We were lying there on Sunday morning, my new girlfriend and me.....

Oh, did I mention I'd got a girlfriend?

Uh-huh, oh yeah (dances badly).

Lovely woman from the date last week, took her out on Friday to watch that sweary tour-de-force In The Loop, kissing in the pub (how annoying is that when you see someone else do it) then home in separate taxis. Rang her up the same night about one in the morning to invite her round on Saturday night.

So, Sunday morning. We're swapping snippets of life story, lying there in t-shirt and pants, a little sleep-deprived. I give her the shorthand version of the last years of my marriage and of the affair that transformed my life.

"Do you still love her?" she asks, meaning my ex-lover, not my ex-wife.
Pause.
I'm not about to lie but I can't think how to describe it. She fills in the silence.
"When you've been in love you can go on loving someone. I did with the last man I was in love with. You don't have to totally forget. But it doesn't mean you can't move on."
I smile at her, thinking she's put it well. "And you can let it go and hold on to the good things, the good memories," I suggest.

I read a review in one of the weekend papers, of "The Field Guide to Melancholy". It described a state of sadness we might actually choose and gain some pleasure from. It is a mood of loss and yearning but without the desperation - so unlike depression (which Susan Sontag calls "melancholy minus its charms"). Gloom, not doom, in other words. The author reckons it's a state which "slows things, allows for percolation, facilitates solitude and solace for the imagination."

I think that's a pretty good description of my state of mind these last few months. Living with gloom, not doom. I was in love, I still feel great tenderness towards that love, the memories of what we had and the sense of loss. I have chosen to dwell on them. But it isn't love anymore - it's melancholy, actually.

"I'm ready to move on," I said on Sunday morning, failing to find a less cliched phrase to sum all this up. "You can't keep loving somebody in a one-sided way. It falls into obsession or stalking, and I'm not going to let myself become that. I wish we were closer friends, but it's not to be."

We carry on talking, Sunday morning stretches out, sunshine fills the room. She's smart, this one. I like her.