Yep, Pharrell Bell is in love at last. Profoundly and truly in love, as the word goes between man and woman. I cry it passionately to myself in the daylight hours, more so as the sun goes down.

The things that before seemed to me to be insufferable - my lack of first-team football, my..., well, just my lack of first-team football - have now become the merest chaff before the wind of my infatuation.

I have heard people describe the passing of time as flying by in a whirlwind, but the last two weeks have been nothing like that for me.

Rather the halcyon days have drifted by like boats on a calm summer river, like melancholic spring evenings.
Since she - Gloria - rescued me from a pit of bile and self-indulgence at that whispering hour in the nightclub, we have spent all the time together we can.

I began to miss training - I didn't think it mattered, since the gaffer had barely acknowledged my existence over the last few months - and instead, took long walks in the countryside, hand in hand. On occasions, I caught a little skip in my step as I might run to pick her a daffodil. We took a trip to the coast and ate fish and chips on a bench overlooking the sea.

As the days have passed, we have been unfolding to each other, revealing little pieces of ourselves, some willingly, some unwillingly, by the merest of our reactions, smiles, evasions and hints at the past. Gloria puzzles me delightfully, she leaps up at me in little ecstasies and that flit and hover and disappear as quickly as they came. She is nothing like the girls I have known before; they seem just distant memories of childhood to me now. Gloria has the calmness of a great ocean and the deep courage to match.

The sum-total of all the other girls I have ever met, known, kissed, slept with - the entirity of their very existence is a mere grain of sand when compared to the vast white beach of Gloria's beauty. All the other girls I had known were, in the most contemptuous use of the word, so very female, still giving off the faintest odour of either the cave or the nursery.

As the days passed and I missed more and more training, I began receiving phonecalls from the gaffer - although it did take longer than I thought appropriate for him to finally bother to trace my whereabouts.

He would leave messages on my answerphone:

"Pharrell, I hadn't noticed but one of the lads pointed out this morning that you haven't been into training for six days. Anything the matter? Give me a call."

Then: "Pharrell, did you come into training yesterday. I vaguely remember seeing you milling about, but I might have been wrong. Anyway, let someone at the club know if you're okay."

Then: "PB - we're getting a little worried now. It's been ten days since you last turned up for training. Don't get me wrong, we can cope without you - we have done for most of the season - but it would be nice to know your plans. Get your agent to give me a call."

Finally: "Pharrell, if you're still alive, we've decided to stick you on the transfer list. We won't ask any money for you - I don't think we'd get anything - but we're not going to continue to pay your wages if you're not showing up. If you want out now, give me a call and we'll start thinking about cancelling your contract."

When I've gone AWOL in the past, phonecalls like these have always inspired some surging sense of injustice that has fired me into action. I'd go screaming into training and throw myself into the club, haring around the pitch like a dervish, kicking anyone and anything that moved.

But this time, I felt nothing. The fact that the gaffer was ready to give up on me, ready to cancel my �25k-a-week contract, ready to discard me like an unwanted puppy - it didn't mean anything to me.

A couple of days ago, I lay on the bed, it was late in the afternoon. Gloria had gone home for an hour for a change of clothes. Somewhere between asleep and awake, I dreamed I was walking through a field in the sunshine. I was barechested and barefoot and felt the warmth on my back. I had something in my hand, a yo-yo, and I was rolling it gently up and down as I walked.

As I walked along, feeling the blades of grass in between my toes, I looked down. The yo-yo had turned into a football; it rolled down and up, gently, but the string by which it was attached to my finger was becoming thinner and thinner with each roll. Now it was like cotton, now the finest gossamer, now....nothing.

The football rolled off, bouncing away from me, across the field, away down a hill. I had nothing left in my hand. It was empty, and then it dawned on me. In falling in love with Gloria, I had fallen out of love with football.

I awoke. Not in a panic, but in calm. I picked up my phone and rang the club.

"Gaffer, you're right. My heart's just not in it anymore. So sorry. I'm in love now. I don't know if you understand that or not. I can't play football anymore. My soul now sings to the sound of faint guitar melodies, not to the roar of 30,000 caged animals. You have been good to me in the past. Do me one last favour - release me."

And with that, my career as a top Premier League footballer was over. I put the phone down. Out of my kit bag by the door, I picked up my boots. I looked at them closely; ran my hands over the instep, remembered how it felt when a volley came crisp off the laces; I smelt the leather in long, deep breaths; I put my hand inside and felt the insole still slightly damp with sweat.

I carried the boots over to the coat stand, tied the laces together, and placed the loop gently over a hook. My boots were hung up.

Have I any regrets? Not one. I look back at my career in High Definition and Surround Sound. But if I do not marry this girl, my life will become a mere parody on my own self-obsession. I love Gloria, and I do not have the capacity to love two things at once.

Thank you for reading.

Forever,

PB.