Of Fennel and Fisting

So much has changed since I was dating previously, like the invention of Grindr, the automobile and penicillin. It seems that the mobile gay-on-the-go facility just gives Gentlemen Who Can't Catch a chance to be flakier at a distance accurate to plus or minus 65 meters. And they are even more demanding too: conversation is often limited to a couple of letters and numbers, a demand for cock shots and then delivery of a postcode and before any rational sense takes you, you've dabbed your undercarriage with a Johnson's Wet Wipe and are on a bus to Streatham.

I was summoned to an orgy in this manner one Saturday morning. I was on the day shift; apparently they'd been at it since 8pm the previous night, whereas I'd spent a lovely evening with a decent bottle of red and a jigsaw of Balmoral castle. As an aside, do you know the Queen is a member of a jigsaw club? I love the idea that she'd done the same one as me, nudging Phil and pointing at the picture, "I told you the guttering needs painting." Anyway, they'd been lazily shagging for a good 18 hours before I'd arrived... The men, not Phil and Liz. And it transpired that you can't really do anything for that length of time without it becoming boring and having to dress it up anyway you can in order to keep it fresh. To my left was a man apparently getting MDMA inserted up his backside, to my right someone being paddled with some MDF. The hosts offered me some drugs put I declined; my history with narcotics is not a pleasant one and I get a come-down off Night Nurse. So I Just Said No, or as my mother politely taught me: just say no, thank you, it looks delicious but I'm as full as an egg.

In retrospect, I don't think you can't really do bacchanalian in Balham. The hosts buzzed around making sure everyone's glasses were topped up which was fine if they weren't tapping on your shoulder while you were being bookended by two men. "Oh do pop out and have some of the lamb casserole if you're peckish. The fennel's from the back garden," he trilled, moving through people with the seasoned ease of an air steward as his partner was nuts deep in a newcomer.

By this point I'd been there for two hours, so they'd been at it for at least 20. I doubt people were tired of the current cut-and-shunt going on, but the host was most insistent on keeping everybody buoyant by any means necessary. "Oh we'll be at this all weekend," he confessed. "Mario and I -" he laid a hand on his partner's sweating shoulder swinging back and forth "- we've had everybody over." I politely emptied my mouth before asking who.

He loaded up Grindr, Scruff and then a couple of sites on his laptop I'd never heard of and pointed over and over, with the running commentary usually going "He's been over, he has an ENORMOUS penis. Oh and he's been over. Also enormous, eh Mario? Mario..? Well anyway, he may be coming along later. And he..." It went on and on and on. Pages and pages of people, face, chest and dick shots, all tagged and collated. It was like a gay Pokémon collection.

I came and went as it was all a bit too strange if I'm honest. I kept wondering about the conversation between the host and his partner about what colour bedsheets they should get for the sex room. I imagine the host gunning for purple because it matched the Venetian glass they'd bought on holiday, whereas his partner would have been utterly indifferent. As it was it was a huge mistake: 20 hours in and it looked like someone was slowly finger-painting little silvery maps of the Philippines on them.

I imagine after the weekend you could have sold it a Jackson Pollack print.

Fountain of Youth

When I was much younger - when Bakelite was a thing and decimalisation was a shiny glint on the horizon - I was quite struck with the idea of a sugar daddy. A few years of therapy later would reveal this was due to the uncompromised distance between me and my own father and that I was trying to cross that emotional wasteland in whatever manner I knew how. I nodded quietly when my therapist, the semi-glamorous Dr Susan Rayner, had come to this conclusion. She's previously decided that I revel in good music whenever I feel emotionally unstable, so after this session I then went and bought that Sugababes CD I'd been hankering for a while. Dr Rayner may have had a glorious pair of hoop earrings, but she wasn't completely infallible.

So prior to that, as a fresh-faced ingenue on the Leicester scene, I'd gladly drop my handkerchief to any decent elder gentleman who'd give me the time of day (or at least hinted at the time of my life). The purchase of a half-pint of cider was merely a formality; a transaction to enforce that I'd already been bought by his soft words and rhumy eyes.

Clearly as I've gone on, there's slim pickings in the line of 'elder gentleman' unless you want someone who can pop their hip out during the reverse cowgirl, or buttocks that feel like two semi-deflated Christmas balloons found behind the sofa when you're packing the tree up.

