Hi kids. I’m back.
I had once thought that this would be my last entry. One final chapter to neatly wrap up my story of loveless questing for Mr Right, a happily-ever-after ending to validate all the drunken fumblings, public nudity and revealing the depths of my homosexual depravity to my immediate family. Uncle Robert, if you’re out there, this one’s for you.
No, there will be no fairytale endings in this blog. Prince Charming will not be galloping out of the sunset in a lacy shirt astride his bucking stallion, because quite frankly that is fucking dull. Unless it’s “Prince Charming Rides His Bucking Stallion III” in HD surround sound, which is anything by dull.
Instead I proffer a tale of a budding young romance set amidst the delicate blossoms of a London spring, a romance flush with hope for a new world of candlelit dinners and joint bank accounts, a romance that I fucked up by thinking “ooooh, if I can just make this work out it would make a brilliant ending to my blog.”
It all started one fine March morning as I stood in the Salad Man’s queue, waiting for my usual bucket of health for lunch. For £2.70 the Salad Man will give you a tub of olives, couscous, carrots, feta, sun-dried tomatoes and chickpeas so big it has developed sentient life. To put that in perspective, £2.70 in London will usually buy you a postcard of Lady Di and a punch in the face, so the Salad Man was always busy.
On this particular occasion none of my work colleagues had come with me so I was whiling away the queue time with my favourite hobby; Perving On The Unsuspecting. Pickings were slim that Friday, and after the horrorshow of mentally undressing a man who turned out to be seventy I settled for admiring the tailored coat of the man two ahead of me.
What a lovely subtle pattern. Such a clever collar trim. Selfridges? No, Liberty’s surely. A great cut. Fits perfectly over those broad shoulders. Excellent tailoring in the body too; the shape emphasises that toned, muscular chest and waist. Oh, he’s turning his head into profile, and I say! that ain’t bad either. Hmmmm, forget the salad; break off a chunk of the Coat Contents for daddy.
Such was the depth of my anorak admiration that I wasn’t even put off when he opened his mouth and addressed one of the Salad Girls in the dulcet tones of America. Rather, I waited until it was my turn to be served and – under the pretext of confirming that yes, I was having the same salad I have had every single day since 2006 – I nipped ahead and planted myself beside Coat Contents. I took a deep breath and prepared to deliver the best opening line since "if I could rearrange the alphabet I would put U and I together."
HW: “My god, are you having the LARGE salad box? That’s an epic eat. Respect.” Yes, I actually said ‘respect’. I am Tony Blair circa 2004.
Coat Contents: “Yep, I get it most days. I love this salad bar.” Amazingly, speaking back.
HW: “Me too, although I sometimes find it a bit repetitive so I like to spice mine up with some smoked haddock back at the office.” Oh yes, take notes dating underlings. There’s nothing like imagining someone with a smelly, oily North Sea fish stuffed into their gob to crank up the sexual frisson.
And so it continued. Coat Contents took his salad and waited for me to get mine, and then we stood around awkwardly while he established that yes, I worked locally and yes, I also ate salmon, skate, cod, trout, barramundi and perch. Strangely he seemed unwilling to end this most educational of marine conversations. I weighed this against an estimation of the damage his clenched homophobic fist could do to my pretty-boy face, steadied myself on the vat of potato salad and asked for his phone number.
Coat Content’s face broadened into a fantastic grin. He reached into his wallet and pullet out his business card. I did the same and we exchanged like some dreadful 20th century cliché. If only we’d done this 200 years earlier, we’d have had servants in wigs to carry our monogrammed cards to each other on silver trays and lend the moment an air of majesty. As it was I discretely wiped the humus off mine and hoped he wouldn’t notice.
Relief at having my teeth intact mingled with a sudden sense of achievement. I had just successfully hit on a cute man in a well-lit public place, without the assistance of alcohol, Straight Best Friend or Kylie! Truly I was a dating god.
A couple of risqué dates later and I had myself a bone fide boyfriend, and what a corker he was. While I nodded liked a labrador he’d describe Virginia Wolfe’s critical essays. While I gazed adoringly at his porno ‘tash he’d sketch arguments outlining Mozart’s compositional superiority. And while he read The Economist over breakfast I’d sit and think “when we get married this is what our breakfasts will be like every single day for the next seventy years until finally we die like Romeo and Juliet but horribly wasted and decrepit clutching each other in an embrace of enduring love.”
Sure there were difficulties. Sleeping together on those warm spring evenings, I’d lie awake and think “OK HW, just breath, it’s OK, don’t stress about this… It’s OK if he wants to sleep underneath a sub-arctic doona while the windows are closed in this heat. It’s OK that he has a fan running all night on high, it’s electric motor powered by coal-fired stations that are pumping out CO2 while the planet burns. No no, it’s OK because he LIKES THE SOOTHING WHIRR it makes. Breathe. Breathe the refreshing cooling air.”
