Do unto others

It’s a Wednesday night. I’m on a date. Bloke. Met him on the Guardian’s dating website. Chose him because he has an 80-foot boat and blue eyes. First meeting.

Things are not going according to plan.

The Plan was to have a drink, determine if he’s a fuckwit or not, and then cut-and-run. Play it cool. Leave him slavering for more.

The reality is he has managed to get two Guinesses down my throat in 20 minutes, which means we have left the exponential curve linking HW’s mental judgement to alcohol units at the point where the line of tangency becomes vertical. If you were to crack open my head now you would see a series of severed cables dangling in the gulf between Rational Thought and Libido Control. And the ruddy Guiness toucan dancing around with a pair of wire cutters in his beak.

So drinks become dinner, which becomes a piano bar. I am now four Guinesses, a bottle of red wine and two vodka tonics down, and am officially In Trouble. The earpiece linking me to The Best Friend Help Desk fell into my seafood soup at dinner and had to be rapidly swallowed as an unconvincing prawn, and I am having trouble differentiating between the straw in my cocktail and the thin scary man at the bar. This is not good.

The Date comes back with more drinks, and as he does so the gentleman-of-darker-persuasion sitting opposite asks him if he knows where the loos are. “Fuck”, I think. “Pissing. Yes. Pissing. This would be good. Yes, yes. I too will now piss.”

I enter the Gents, noting with my Holmesian eye for detail that there are two closely-placed urinals and one cubicle. The gentleman who asked The Date for directions is already relieving himself into one urinal, and is laughing and singing away happily. He attempts to engage me in conversation but I’m more interested in freeing the 243 litres of piss that have suddenly materialised in my bladder than debating Schopenhauer’s notions of free will. Still, it costs nothing to be polite, so I so I mutter some inanities back and dash into the empty cubicle.

“Oh god oh god the buttons they’re stuck oh god why the fuck don’t they put zippers on jeans anymore I mean it must be easier for the little Chinese kids to sew on zippers for 14 hours than buttons but maybe they like the variety oh god I’m going to piss myself on a date the indignity the ignominity is that the right word or does it have fewer letters and yes yes yes the buttons are off and ahhhhhhhh…”

As 243 litres arc to freedom I notice that my friend has decided that the best way to get my attention is to stick his head around the cubicle door and continue his prattle while I piss. When I give his latest joke a polite chuckle he takes this as assent, takes a step closer and peers around my shoulder. Before I can say “excuse me young man may I enquire what you are doing invading my personal space in such an inappropriately intimate manner?” he has reached down and given Mr Dangle a good ol’ grope. While I’m still pissing.

Fuck I hate gay men.

Trapped as I am by the liquid rope that holds me in unholy communion with the lav, the best I can do is splutter “Whoa! Mate! You’ve really got the WRONG BLOODY IDEA!” With a nonchalant shrug and a giggle he departs, leaving me pondering when exactly when in the history of social development it became acceptable to hold a stranger’s genitalia in a public place.

I’m thinking never. And I’m also hoping that my mum has stopped reading my blog. Reaaaally hoping.