However, as I screech towards my forties, I have discovered there's a swathe of emotionally-stunted youngsters who want a daddy. Completely unbidden, they are mesmerised by my Greek God beard and are in love with my more... Greek yoghurt physique. 'U is HENCH man!' someone sent me, who frankly looked like they should have been watching Blue Peter instead of chatting people up on Grindr. I had to google what hench meant. Apparently means fit. Fancy that.

Thus I also discovered how... Energetic the young are. You're bound to have heard this revelation so many times before its about as shocking as the end of The Crying Game, but still. All over the place! And at some considerable speed too. Prior to this, my sexual activities were akin to playing the board game Buckaroo: just keep twitching the odd thing until it all gets too much, a leg kicks and there's now a mess all over the table.

So this is by means of a thank you to all the daddies I used to know. I salute you (although it's probably more correct to say 'rest in peace', I suppose). I'm now taking up the position and definitely gaying it back.

The Reason I Now Have Short Hair

I hadn't been single long, still finding my feet - which it turned out were more often than not in the air - and managed to find this hulking great man via Dr Grin's Patented Finder of Gentleman Friends (To An Astounding Accuracy of 65 Meters). Good body, face less so, but I was simply after a little slap, tickle and pointless validation. Which he was giving me in the strangest way: he kept stroking my hair. No, not stroking - petting. My hair was shoulder-length at this point; I recommend to almost anyone to at least give it a go growing it. Plus I'd had a new passport photo taken at that time, so I could flash it and at least pretend I was rock 'n' roll at one point in my life; that I'd travelled the world and done all the drugs. These days I think being a rebel is not piercing the film on a microwave meal, but in flashing my passport I could hint at another life where I'd tried licking toads and owned a pair of flip-flops.

I was slightly conscious of a figure of the Virgin Mary rocking back and forward with each shunt.'Dirty cow,' I thought. 'She wants in on this. Virgin my beautiful bouncy ass.' But it was only til we finished did I start to take in exactly how much religious iconography was around the bedroom. I got no problem with diddling the God-botherers - they tend to be ten times more vigorous, having finally smothered their pent-up self-loathing with brief relief, and never really want to engage with much chit-chat afterwards bar 'is that your sock or mine?' And 'You're going to Hell, you know.' Yeah well so are you for that polyester bed set, but I didn't want to be the first one throwing stones honey.

This guy, whereas: he held me for a long time after we got dressed to the point where my arms fell to my side, but he carried on. "Thank you, thank you,' he whispered. I patted his back in distracted consolation; I mean, I was ok but definitely not worth what looked like tears forming in the corner of his eyes. Blimey, perhaps this rickety old body still got moves after all. "Thank you," he repeated. "I finally fucked Jesus."

And I got out of there at the speed of God.

You Wanna Piece Of That?

The only way I get to see the popular musical charts these days is keep one eye on the tunes they play in my gymnasium, which tends to be thumping, dizzying nonsense with lots of people ‘featuring’ people and rapping. That’s until 9.30am, when all the hardcore people have trotted off to their proper jobs, and then they play somewhat more sedate things for the likes of me who is more content to do a weight set and then pick at their nails for five minutes. Music similar to that in a supermarket when they start playing Duffy’s ‘Warwick Avenue’ to make you plod in time down the Haberdashery aisle in slow, dead-eyed steps and get beguiled by the overly-stimulating packaging of Jayes Fluid.

Anyway, in that golden post-9.30am gym playlist, a brand new Take That song came on. I was beguiled. It is called ‘Kidz’ and if you care to, you can watch it here. I advise you do, because I did the same and couldn’t quite get my hat on. Take That have gone steampunk! We have lisping homunculus Mark Owen giving us social commentary from underneath a cloak stolen from the Scottish Widow. Now I'm not a fan of Owen's reedy voice, certainly not when he's asking for us whether we 'wanna piece of that?!' where he's apparently inviting us to fight, and not offering us a section of Terry's Chocolate Orange. Later on in the album he sings an unfortunately visceral apology to his wife for his numerous affairs that have been made public in the last year. "And I," he sings, chewing the words as if they're made of packing sponge, "still wanna have sex with you." his sibilant 's' making 'sex' far more prominent than I'm comfortable with, and I'm really not comfortable with the idea of Mark Owen rutting at my leg like a horny spaniel.

