You can’t see them. Only feel them if you kiss it. But your nose is definitely fluffy. It’s a definitely fluffy article.” And then he laughed, as if he’d just said something funny, instead of mortifying and possibly emotionally scarring.
“Like a… monkey?’ I pretty much sobbed at him.
“No, more like a baby rabbit or something. That’s why I called you Fluff. It wasn’t an attempt to compress or supress or digest your intelligence or anything like that.” He paused and then added: “I think you do that pretty well on your own, to be honest.”
And then he laughed, as if he’d just said something really, really funny again.
If there’s one thing worse than being called Fluff by every man you’ve ever dated, it’s finding out that it’s because you have hairs on your nose. Having spent the last hour rubbing it with my finger and trying to reach it with my lips to check, I think that it’s nonsense: my nose is perfectly smooth, thankyou very much.
But - in my effort to prove my exboyfriend wrong - I have a strange feeling that I may have accidentally proven him right.
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