A shame you weren't carrying something sharp

I spent the journey home thinking about compliments. (Well, that and wondering if I'd looked like an idiot when I turned my iPod on and then had to scramble to turn the sound down because it had been left up high when I'd been listening to Mogwai Fear Satan on the way in. (It was the start of Under Canvas Under Wraps by The Delgados that had made me jump, but I don't want you to think that I was having some sort of early-Chemikal Underground on the Underground day, at least not consciously anyway. I've been trapped in my own parentheses, haven't I? Start again.))

I spent the journey home thinking about compliments. You see, I'd been paid a compliment just before I left work, someone passing on nice comments from one of his chums who we'd been for a drink with. Only, being me, instead of saying something about how nice it had been to meet her (which it had), I felt the need to point out that in fact she was a little drunk by that stage of the evening in an attempt to suggest that her impression of me may have been slightly misconceived, only I'm not sure that it came out well and that I'd given the impression that I thought that the complimentor was a bit of a lush.

I've never been good at taking a compliment. I'm sure I've written about this before somewhere but I can't find it now, so you've probably heard this rather flimsy theory of mine before, but I think it stems from my early teenage years when girls would occasionally come up to me and say "my mate fancies you", when it was pretty obvious that their mates really didn't fancy me. I remember being quite upset the first time this happened - I suppose because I was young and naive and it was a new experience there was a brief glimmer of hope that actually her mate did fancy me, quickly being snuffed out when the mate's horrified face came into view - but after a while I got used to it and shrugged it off. I like to imagine that by the final time it had happened (I think it happened about four or five times, which I'd say is pretty good when you're as anti-social as I've always been) I was doing a certain amount of eye-rolling and sardonic commentary, although that probably wasn't the case.

The problem is that any vaguely nice thing that anyone has said to me me since tends to get treated with the same suspicion, that the person involved may, in fact, be taking the piss. Not that people pay me compliments on a regular basis, but it does prove quite difficult when, say, someone tells me that some bit of work I've done looks good (fortunately I've managed to get round that of late by making horrible, stupid errors in important new projects, so phew). I realise that this is something else that I should be over now, but it never quite seems to happen. Perhaps I need an etiquette guide to tell me how to react properly, or some inane news item on the BBC website will come to my rescue again. Yes, I have forgotten precisely what the point I was intending to make was going to be. Oh dear.