A Play, A Perjuror, Performance Art & A Party

Blogging, by its very nature, is a highly self-indulgent pastime. While some bloggers have achieved a sufficient level of interest in their musings to make a living out of it (Perez Hilton, take a bow) I can claim no more noble motivation than that I love writing and enjoy the catharsis of getting my often disjointed thoughts on this that and the other into some sort of order. Writing is my therapy (always has been – at university I wrote a column for the college paper; before that, I’d dabble in poetry which whilst uniformly flowery and pretentious, at least served to soothe an often addled and over-active mind) and so the act is its own reward. That said, it’s always gratifying if and when someone else finds some pleasure in what one has written, so I’m naturally pleased that my last couple of posts have sparked a fair bit of interest from my small-but-loyal readership.

The piece about honesty seemed to strike a chord with many people and it was interesting to see its central theme borne out in a couple of recent events. The first was a trip to the wonderful Oval House Theatre – my local hub of gay culture – to see a brilliant new play, ‘Twisted’. Loosely based on the events leading up to the death, in mysterious circumstances, of Stuart Lubbock in Michael Barrymore’s swimming pool, the play followed the unfolding events of a weekend of drug-fuelled debauchery in the Manchester home of a dysfunctional gay couple whose house guests, both invited and uninvited, number a sexually voracious but, for the ‘sake of his career’ closeted, famous actor friend; a hard-as-nails, naturally straight-acting but defiantly out scally, and his sister’s boyfriend and, it transpires, own sometime bed partner, whose confused sexuality may be due to denial, ignorance or immaturity, we cannot be sure. In addition to their varying degrees of comfortableness in their sexuality, a further layer of complexity is added by the inter-relationships that develop between them and the extent to which dishonesty about their true feelings for each other – both positive and negative – affects their ability to interact functionally. The overarching lesson to be drawn from the play’s eventual tragic and all too sadly avoidable outcome is that a great deal of pain can be caused by our concealment of truths we are too scared to reveal.

Exactly that lesson was shown to be worth learning by the likewise all too sadly avoidable fall from grace of Lord Browne, nicknamed ‘The Sun King’ and toppled from his throne as chairman of BP for having lied to a court of law about the circumstances in which he met his ex-lover. This latter, by all accounts a spiteful and vindictive little bitch who, the relationship having ended and with it the high life, went running to the tabloids, happened to be a man. What was interesting was that none of the reporting of his sudden resignation that I saw seemed to attach any significance to this fact. The media also avoided finding any titillation in the allegation of which the mendacious denial caused Lord Browne to have to resign, namely that the men had met via a gay escort website. No, the only indiscretion for which Lord Browne ultimately had to fall on his sword was that he told in court a bare-faced lie in order to conceal a truth that he chose to dislike, and he got caught out.

I have nothing but contempt for the nasty, vengeful little trollop who repays four years of apparently unrestrained generosity by running to the Mail on Sunday. It follows that I abhor that publication and all who run it for being so archaically prurient and debased as to fund said treacherous bastard’s story-telling. I’ve wondered whether the story would have piqued their interest quite so much if the lover had been a woman and the escort agency had been a ‘straight’ one, and arrived at the conclusion that it probably wouldn’t have, so there’s some extra dislike and residual anger at this latent but nonetheless nasty homophobia. But why, why WHY did a man of Lord Browne’s immense power, wealth and influence think he would get away with lying in court? And what could he have been so afraid of that he felt the need to conceal it? His mother, an Auschwitz survivor to whom he was said to be devoted, is dead and therefore beyond embarrassment. Professionally, one can’t really get much higher than chairman of a multi-billion pound global corporation and a salary in excess of £3 million. And among his peers, after 41 years with the company and ten years at BP’s helm I imagine Browne must know at least as much if not more dirt on others as to be able to silence any board room sniggering. A couple of years ago, when the Mark Oaten/Simon Hughes revelations overshadowed the Lib Dem leadership contest, I wrote (for the currently moth-balled but hopefully soon-to-re-launch Coo-ee that, “these scandals have nothing to do with homophobia; they are the fruit only of foolishness and disingenuousness in men we expected to be a great deal wiser.” It really is sad to see that the same holds true this time around.