I love trying to follow the plots of videos through a band's career. I did formulate my own storylines through the many promos of pop reality show Frankenstein's monster Liberty X (pronounced 'Liberty Kiss' to my mind) which would explain why one video they were stealing (and unfortunately dropping down a drain) a giant diamond one week, hanging around a luxury house in the Bahamas the next, before times becoming hard and finding themselves working in a factory under pop overlord Richard X making clones of themselves. There was a clear path in my head how one situation got from one to the next; Take That less so. We last saw the grinning five-some accepting down-on-his-luck Robbie Williams back into the group so they could enter a rowing competition and mournfully sing about the weather in a boat house (cf. 'Take That and The Flood') before rowing off to sea. They must have rowed all the way to their secret Thunderbird-style base, because they now inhabit a grimy space ship on the edge of the Earth's atmosphere where Robbie is happy to tinker with his BMX like he's 30 years younger than he actually is and Jason Orange can wear inconvenient steampunk spectacles while drinking cups of tea.

Oh lovely Jason Orange. He's always been one for me since I saw him cavorting topless on a beach during a formative moment of our childhood (cf 'Take That and the Pray'). He's so... Lithe! And I'm still holding out on the rumours fuelled by the fact he's the only one not wearing a ring on his finger. Well, a wedding one, if you catch my drift. If I fluttered my fan any harder, the Butterfly Effect means we'd probably cause a tornado in Texas. Yes, Jason was always my number one of the boys to accidentally meet at a premiere to something, where we'd hit it off over a bag of popcorn and a diet Sprite before he whisked me back to his glamorous London pied-a-terre (is that right? I do mean townhouse, not potato) where we make love on beautifully upholstered sofas. And as it's a fantasy sequence, I'm not fishing popcorn bits out my teeth or have to stop three times to empty my bladder of the bucket of Sprite.

But. Well. You see, I had this dream once. About his band mate Howard. A dirty, dirty dream. In real life, I tend to bumble through situations and events with barely any cares in the world and it takes something monumental to make me sit up and listen. And to my mind, there's nothing better than a dream to make my molasses-slow brain finally get the time to put all the pieces together and go 'hang on a minute...' It happened recently, waking one morning from a dream to discover I'd become smitten with a certain make of toaster (I shan't name names - I'm not completely about free advertising) and that I'd been popping my hand in and out of the gap between the pillows every three minutes until quite sore.

You see Howard is much more ‘Premiere Inn’ than ‘premiere, film’ (sorry, very tortured, but there you go). Honestly, it was a revelation! He took me this way and that in some ghastly hotel room. He was in his dredlocked stage as well, and I noticed that his hands that pawed at my 'Clarissa Explains It All' underwear had the most shockingly filthy fingernails. I've put this down to my semi-inexperienced youth and equating dirty hygiene to dirty sex. My therapist had a field day over that. We then proceeded to enjoy each other with such vim, vigour and finality that I remember coming away from the dream and going to check that my backside didn't actually look like a donkey's yawn after all. I haven't been able to look at Howard in the same light again. Thankfully, Take That broke up before my fixation became an obsession, but even to this day, each time a Take That video comes on, I get a misty look in my eye. And I was doing fine, thank you for asking, right up until this moment in the video:



That noise you just heard was the deafening clang of dropping knickers. Look at him! Look! What a man. You'd barely get away with your life in one piece, let alone your dignity. As I speak, I'm recalling the odd sensation of polyester sheets rubbing against my cheeks. The ten dollar, not the five dollar cheeks.

Anyway, back to the plot. Mark Owen is singing about authority and how it's all going to go out the space-window as soon as 'the kidz' come out, which I took to be a reference to the student riots that rampaged through London. Rampaged? Is that the right word? I didn't think the British rampaged at anything to be honest. We'll tut if someone pushes in front of us in a queue, but rampage? Just not us. Besides, that would be a complete volte-face for Gary Barlow, who revealed his support for the Conservative party by appearing at a school with then-Prime Minister candidate David Cameron hanging off his piano, one sequined dress away from Michelle Pfeiffer's role in 'The Fabulous Baker Boys'. He really does have an unpleasant face, that Cameron. My boyfriend says it looks like a freshly-wanked cock and I can kind of see his point.

