Back Story Page 0,104

hanging out in trendy bars. But no such thing.

I certainly didn’t go on dates. In fact, until fairly recently, I didn’t really believe that going on dates was something people did, except in stories and America. I thought it was like proms or spherical Christmas puddings. The fact that some people – probably most people – approach the absence of a romantic relationship from their life in such an ordered, almost clinical, way is something I’ve only cottoned on to in the last five or six years. In my twenties, I didn’t have a clue. Sex was surely something that happened unexpectedly, occasionally and almost by accident, and ‘going out with someone’ was just a further happy accident that would follow if you didn’t feel shit about yourself in the morning. The thought that you might actively try and meet women – at parties or bars, maybe by going along with male friends also looking for dates – and then get talking, exchange phone numbers and then, horror of horrors, ring up and ask them to join you for some sort of social event was ridiculous. That would be like just saying you fancied someone, to their face! Honestly!

And none of my friends seemed to go on dates – or, if they did, they didn’t tell me. All of my friends were from Cambridge and some of them were going out with each other. In the absence of anyone in that group who I wanted to go out with and who wanted to go out with me, I was single. That just seemed to be one of the things about me, like brown eyes and a preference for tea over coffee. I tried not to think about it. I imagined that, one day, a supermodel with a rapier wit and a heart of gold would throw herself at me. And my friends didn’t discuss it much either. Studenty conversations about crushes waned. In the real world, the crushes were fewer and further between – but the whole subject was somehow more serious. So I avoided it. I knew this sort of thing was important in the long run but, like eating enough fruit, it didn’t feel like a pressing concern. I was perfectly happy single.

Besides, I seldom met anyone new, other than over a tea in a production company, discussing the difficulties of pitching a sitcom. Which, to be frank, worried me a lot more than the prospect of dying alone.

- 27 -

Causes of Celebration

A pink limo pulls over to the kerb a few yards in front of me. I doubt that it’s local. It’s not that sort of area. I’m back on the Bayswater Road now, having run out of park. The posh houses of Kensington Palace Gardens stretch down to my left. I’m not saying their owners are immune to vulgarity when it comes to choosing cars – they could probably be tempted to one of those slightly chavvy new two-door Bentleys – but this vehicle is full-on Vegas kitsch.

Various participants in a hen do, still fairly sober at this hour of the afternoon, get out to stretch their legs and finalise plans for their assault on the West End. They’re all wearing devil horns and short skirts except for their two male friends who, for some reason, are dressed as pirates. I pity those men. The girls’ devil outfits look perfectly sexy, while the two blokes are encumbered with cutlasses and parrots. When the paparazzi hope to glimpse a twat getting out of a limo, this isn’t what they mean. What are these two doing there?

Maybe they’re gay. A gay friend of mine was once invited on a hen do. He went along but couldn’t quite get the rationale clear in his head. Surely, he thought, stag and hen nights have to be demarcated along the lines of the gender of the participants, not that of whom they aspire to fuck? Would a lesbian be made to join the stags?

Take that to its logical conclusion and loos, the gender division of which is presumably to preserve decency and avoid funny business, should actually not be for ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gents’ but for ‘Gent-Fuckers’ and ‘Lady-fuckers’. So straight men and lesbians can happily pee in the same area, safe in the knowledge that mutual sexual attraction cannot occur – while the gay men are in with the straight women, happily talking about [insert sexist/homophobic generalisation of your choice here].

I really must stop thinking about loos. I stop briefly in