The other piece that chimed with readers was the most recent in which I reminisced about clubbing days gone by and my new ‘home’ on the scene, Vauxhallville. Some agreed wholeheartedly that London was long overdue somewhere genuinely new, while others felt that my report of the scene’s death was, perhaps, premature. Either way, it certainly seemed to generate some interest in giving the night a try and so it was that about eight of us headed on down a couple of weeks back for Madonna night. I went as H&M Madonna, faithfully recreating a look from one of the posters for that collection in trenchcoat, sunglasses, heels and uncannily realistic Madonna wig. ActiveWill dressed in top-to-toe denim and spiral curls to be Ray of Light Madonna; but it was Margo who carried off the prize for best outfit with his take on Malawi Madonna, in a vest top, sarong and Panama hat, all accessorised with his pièce de resistance – baby David Banda, or at least a doll thereof, bought for the occasion from East Street Market. The entertainment and activities that night were as eclectic as ever and had us all hooting with laughter. Le Gateau Chocolat, an enormous black opera singer, performed Frozen, backed by two dancing cats; Scales of The Unexpected, a barber shop choir, treated us to their Madonna Medley; Bearlesque (it does exactly what it says on the tin) vogued for all they were worth (clothes were removed; I swooned – they’re a seriously hot bunch of boys) and the hosts, Nathaniel De Ville and Timberlina (upon whom I have the most ridiculous crush) invited one and all to be part of their DIY Sex book. Margo and I went head-to-head in the quiz and as with the costume competition he pipped me at the post in that too, but deservedly so given his lifelong devotion to Her Madgesty.

The week before that had been Moulin Rouge – I went for a loose interpretation of the theme and dressed all in rouge, right down to socks and smalls – which involved the Bearlesque boys doing the can-can, Nathaniel’s revival of the tableau vivant (Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe starring the gorgeous Fred Bear) and the hands-free cocktail shaking skills of Ophelia Bitz. This Thursday just gone was the May Fayre, and although I rolled up rather late and alone (confident that I would cease to be alone the second I walked through the door, a confidence that was duly repaid many times over) I was still in time to catch the home-made placard-waving May Day march round the block, a one-off short set from the unbelievably talented performance artist Taylor Mac, and most fun of all, the dance around the May Pole. That I ended up snogging someone totally random who I didn’t fancy one bit, while dressed as a deconstructed May Pole, only added to the inherent entertainment value of another wonderful, original, enriching evening.

Yet, there’s one exclusive, invitation-only ‘club’ in Vauxhall that tops even Vauxhallville for sheer fun and glamour, and that’s my home sweet home. This Sunday just gone I celebrated one year in my much-loved bachelor pad with a (for me) fairly low-key cocktail soiree to which I’d invited thirty or so of my favourite people, of whom twenty or so turned up. Of the six or seven hours it went on for, the last couple – including a fairly brief visit to the Brewers – are less a blur than completely obscured, but from the substantial chunks I do remember I’d be very hard pushed to choose a single favourite moment. I loved that Dolly had joined me early to help perfect the night’s signature cocktail, the Peach Cobbler; I delighted to see Glenda and Princess Timmy, newly enfianced, arrive hand-in-hand bearing Malibu and pineapple; I was thrilled when ActiveWill arrived bringing not just a new friend but also a lovely bottle of bubbly, and doubly thrilled when The South African arrived with the same (well, the bubbly at least.) I was delighted that The Second Favourite Lesbian and her Lady Love made it along, especially as until that point the gathering had been all male (not that I mind that per se but one does like to embrace diversity); I loved that my Gay Neighbours dropped by from across the garden square (I couldn’t help feeling that that had something of an Alan Hollinghurst novel about it) and oh, God, I loved that every single glass, cup and vessel got used and re-used and yet the bar never ran dry, the music never stopped and not a cross word passed anyone’s lips. I even loved waking on Monday morning (not alone, but discretion prevents me from naming him) not knowing what kind of carnage might greet me upon entering the living area from the bedroom (as it happens hardly any, bar a few crumbs and my party shirt, buttonless having been physically ripped from me in the throes of passion.)

