Baseless concerns

About two months ago I received a standard heads-up email from HR saying a new guy was starting at work, and when I saw his name, I realised that I knew him. We were part of the same extended social circle a long time ago, and when I was 17 I spent an afternoon or two sunbathing around his parents' pool in south west London. How odd, I thought. It's a small world.

So when he started, I sent him an email saying 'Remember me?' His desk is only fifteen metres from my office door, but I chose to send him an email not only because I am sometimes a bit shy (100% implausible but 100% true) but also because being greeted at your desk, surrounded by new colleagues, by a girl you may or may not remember from around 15 years ago doesn't sound like my idea of fun. So I sent the email, and he replied and said 'Yes, what the hell are you doing here?' and I told him and that was it.

And then yesterday, after he'd worked here for six weeks, I finally bumped into him in the vending area while I was getting a glass of milk to drink alongside my second piece of Laura's Marks & Spencer's chocolate birthday cake. And instead of saying 'How are you getting on?' or 'What's new?', the first thing I said to a guy I hadn't seen for 15 years, a guy who I SWEAR I do not fancy (and I know this because my friend still knows him and has told me enough about him for me to know for sure) was 'Oh god, how embarrassing, you've caught me on a day when I'm not wearing any make-up.'

I mean.

The catalogue of things which are annoying about that statement is tragic:

a) I very rarely wear make-up at work, so I don't know who I was trying to kid.
b) I do not fancy him, so why do I care whether he thinks I'm rough or not? I could have been naked except for an immaculate Hitler moustache and I still shouldn't have been self conscious about my appearance in front of him.
c) There is absolutely no WAY that a boy would hear a girl say that and not think that she does then fancy him.
d) Even if I'd thought I might fancy him at some undisclosed point in the future, that would have been up there in the Top 10 list of things not to Tourette's-reveal on first meeting him.
e) The fact that I'm even slightly annoyed about it will make everyone who reads this convinced that, in a Gertrude protesting too much fashion, I do actually really fancy him, which I really don't.

In short: I am a dick.

What was good, however, was that last night I had a vivid, VIVID dream about being seriously, morbidly, twice-as-big-as-Vanessa-Feltz-at-her-biggest, needs-a-winch-to-get-out-of-bed fat. My mum was telling me that I was disgusting and needed to do something about it, and I was crying and saying, 'How can you be so horrible and judge me like this?' but secretly knowing she was right and hating myself. And then I woke up and got dressed and looked in the mirror and comparitively, I am like the thinnest person in the history of the world, basically like Kate Moss but fractionally facially less pretty, so I'm off to have some garlic bread with cheese.