But whatever issues I had with Coat Contents I always forgave him because knock me sideways to Christmas if the boy couldn’t actually kiss. Over the past seven years of having British men fondle my tonsils, plunge my tongue and suck out my oesophagus I’d forgotten how a real kiss is undertaken. Not with the express aim of eating your head, but with gentleness, passion and a tic tac.
Sadly, the good times were doomed not to last. After three months Coat Contents decided that things weren’t working out for him, and threw my heart into the trash alongside the articles on climate change I’d discretely cut out and left on his pillow. Yes, that’s right, imagine the horror; he couldn’t even be bothered to recycle. My heart went straight to landfill. That’s Americans for you.
Still, there are some pearls of wisdom in this cautionary tale. Number one, I learnt that years of internet dating, set-ups, one-night-stands, drunken touch-ups and dirty eye contacting had so reduced my self-respect that I could now happily hit on strangers in the glare of the noonday sun. Brilliant. Number two, I learnt that not all men who frequent salad bars are tofu-munching homosexuals, but if you’re lucky they might be. And thirdly I learnt that happily ever afters are the remit of dwarves, men in tights and stepmothers in drag, and thus have no place in any self-respecting gay man’s life.
Until the next time of course.
Thursday, 3 December 2009
Wednesday, 10 December 2008
Adieu, adieu, to yeu and yeu and yeu
Welcome, welcome one and all! We come together today to celebrate a great pillar of our community and to mourn their passing from my life. Never sought yet never failing to provide succour, never critical yet always a bastion of integrity, my life has been changed forever and for that I will always be grateful.
So please, take a seat. Sit back; relax. And enjoy the Big Guardian Newspaper Love-In.
Like all the best lovers, the Guardian didn’t force herself upon me but slipped into my life unnoticed (NB a contextual clarification from the author: while no female has ever managed to slip him anything unnoticed – that being gross and very yucky – the author feels that the personification of the Guardian lends itself to an intellectually ruthless and emotionally detached 40-something woman, who secretly wears a tie-dyed bra and likes to give big hugs when no one is watching). Our liaison started when a work colleague informed me that free copies of that day’s paper were available from the Guardian office foyer and – being a consummate tightarse – I couldn’t resist.
Before I realised it the Guardian had become part of my daily routine. Where once I would hiss and spit at my flatmates over breakfast, I now avoided the need for human interaction by reading yesterday’s edition. At the office I would put the coffee on before nipping out to get that day’s copy, a snatched moment of indulgence before the day began. And at lunch I would pore over the crossword with my workmate in the park, always desperate to finish it in a shorter time than That Smart Bitch H. I never did by the way. I swear she has the OED chipped into her head (as in ‘microchipped’, not a bit taken out with the OED shoved into the bloody pulp of a hole, which would be more personally satisfying).
Then there were the perks of living next to a building full of warm-and-fuzzies. Some mornings I’d chat to the lady with the baby seat who chained her bike outside our office, and her friendliness made me feel like London wasn’t such a seventh circle shithole of bubbling putrescence. When my boss refused to pay for paper recycling collection I first had a little cry for the Amazon, then asked the nice security guard at the Guardian if I could lob my paper into their bins. “Of course mate! Be my guest.” And whenever they’d run out of that day’s edition and I attempted to pay for a copy, the front desk personnel would wink and tell me to run along and spend my 80p on sugarpuffs and bonbons. Sigh. Save me 80p and I will love you till the end of days.
Of course, the primary reason I revelled in the Guardian’s proximity was because of all the Hot Homo Tottie it attracted. Better still, it was Hot Tertiary-Educated Disarmingly-Witty Spandex-Pants-On-The-Outside- Planet-Saving Homo Tottie. In the quiet hours of the day between plastic flow analyses I would sit back and daydream of chance meetings… collisions between single-speed bikes that would end in romantically entangled limbs… the amusing shenanigans of muddled gluten-free salad orders at the organic deli… the rush of wind at the recycling point that whips a pile of shredded documents into the air before it comes to rest on laughing eyelashes and tousled hair. All it lacked was a pottery wheel and an 80s soundtrack.
Sadly, all this must now come to an end. The Guardian is moving its offices to a swish new building near Kings Cross and I shall lose a) my free paper, b) my daily perve, and c) well, ummm, my free paper. I can’t blame them. Their current building is a converted carpark, and while I’m sure the convenience of note-changing machines on every level and the ability to urinate in office corners is not to be underestimated, working within those dotted white lines must eventually get you down.
Worst of all, I have only recently succeeded in infiltrating the Guardian’s wool-knit ranks with my cunning spy, Mrs H. She is moonlighting as a freelance writer for their online service, when in reality she is assembling a secret dossier on its male employees. I have charged her with the task of ranking them according to their:
1. Attractiveness, using my patented 383-step diagnosis.
2. Liquidity, using a traditional hacking-into-the-HR-database technique.
3. Moral fibre, using a small African orphan.
4. Degree of homosexuality, using her own oops-a-piece-of-my-lunch- has-fallen-into-my-cleavage trick.
Mrs H’s early reports were most promising. Apparently even some of the sports writers like batting for the other team, putting a few balls in the back of the net, rowing up the Thames on Tuesday or shooting hoops from the 3-point mark. A sports writer who likes to touchdown inside the baseline is something of a gay Mecca, but the move to Kings Cross has put paid to all these dreams.