Thirty, Single and Fabulous might sound like a terribly self-aggrandising title for a blog, but reading back on what I’ve written here I think it's a fairly accurate definition of the life I'm lucky enough to be living right now. I lead, as far as I can, an honest life, awkward as that may sometimes be. I’ve found a truly wonderful night out that really lifts me up and have like-minded friends old and new to share it with. I have a safe and secure home in an area I love, to the extent that I would want to celebrate a year of living there; and when I choose to do just that, I get to share that celebration with the most amazing, eclectic, vibrant group of people you could hope to bring together. I don’t take any of it for granted; God knows I’ve seen enough change in my relatively short life already to know that nothing lasts forever and that people and things we assume will be with us all our natural lives can leave you in the blink of an eye. In just a few weeks I’ll cease to be thirty (though I’ll have nine years yet of being ‘thirtysomething’!) and although I’m happy to stay single for now, increasingly I’m coming round to the idea that one day I may want to settle down again. But for now, while things are as they are, that ‘fabulous’ stands and I defy anyone to convince me otherwise.

Vauxhall the fuss?

Lately I’ve been far, far away; not geographically, but to somewhere that’s been compared to another country – the past. My absence from you these past few weeks has been due in no small part to an extended trip down memory lane…so do indulge me as I share my holiday memories with you.

It all began with a hugely positive experience – my discovery, thanks to Margo, of Vauxhallville, quite the most amazing thing to happen to the gay scene for years. Vauxhallville almost defies description, not being easily pigeon-holed (and nor would it want to be) but one could loosely describe it as a weekly extravaganza of film, music, cabaret, dance, arts, craft, drag, fancy-dress, competitions and performance, with scope for dinner, drinking and dancing the night away. From the moment I entered that first night I was hooked. There was a tangible though indescribable excitement hanging in the air that intoxicated and excited me; the feeling that yes, at last, here was somewhere totally new and fresh on the scene (no, not ‘on’ the scene - in addition to it) where I felt at home in a way I hadn’t since…well, since Dirty Dishes circa 2000.

I got to discussing this idea of one’s having a ‘home’ on the scene with Margo and Jerry over Sunday lunch (Jerry’s killer chilli-tuna salad washed down with rosé) and it quickly transpired that both Margo and I – two men to whom the term ‘shrinking violet’ could never be applied – had felt for a long time now that the scene, such as it is, held no appeal for us. Gone were the days when every weekend was a blur of danceanddrinkanddrugsanddicksanddowners and Margo wondered aloud if, given that the opportunity for such weekends still more than existed, and in fact was far from confined to weekends, we were missing out on something by not indulging. No, I answered; we don’t club like we used to because the clubs aren’t like they used to be. Sure there are a million and one nights to choose from under myriad names alluding to their promised extremeness (Later/Beyond/Gravity...) each offering something more than the others (Better lasers! Bigger sound! Hotter go-gos (though why one would want to see Belinda Carlisle sweating is beyond me)! Open later/earlier/forever!) But therein lies the total non-appeal; the scene, bar a few once-edgy-now-mainstream nights like Popstarz and Nag Nag Nag, has become totally homogenised, with one spread of saucer-eyed muscle-boys under a mirrorball in Boyz being totally indistinguishable from the next, and the next and the next…

Our – OK, my – clubbing hey-day was from about 2001-2004, beginning with my move to the then-nascent gay Mecca of Vauxhall and ending fairly abruptly when I met The (then narcotic-unfriendly) Ex. Back then, the idea of an after-hours club under a railway line was totally new; I remember still the excitement I felt being handed, as I left DTPM, a flier for something called ‘Orange’ at ‘The Viaduct, South Lambeth Road’. We piled into a taxi, headed home (conveniently just off said South Lambeth Road) for more vodka and a line or two, then made our way to what we had established was the rebranded Dungeon Club to see what this Orange thing was all about. What we found was an arch, just the one, its walls - bare but for a few cheaply-made UV banners – dripping with condensation, a few green lasers cutting through dry ice and pounding hard-house from a not-bad sound system. This was being danced, swayed, raved and monged to by a totally mashed-up crowd of pretty gay boys, grotty stray boys, black girls, crack girls, she-males and don’t knows, fuelled by God-knows-what cocktail of pills, powders and liquor, all of it being indiscriminately poured, popped and snorted along the length of a bar staffed by a couple of boys who appeared to be the most out of it of us all.