So I think this is the moment where the 'kidz' come out - in this case the budget stretched to one teenager with a Polaroid camera. Clearly steampunk spectacles and tea cups are more expensive than I thought. Take That leave their space station for a bit of a jig, and the soldiers look on impassively. Now I'm not knocking jigs; I'm reliably informed that people used to turn up for the traditional trip around the stage at the end of the play just as much as they did for any of Shakespeare's works preceding it. It's just... All that effort and just for a bit if a dance? It does remind me of the mid nineties where I'd spend the afternoon getting ready just to go on the dance-floor for the Spice Girls' 'Who Do You Think You Are', the only song I knew how to dance to. But I wasn't arriving in a space station. Usually a clapped out Vauxhall Cavalier driven by a taxi driver who always tried to get a little fresh when you said you were going to Streetlife, the only gay club in Leicester.

But then, as Robbie Williams jumps on his BMX and rolls back and forth with all the charm and intent of a bored teenager in front of the local Spar, you realise that Take That are meant to be The Kidz. Good lord. Does the 'z' at the end now imply middle age? Gary Barlow's saddlebag cheeks are thrown wide in a bygone approximation of a cheeky chappy grin that doesn't quite meet his buried eyes. And this - this! - is why a band like this should never do anything as dismally serious as this, because we remember them cavorting on the beach, or having jelly thrown at their arseholes (cf. 'Take That and the Do What You Like'). Can you imagine them causing the trouble that Mark Owen promised in the first verse? Can you bogroll. Wisely, they just get back in their spaceship and go back into space. The kidz came out and the revolution never happened. Fancy.

Frankly, I went back to picking my nails and wondering if that man behind me in the gym had a job.

Reboot

New Year's Eve. Someone gleefully pointed out that you don't get a blindingly shiny new year after midnight. You don't get the promise of a exponential list of possibilities. What do you get? You get January.

I was sober for New Year's Eve due to complications of having my wisdom teeth out and fallen foul of a 'dry socket', which is where the hole where the teeth once were doesn't scab properly and you get an infection. You also get a group of whimsical gay friends completely without sympathy when you mention you have 'dry socket' because there's lots of braying and "...I'm not surprised at your age, dear..!" leaving you with little more than a wry smile and a glass of water to swill whatever crisps are left in what feels like chasms where your teeth used to be. I find New Year's Eve to be a miserable affair anyway, with a forced Butlins-style jollity forcing everyone to stay up to 2am to fire weak party poppers off a balcony somewhere. Celebrating that you're now into the dank joys of January, where you're going to be inundated with interminable Facebook status updates of how many days people haven't drunk a drop of alcohol, how people's diets are going, and how hideous the Sales were. Although those Runkeeper things on various smartphones are an utter joy, updating us all to how far around the park people have wheezed on the 2nd of January before the updates slowly disappearing til next year. I love those things. Highly detailed monuments to human failings, chittered off with technological indifference and accuracy, and only just stopping short of how many times you stopped to lean up a wall and clutch at your chest before limping back via the newsagent for a Mars Bar.

I take against January because its meant to be a time of change, and it never is. And it certainly isn't going to help eating my body weight in yoghurt, Martine McCutcheon. And I have to do my taxes because I'm self-employed graphic designer and I will now be spending four weeks flopping dramatically around my office with my back of my hand against my forehead, wailing "Why me? Why do I have to find the reciept for those pencils?" The whole thing is an up-hill struggle for me as I now only use one side of my brain and the side for numbers has atrophied like Samantha Mumba's career. It is not helped by my accountant, who steps up the somewhat tart-in-tone letters to almost daily during this month. They tend to start 'As per the letter we sent you dated August 23rd...' with a following request for how much I have spent on blank DVDs, cinema tickets and drinks for 'entertaining' 'clients' for my tax bill. These letters are fine in September, but as you're actually in another year now, it's just a little embarrassing. Add to that the appearance of pre-dame Moira Stewart, the lovely trustworthy newsreader on banners and billboards around the city, telling me that I really should do this by the 31st or I'll be fined. The only way to calmly do this is to imagine the lovely Moira is sitting behind me, coaxing me on. Her honied voice telling me that I'm doing really really well, and as soon as I do this, my reward will be the entire presenting team of Blue Peter will enchant me into a dark closet where they will proceed to lightly lick my forehead. But they never come. They never come. All that happens is I send them off and my accountant will stop the letters. And you can stop looking at me in a sassy, accusatory manner from your billboard perch, Moira Stewart.

Worse, this January atmosphere of semi-revolution is infectious. I promise myself that I'll do it earlier next year, that I won't cause the fuss and the drama. That I won't make fun of people's statuses or sudden can-do attitude that will last for a fortnight. And yet, if I look back over this blog I reckon that this proclamation will be there every year. And that's human nature. And that's January.