So I shall put away my Arsenal T-shirt with matching pinafore, dig 80p out from my piggy bank and face 2009 with a brave smile. I have loved the Guardian, and for those brief two years that I worked in the stinking alley beside her, I think she loved me too. Adieu! Adieu!
And when the wind blows through your shining new offices, and you turn and cock your head to catch the lingering perfume of piss, then think of me, alone, in Farringdon.
So please, take a seat. Sit back; relax. And enjoy the Big Guardian Newspaper Love-In.
Like all the best lovers, the Guardian didn’t force herself upon me but slipped into my life unnoticed (NB a contextual clarification from the author: while no female has ever managed to slip him anything unnoticed – that being gross and very yucky – the author feels that the personification of the Guardian lends itself to an intellectually ruthless and emotionally detached 40-something woman, who secretly wears a tie-dyed bra and likes to give big hugs when no one is watching). Our liaison started when a work colleague informed me that free copies of that day’s paper were available from the Guardian office foyer and – being a consummate tightarse – I couldn’t resist.
Before I realised it the Guardian had become part of my daily routine. Where once I would hiss and spit at my flatmates over breakfast, I now avoided the need for human interaction by reading yesterday’s edition. At the office I would put the coffee on before nipping out to get that day’s copy, a snatched moment of indulgence before the day began. And at lunch I would pore over the crossword with my workmate in the park, always desperate to finish it in a shorter time than That Smart Bitch H. I never did by the way. I swear she has the OED chipped into her head (as in ‘microchipped’, not a bit taken out with the OED shoved into the bloody pulp of a hole, which would be more personally satisfying).
Then there were the perks of living next to a building full of warm-and-fuzzies. Some mornings I’d chat to the lady with the baby seat who chained her bike outside our office, and her friendliness made me feel like London wasn’t such a seventh circle shithole of bubbling putrescence. When my boss refused to pay for paper recycling collection I first had a little cry for the Amazon, then asked the nice security guard at the Guardian if I could lob my paper into their bins. “Of course mate! Be my guest.” And whenever they’d run out of that day’s edition and I attempted to pay for a copy, the front desk personnel would wink and tell me to run along and spend my 80p on sugarpuffs and bonbons. Sigh. Save me 80p and I will love you till the end of days.
Of course, the primary reason I revelled in the Guardian’s proximity was because of all the Hot Homo Tottie it attracted. Better still, it was Hot Tertiary-Educated Disarmingly-Witty Spandex-Pants-On-The-Outside- Planet-Saving Homo Tottie. In the quiet hours of the day between plastic flow analyses I would sit back and daydream of chance meetings… collisions between single-speed bikes that would end in romantically entangled limbs… the amusing shenanigans of muddled gluten-free salad orders at the organic deli… the rush of wind at the recycling point that whips a pile of shredded documents into the air before it comes to rest on laughing eyelashes and tousled hair. All it lacked was a pottery wheel and an 80s soundtrack.
Sadly, all this must now come to an end. The Guardian is moving its offices to a swish new building near Kings Cross and I shall lose a) my free paper, b) my daily perve, and c) well, ummm, my free paper. I can’t blame them. Their current building is a converted carpark, and while I’m sure the convenience of note-changing machines on every level and the ability to urinate in office corners is not to be underestimated, working within those dotted white lines must eventually get you down.
Worst of all, I have only recently succeeded in infiltrating the Guardian’s wool-knit ranks with my cunning spy, Mrs H. She is moonlighting as a freelance writer for their online service, when in reality she is assembling a secret dossier on its male employees. I have charged her with the task of ranking them according to their:
1. Attractiveness, using my patented 383-step diagnosis.
2. Liquidity, using a traditional hacking-into-the-HR-database technique.
3. Moral fibre, using a small African orphan.
4. Degree of homosexuality, using her own oops-a-piece-of-my-lunch- has-fallen-into-my-cleavage trick.
Mrs H’s early reports were most promising. Apparently even some of the sports writers like batting for the other team, putting a few balls in the back of the net, rowing up the Thames on Tuesday or shooting hoops from the 3-point mark. A sports writer who likes to touchdown inside the baseline is something of a gay Mecca, but the move to Kings Cross has put paid to all these dreams.
So I shall put away my Arsenal T-shirt with matching pinafore, dig 80p out from my piggy bank and face 2009 with a brave smile. I have loved the Guardian, and for those brief two years that I worked in the stinking alley beside her, I think she loved me too. Adieu! Adieu!
And when the wind blows through your shining new offices, and you turn and cock your head to catch the lingering perfume of piss, then think of me, alone, in Farringdon.
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