Of course, we fucking loved it.

Nothing else quite came close to replicating the excitement of those early-days-of-Orange until Action came along in the early noughties. Here was a club – no, a super-club – with sound, visuals, publicity, venue and most importantly, crowd unlike anything we’d ever experienced, here or abroad (I make the distinction as even Home in Sydney failed to come close) and for the few short years that it thrived it was to us the ne plus ultra of Saturday night excess. Being held only fortnightly, you'd start looking forward to the next event pretty much the second you embarked on the walk of shame home. But, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, Action was bound to beget others and as we all now know, the result was that within a few short years every last damn railway arch in SW8 had been taken over, gutted, made over and relit to become an only-extremely-subtle variation on a no-longer novel theme. Over Good Friday brunch Glenda quipped that a so-minded entrepreneur could simply ‘knock Vauxhall through’ into one sprawling, laser-lit, muscled behemoth of a club and be done with it; we laughed but inwardly I think all wondered if just such an all-conquering act could be all that far off.

Nostalgia for a smaller scene, with less choice and whole fortnights between parties might seem absurd; minimalism may work for interiors but surely when it comes to nightlife, more is more, right? Not for me. I miss those heady days and the almost unbearable anticipation. I miss the thrill of being handed a flyer for somewhere ‘new’ that really was new, in concept as much as in name. I miss those 3AM taxi rides from EC1 to SW8 and the walk of shame home; hell I even miss the dripping walls of The Viaduct. But we grow, and we learn, and we take those precious memories and put them in a box until, as happened to me as I walked into Vauxhallville, something triggers in us the same rush, the same excitement, the same sense of being there as something so new and fabulous and you emerges blinking into the sunlight and seizes the Zeitgeist by the throat.

I’d like to say that these fond reminiscences are all that’s been exercising my thoughts of late, but on the contrary; as far as the trip down memory lane goes we’re not even at the corner by the lamp-post yet. But, much as I wouldn’t show you all my holiday snaps at once lest you get bored, I’ll save some of the story for another time. For now, I’m off home – it’s Vauxhallville tonight, and I’m planning on making a whole load of memories for the future.

Honestly!

A couple of Saturdays back, I had the rare pleasure of having Little Agony Uncle all to myself for a whole afternoon. LAU had scored a pair of free tickets for ‘La Dolce Vita’, an exhibition devoted to all things Italian at Kensington Olympia, and correctly thought that I would be interested in joining him for a couple of hours of free wine and hot boys in SW5. After a few laps of the hall in hunt of Pinot and penis, all we’d come across were a few perma-tanned gentlemen-of-a-certain-age flogging Tuscan villas and hordes of bridge-and-tunnellers queuing – queuing! – for the thimble-sized free samples of gut-rot Chianti, a depth to which even I was not prepared to sink. So, with the great honesty that true friendship enables, I told LAU that I’d had basta of this and we buggered off to The Coleherne to put the world to rights over a few lagers and chuckle about ‘La Dodgy Vita’ as we soon re-christened it.

The conversation took in many themes but the one that really got my cogs whirring was that old problem page staple of coming out to one’s parents. Over their years in the job, both Big and Little Agony Uncles have advised dozens, perhaps even hundreds of gay, bi and uncertain boys on this particular and, to my mind, by far scariest aspect of the coming out process. Go into any gay bar, club or gym, anywhere in London – hell, anywhere in the UK – and I will guarantee that there is at least one person in there whose coming out to mom and or pop was facilitated either directly or indirectly by the culture of possibility inspired by these two caring and wise men. But here’s a thing – neither one of them is actually out to their respective extant parent, nor in one case to his siblings.