Knocking Through To The Back Parlour

So currently, I’m all about the painkillers and the Dame Shirley Bassey remix album. I didn't want to be a gay cliche, it just sort of happened. I got some white pills that fizz on my tongue, and some pink ones that go well with my pyjamas, and some turquoise ones that make me drowsy and when I take them I they’re a bit like a K-hole, and I come round discovering I’d been looking at clips of ‘Suddenly Susan’ on YouTube for two hours.

There is a reason, other than reading ‘Valley of the Dolls’ and thinking ‘Hey, I could totally rock that rustic-look Lawrenceville mansion of Anne’s’ - I’ve just had my wisdom teeth out. To be honest they’ve been annoying me for years, but I’ve only just had the time to get them sorted. And this isn’t the first time I’ve had a doctor poking around down the back of my throat (stop leaping ahead to your own punchlines) as I’ve already had my tonsils out too. It’s almost as if I’m making room for something back there, though I can’t think what. Of course, having friends who are as gay as tinsel, every time I mentioned I was going to be in intense pain for a week, every single one of them said “Still! No eating for a week! Oh, I envy you doing that just before Christmas...” and they would trail off before looking wistfully at a mince pie. And it is true - I’ve lost about half a stone simply by having a mouth the size and shape of the slot Princess Leah uses to put the stolen rebel plans into R2-D2.

Oh how I miss food! I would happily murder someone for a bag of crisps. And I can't WAIT to get better to see Burlesque. And by 'better' I mean 'off the drugs so I can turn it into a drinking game in the cinema’.

Wankr

So far I haven’t been seduced by the smartphone revolution because I’m a luddite who barely understood teletext when that was on. And yet, here I stand on the cusp of a contract upgrade, willfully holding back on whatever must-have gadget that is currently doing the rounds. I am naturally reticent to get an iTelephone because I’ve made my feelings on any and all of Apple’s smug Talking Tupperware products clear within these garishly pink pages; although I will now add to my distrust the bizarre phenomenon of, as soon as you mention an iTelephone, any and all users in the vicinity removing them from their pockets and bags and stroking the screens. Do please try it, if you can bear the strange sight of man petting machine so lasciviously. Just the name of the device, and this will cause the owner to subconsciously reach for it, as if to affirm that such wonderful technology does truly exist and they didn’t just dream up this life-changing cultural zeitgeist in the night. Most bizarre.

What I cannot get my head around is it clearly is terribly bad at a good percentage of the functions it proclaims, yet all of these owners still dote on them with the forgiveness of a backward child. As I’ve been edging towards getting one, I’ll ask these bewitched owners about the terrible camera and the fact that it drops calls and they’ll just stare at me with glassy eyes and say “But it’s changed my life...” before going back to pecking away at their Apps like hens with A.D.D. So it doesn’t function as a phone? “Oh, but its so much more than that...” they’ll say. One can only assume that the spinning little wheel that appears whenever its processing is a tiny little hypno-disc that calms and soothes the user as it fails to work on every other level.

The only reason I’m still thinking about getting one is the Apps - most of which sound like a delight to use. I tell you, if I were single I’ll be all over the Grindr application - the mobile version of gaydar. The idea is that you activate it, and it shows you how many Gentlemen Who Moisturise are in your vicinity who are up for a bit of bum fun. Although clearly as it was designed by gays, it can’t do measurements for toffee: one of my friends activated it in his lounge and was most startled to discover there was a gay apparently one meter away. Cue a horror film slow-motion turn to have a look behind him, only to discover no-one’s there. Apparently some bars now hold Grindr Parties, the thought of which fills me with a unearthly horror as I picture crowds of zombie screen-jabbers talking through the medium of their tedious device, lined up the walls like Borg in their alcoves.

Of course, the other option is Google’s Android phones, which seems far more efficient... and deathly dull as a result. Yes, its got lots of worthy apps to help you shop and recognise buildings via pictures you take, but can you throw Angry Birds across the screen? Can you bogroll. To cement this, one of my other friends decided to get the Android version of Grindr - and all that popped up was a man called Barry who worked in IT who was 42km away. I do not want to be these people. I want to be fun, and interesting... and yet you’d think that would point towards the iTelephone, but from everything I’ve seen of it, it is anything but. It removes part of your brain and only enables you to communicate via displaying YouTube clips and pictures of other friends sitting in other bars. Can’t I just stick to my old phone? Please?