For a month there, I thought I had something good going with someone; until he finished it last week. It was strange revisiting the pleasures of coupledom; it had been two years since my last relationship ground to a shuddering, gory halt. This time around, it has a no-blame feel to the ending.

It's sad, but it's not disastrous. I got close to someone for the first time in a long time. We curled up together in front of the TV, talked for ever on the phone late at night, rediscovered how to make love instead of having sex. In grey London, full of expressionless eyes and hearts of stone, it was good to be reminded of another reality, however briefly.

In the aftermath of his departure, instead of feeling gutted, I feel that I'm back in the saddle, if that's not too daft a pun. He helped me back on it. But, just because he's not prepared to stay the course with me, I'm not going to shoot the horse. Fear of rejection is always worse than the experience itself. His choice; his problem; his loss.

Now that I've had time to think about it, and that I've played my old Joni Mitchell albums to death, I realise I feel much lighter now. It's almost as if it's psychologically healthier to be the one who is left; I hadn't realised how guilty I had felt for leaving the last miserable relationship.

It's only now, in the past week, that I realise that my old travelling companion since those dark days, guilt, is gone. You can't feel guilty when someone else says "let's just be friends"; you feel angry, you feel sad, but you've nothing to be guilty about. It is better to have loved and lost. To have given love a chance.

brassy bravura

Oops. That's a bit rich, even for me. I must be still in shock. It's funny, but the brassy bravura of the tragic drag queens, the essence of camp, is my kinda language at the moment.

Define camp. Define the undefinable.

It's in the bleak and stunning opening speech of Torch Song Trilogy in which Harvey Fierstein says, "No-one ever said to me 'I love you' - that I could believe." It's in Garland singing "Over the Rainbow", and her daughter singing "Maybe this time (. . . I'll be lucky, maybe this time he'll stay)". Piaf singing "No Regrets". Dietrich's "Falling in Love Again". It's Shirley MacLaine as Charity Hope Valentine being asked on the telephone by her girlfriends (after she's just been jilted at the altar): "Are you happy, baby, are you finally happy?"

It's Shirley Bassey turning 60, looking, remarkably, half her age. It's Lynne Perrie, Ivy Tilsley from Coronation Street, drunkenly fumbling her way through 'I Will Survive' on The Word, forgetting the lyrics, shortly after she was sacked by Granada for having plastic surgery.

camp divas

I suppose what is the common denominator is a mockery of sensitivity, a relishing of the grotesque way in which like moths to a flame we keep on getting scorched. We prefer the flame of passion to the dreariness of relating on a day-to-day level.

The camp sensibility latches on to powerful female icons and sends them up; adores the way these women switch between playing with, and believing in, their public personae. In a camp world, women are divas, not mortal; for mere mortals would not have survived the heartbreak they've been through, and still look so fabulous, darling. So they light another cigarette, have another drink, and survive. But they/we still depend on the kindness of strangers; and that's their/our tragic flaw.

Some camp divas, like Streisand, achieve their camp status by being completely oblivious of their power as sex goddesses. With the world grovelling at her feet, she talks simplistically of the inequality of women. On the video of her recent world tour, Babs sang 'Nothing's Going To Harm You' to her gay son Jason Gould, oblivious to the fact that in the musical from which the song is taken, Sweeney Todd, the singer slays the boy she's lullabying.

Now that's the sort of motherly love that would turn any boy gay. Oops. My slip is showing.

Like Murphy's, I'm not bitter. But I am conscious. n