Both has his reasons - broadly, religion and old age – for believing that the degree of distress an admission to being gay would cause the parent is disproportionate to that which the concealment causes him personally, and therefore keeps schtum. Day-in, day-out this causes few problems; the parents live miles away, both Agony Uncles are young enough to not yet attract speculation as to why they’ve not ‘met the right girl yet’, and familial visits are arranged sufficiently in advance for them to have plenty of time to make up the spare bedroom into a passable facsimile of one’s wholly-discrete-from-the-other’s sleeping quarters and hide all the toys. But what worries me, and I admit it’s a rather macabre worry but it really does exercise me, is what would happen if God forbid one of them died? What then? It was bad enough that each had to go through the loss and interment of a parent in recent memory without the other by their side, but what, I asked LAU, would one do if he had to bury the other all the time pretending to be just his housemate, his friend?

I don’t seek for a second to advise them – physician, heal thyself as Luke would put it – but I did share the view that in my experience there is far more to be gained from the telling of an inconvenient truth than from concealing it, be that through honest silence or actual deception. It certainly got me to thinking whether, in fact, ‘honesty is the best policy’.

That maxim has existed in one form or another for over two millennia and is found, with little if anything lost in translation, in most world languages. There are hundreds of other time-worn quotes, proverbs and anecdotes about honesty (indeed, the moral education of every American schoolchild is founded on the example of George Washington’s inability to lie) of which my personal favourite has always been Mark Twain’s assertion that, “If you tell the truth, you will never have to remember anything.” It’s a rather beautiful point if you think about it: when we lie, or otherwise conceal the truth, we create an alternative reality which becomes someone else’s truth. They will then share that with others, to each of whom we may have told the truth, part of the truth, or an untruth, or from whom we may have concealed the truth completely by our silence. This then creates stress and confusion for us as we struggle over time to recall who knows what about what and which version of events, all of which will sooner or later come back to bite us, as Twain may also have put it, on the ass. Tell the truth on the other hand, however unpalatable it may be, and you can carry on with life not having to remember a darn thing because everyone knows what’s what and once it’s out there it can’t hurt you.

I base this view on recent experience, some of my own, some of others. I’ve certainly benefited enormously these last few months from being honest with myself. First of course, there was the drinking. Admitting to myself that there could be a problem led to a major overhaul of behaviour that was damaging me physically and emotionally. I’ve still not got it licked; Saturday just gone saw me slip back into very bad old habits at a birthday party and I awoke Sunday morning on the hosts’ sofa not recalling any invitation to stay. [I should mention that my behaviour at said party was no worse than many others; Glenda called me on Sunday morning to ask if I had any idea how he’d got home, and Princess Timmy threw up in a carrier bag.] I am, now, reflecting on how I feel about that lapse and whether I should act on it, all the way being honest with myself; that’s a big change from just a few months ago when I’d have been laughing it off on the outside while ripping myself to shreds on the inside, and I’m thankful for that.

The other truth I’m thankful for having told myself of late has been my finally – finally, after years of denial – facing up to the dreadful mess I was in financially and doing something about it. Years of living, wilfully, beyond my means and a reckless belief that there would always be a Peter to rob in order to pay the many and various Pauls, led me to the edge of a frankly terrifying abyss that someone of my age and earning the kind of salary I do should never have to stare into. In the same way as I faced up to my drinking being out of control, I faced up to the need to marry what’s going out rather more closely with what comes in. Now, thanks to some hard-nosed negotiation, learning to say, ‘No, I can’t afford it’ – to myself as much as to others, and crucially, the support of friends generally and one friend in particular, in just a couple more months I’ll have the kind of disposable income that I would always have done had it not all been owed to the banks. I can’t begin to describe how much less anxious, depressed and out of control I feel having dealt with the truth of my monetary quagmire than I did all the while I was living the lie.

Others are feeling the benefits of tacking unpalatable realities too. Since my last post, the two boys who were settling have, quite sensibly, parted, having realised that they were not being true to themselves and that it would come to naught. Without a trace of animosity or recrimination each has reverted comfortably to the role of friend and to see them together is to see two chaps each blessed with the priceless gift of a true and life-long friend in place of a transitory and expedient partner for partnership’s sake. Another couple also went their separate ways, through rather less mutual a decision process but for the similar reason that, for one partner at least, the truth of the matter was that it just wasn’t what he wanted or what was right for him, and to have hidden that truth only to spare the other’s feelings would with time have only hurt them both.

