Signs that remind you of your ex

by Charlotte Kymberley

Babe's Bible: Signs that remind you of your ex turn up when you're focusing on them. If you see reminders of your ex everywhere, is this normal?

Signs. They're everywhere. Seemingly innocuous little scraps of metal, paper and posters, billboards, pavement art... telling you what to do in life, where to go, how to work something out. These signs are ingrained into our lives. For the most part we take no notice, because we see them every day, right?

What about other kinds of signs... the ones that remind you of a person you're trying to forget...

A long time ago, I had a crush on an unsuitable man. His arse, I imagined, could crack a walnut. I tried to put him out of my mind, no less because I had a boyfriend. So I chastised myself, smacked my wrist and thought of something else. Like Hugh Jackman, Paul Rudd and Christian Bale lying in my double bed with a copy of Heat magazine and a Galaxy bar, Coronation Street paused on Sky plus, the boys begging for a foursome.

But everywhere I went, there were signs urging me to think about hot arse. The biggest one by far was when a van lumbered on down the road stopping directly in front of me, big gigantic bold red lettering spelled out his name. His entire name, first and surname. Sign from above? No, silly woman, sign on a van. Forget it. And forget I did...

Instead of obsessing (briefly) over hot arse, I concentrated on my own arse and went on a diet. I dumped my own arse of a boyfriend for being a, you guessed it, arse. My arse became smaller through stress and the other arse became a nice boy and not like an arse at all.

Unfortunately nice boy reverted back to being an arse and we broke up. He handled it in a typically arse about tit way which has now resulted in my behaving like lunatic arse and thus, we are no more. Arsehole.

So here come the signs... My ex is a ginger. Walking around Edinburgh, where I have recently moved, was never going to be an easy thing to contend with, no less because we were planning on a new life here together.

Now I have made the move alone which is fine, I get to buy cats and put fairy lights up and you know, have loads of pink things and hot Athena men posters wearing nothing but a tiny pair of pants adorning my living room wall. Sweet!

But the downside for any girl who has recently broken up with her boyfriend is that you have to get through the rubbish stage. I am nearly through the rubbish stage, the boring the arse off your friends with misplaced love and broken dreams. The stage where you stop eating, can't sleep and generally waft about like some kind of melodramatic victim lamenting your bad romantic fortune and furiously imagining him setting up home with a slimmer prettier version of yourself.

Either Edinburgh is full to the brim with an unnaturally high amount of red headed folk or I have my ex on the brain. Both are distinct possibilities. Walking through the city yesterday I counted eleven gingers. Today, I lost count entirely. They were everywhere and for a minute I thought that perhaps my friend had slipped something in my morning cup of tea and I had been transported into some kind of trippy land of ginger people, like a ginger twilight zone.

'Look!' I nudged as we walked past a ginger.

'What?' she said, totally blind.

'Another ginger!' I squealed, 'They're everywhere!'

'Look!' I continued, 'A ginger couple!'

And then I told her about hot arse from work and the van sign.

'It's just like that but worse because it's unwelcome! How can I move on with effortless ease when confronted by the rouge army every time I leave the house?'

'You're imagining things,' she said as we walked past a long row of offices with a glimmering orange plaque that read 'GINGER NUT MEDIA'.

I did a google search to back up my eccentricity with science things - but nothing really came up for 'Ex Boyfriend reminders everywhere... Is this normal?'

But now I've written that sentence in this article, for some other poor woman doing a google search about the selfsame thing, it will.

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