I was thinking recently of the last two posts I left here, one where the majority of visitors to the blog are in Taiwan and the other, the one that looks at liars who are out to reinvent themselves and who are eventually found out because behind their boasting they are still themselves and it doesn't matter how many lies they spin to make themselves look interesting they will be found out because ultimitely they are not clever enough to sustain the lie.

The story that follows involves both of these topics

It's a factual account but I shall make an effort to hide the identity of the central charachter because I don't wish to embarrass him any more than he has already embarrassed himself.
In the end his identity makes no difference, i'm not interested in him but I would be interested to know if anybody has had a similar experience or could offer me any explanation in regard to his unusual actions.
These may appear at first to be blindingly obvious but I have trouble nailing down how he, who I knew to be a rational person could be so delusional. Here's a man who refuses to admit to being part of an elaborate story he himself concocted and then chose to tell me.

We'd both been living in Taipei on and off for several years and met regularly in sports bars. He was good to be around when discussing football because he knew what he was talking about and he made sense.

Outside of football we had little in common and didn't spend any time together socially.

At the time he told me this story I hadn't seen him for a couple of years and was glad to have run into him by chance on the street.
He was less than enthusiastic when I aked him how he was doing and he asked me if I had a few minutes to spare to hear his story, he wanted to find out if the way he was handling the problem he found himself in was the right way to go, or was he wasting his time and making a fool of himself.
We moved to the side of the footpath sat on a wall and he began talking.

He had been involved with the girl for four years, she was Taiwanese and they had met in Taipei.
During the past year while living together she had become pregnant and the international funster had done the right thing, he whisked her back to his mum's house in England where, to some fanfare they were married.
She had the baby, a daughter and she stayed home while the dutiful lad went off to a job and they began to settle into a routine.
Well, he did, she was less than thrilled to find herself jousting with his mother in the kitchen with a screaming baby, so one day while he was at work, she cleaned out their bank account, took a change of clothes and the baby and left for Heathrow airport.
When he came home from work instead of finding his wife and baby he was greeted with a note that told him that he was from that moment on, on his own.

Within a week he packed in his job and had flown back to Taipei to find her and convince her to take him back.
When he eventually found her through her friends she was shacked up with the baby and a young man from South Africa, when he went to their apartment to find out what was going on they had told him they were very happy together and would both be grateful if he slung his hook.
So that was his story, he was sobbing openly as he asked me this question:

"What do you think I should do?"

The guy's life was in piececs, what was I going to tell him?
The first question I had was, did he know about this South African, if she had moved so qiuckly into his life with a baby they must have had had some kind of a prior relationship.
He said he didn't have a clue about him.

I told him that the only way she was going back to him was if the South African got tired of her and walked out; in which case she may want to get back with him and that this was a lousy way to kick start the relationship.
How could he in that future together ever trust her?

He thought this over and seemed to agree, he wasn't a complete idiot, he must have gone over this scenario hundreds of times in his mind during the time since she had left him.

What I didn't bring up was the glaring fact that there was at least a fifty percent chance that he wasn't the babies' father, and there was a hundred percent certainty to me that as far as I could see, he was round the fucking bend.

He told me that at the time he was back in the same position he had been years earlier when he had first arrived in Taiwan.
He was looking for a job, he was broke and he was living in a dormitory in some shithole youth hostel, i guess he was thirty five years old at the time.

We finished talking and I left him with an encouraging goodbye and we went our seperate ways.

About six months later I was in a sports bar too see a game when I spotted him.
He was in fine form, he'd had a few drinks, his team were winning and he seemed well.
When I had the chance for a quiet word I was staggered by his response.

When I asked him how things had worked out with his wife he claimed that all of the incidents he had related to me those months earlier had not happened to him and that I must have mistaken him for somebody else.

He told me he had never been married, indeed he hadn't had a serious relationship with a woman for the last five years, he had not been back to England for ten years, his life was on the right track and I was mistaken.
I gave up in frustration, in effect he was calling me a liar.
I continued to watch the game on the screens then left for home, I've never seen him again.

After I thought about him I was reminded of a story that had happened to me when I was younger.
The story involved my mother and a nervous breakdown and it was a story that for my mother at the time was so terrible, when she was reminded of it she claimed ignorance of any of the facts which were well known in our family and my childhood nieghbourhood.
She had responded to a terrible incident in her life the same way this English guy who had been taken for a sap had done, they both had wiped the unacceptable stories from their memories.

My mother's story was one I was close to and it was harder at the time to comprehend.
I was sixteen.
One Sunday morning my mother found proof that my father was having an affair, in less than an hour he had packed and had left with his mistress and her daughter. This had been relatively easy as his mistress lived next door.
He stayed away for three months during which time, my mother experienced a nervous breakdown.
Then one evening he showed up unanounced back at the house begging my mother to take him back and that he had made a terrible mistake, he complained his new life was a nightmare, his clothes were in the car and he wanted to move right back in.
My mother was so delighted to see him she heped him up the steps from his car with his luggage, I and my older brother were less than thrilled.
I moved out.
About a year later I wanted to apply for a passport and travel and needed some things from my parents house, this was the first time I'd been back.
It was on the weekend and my mother was alone in the house.
I picked up my stuff and my mother asked me about what I was getting up to. There was nothing in my new life that she approved of, she even went as far as to tell me that it was fortunate that my father wasn't there because he would have been dissapointed in me what with him being such a fine man.
I stopped her nonsense and asked her to explain my fathers three month dissapearence with our next door nieghbour and she claimed to never have heard of the woman, not even her name.

She had known her for twenty years, longer than she had known me, the woman had lived next door to us for a decade, she was my godmother and our families regularly went on vacations together. When I reminded her of this she still claimed to have never heard of the woman.

So there we have these incredible stories in these peoples lives that had been totally wiped out.
I know in my own life there are things I would rather forget, but to pretend they have never happened to me would be bordering on lunacy.

If anyone has any thoughts as to why, and indeed how people can blot out traumatic slices of thier lives, I would be grateful if you could pass them on to me, you can send them annonymously and change the names, even the nationalities of the people.
It baffles me how easy it is for some people to turn away from lifes' more unpleasant experiences and so easily claim they never happened.
Can any experience be so horrible that the person it happened to develops a permanent amnesia without taking a severe blow to the head?