Who's The Daddy: Chucking out the letters is what I should have done years ago

In it, a grumpy middle-aged man, played to absolute perfection by Paul Giamatti, trawls through old photographs of a former girlfriend from the late 80s and early 90s to digitally harvest his memories of their relationship for her family to play at her funeral, with the aid of what looks like a glow-in-the-dark Trebor mint stuck on his temple that makes his eyes frost over when it’s on.

So far, so typically nightmarish of a series that’s now become a byword for a world that’s rapidly gone to the dogs. In fact, you could wrap up most TV news bulletins of the last 10 years with a credit sequence that ends with “Written by Charlie Brooker”.

Anyway, we all know how good Black Mirror is, you don’t need a jobbing, journeyman journalist to hand out lectures on the subject. It’s just that a couple of days before I watched Eulogy for the first time, I had one of my own.

We’ve been doing a lot of cathartic chucking out over the past couple of months, basically ever since we decided to put our house on the market again. Do we really need to cart my A-level geography notes from 1986-88 to our new place, and scores of copies of 90 Minutes and When Saturday Comes magazines? I think The Boss knows the answer to that.

However, some items were a bit more personal. Such as letters from post-uni ex-girlfriends from 1991-1995, which I’d only kept because I didn’t realise I hadn’t already thrown them out some time between Eric Cantona’s kung fu kick at Crystal Palace and the Oasis v Blur battle of the bands (checks calendar) 30 years ago. Is that right, 30? No way. Really?

But there they were, sandwiched between mid-80s to early 90s Manchester United programmes and copies of Red Issue fanzine. A magazine so groundbreaking it inspired a 20-year-old yours truly to get into journalism.

Because these relationships all exploded with the whiff or cordite in the days before most of us had mobiles and social media wasn’t around, we lost touch when we went our separate ways, basically for me being a selfish ****hole, like I was when I was young and stupid.

On the whole, the series of letters all ran through a similar depressing spin cycle, in a matter of a few short months. Initial infatuation, which quickly turned to “you were in a funny mood last weekend” to “I don’t think this is going to work out. Goodbye.”

Reading them back now, they all were great people. It wasn’t them, it really was me. And they all had the good sense to get as far away as possible and I hope they’re all enjoying wonderful lives. And not that it’ll mean anything to any of them now, or probably even then, I’m sorry for being a ****.

So I did what I should’ve done the long, hot summer Blackburn Rovers won the Premier League and me and The Boss got together. Put them all in the recycling without a second thought. Like I’m sure they all did with mine, or used them as toilet roll.

I kept all The Boss’ though, obviously. Not sure whether to get them framed or tattooed.

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