Without exception everyone involved in these events has found that the consequences of their honesty have been far less severe than they feared. I think sometimes, to paraphrase Jack Nicholson in that electric scene in A Few Good Men, we hide the truth from others because we say they can’t handle it, while all the time the reality is that it’s we that can’t, through fear, or insecurity, or lack of support. After speaking with LAU that afternoon I cast my mind back to the months before I came out to my mother; the angst I went through, the fear I experienced, the best- and worst-case scenarios I played over and over in my head before finally, one evening, knocking back a bottle of Beaujolais and coming out with it, only for the news to be greeted with an “Oh!” and an offer to open another bottle. Sure, that wasn’t the end of it; mum struggled to accept that my homosexuality – which she never sought to criticise or deny – was simply a state of being without any scientific, sociological or philosophical explanation, and over the course of the next couple of weeks she came up with all manner of crackpot theories which I diffused as gently and patiently as I could. The one thing that helped us both through the process of coming to terms with my coming out was, you’ve guessed it, honesty, talking openly about our feelings and fears and taking the consequences of doing so.

I’m conscious that this is starting to sound very holier-than-thou and that I may be coming across as an evangelical know-it-all who holds himself out to be a paragon of virtue. Far from it. I may have faced up to a few harsh truths of late but I’m still not as honest as I’d like to be. I hide things from people. I make things up. I sometimes pretend to like people I don’t, and to not like people as much as I do (usually to conceal that I fancy the pants off them.) I’m not immune to telling a little white lie if it will help me get what I want, or a great big stinking black one if it’s something I really want. But I do think, pretty much, I’ve stopped the worst dishonesty of all and that of course is being dishonest with myself. I know and like who I am and that makes me happier than I think I have ever been.

And that’s the truth.

Belated Blogging, Boyfriends & Butterflies

OK, OK, first things first, an apology – it’s almost a month since I last posted and it must look as if I’ve got bored of blogging and disappeared into the sunset. One group of readers – they call themselves ‘The Gays’, which hardly narrows it down – has at semi-regular intervals been prompting me to put fingers to keys and share some more of my exploits, and I assure you – and them – that I’ve been meaning to, really I have, I’ve just not got round to it. Or rather, I’ve just not had the urge to do it, until now. The thing is – as you may have noticed – I don’t just write about all the fabulous things that happen in my life the moment that they happen; not to brag but I get up to so damn much that to have the time to write about all the wonderful parties, shows, meals, dates and journeys that I am blessed enough to enjoy from day-to-day I’d need to give up the day job which, I’m afraid, is what pays for it all. This as I’m sure you’ll appreciate would be rather self-defeating. Saying that, for every fabulous moment, there is an equal and opposite mundane one – thirty, single and fabulous I may be but I still have to clean the oven from time-to-time – which does not make for interesting reading. So it is that I go through my really quite wonderful life having experience after experience, reflecting on and processing it all, until along comes an event, or person, or moment, or thought, that I actually think others (including, bless ‘em, The Gays) would care to hear about, or that I really want to share, and then a post emerges.

This time around, the thing that’s been on my mind is relationships. Don’t worry, I’m not about to surrender my singledom, although things are going rather nicely with the gorgeous guy I met when I went to help Andrea Bianco choose new specs a few weeks back and have had a couple of dates with since, so watch this space. Rather, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to relationships in general and a couple in particular, and gotten to wondering just what all the fuss is about.

I had a conversation a couple of days ago with one of my very dearest friends in which he broke the news to me that he and a mutual friend of ours had got together as a couple. This kind of event is usually greeted with much whooping and cheering and downing of cocktails, but this time the news was delivered without so much as a smile and if anything more than a trace of a frown. You see, these two had not got together out of sheer love for each other (although there is certainly reciprocal, if imbalanced, affection) or even as the result of a mutual attraction that had deepened over time. Rather, they had decided to give being boyfriends a whirl for the sake of not being alone any more, to soothe the ache of their mutual loneliness and because they had grown to believe, after years of waiting and hoping for ‘The One’ to come along, that ‘The One’, like Godot, was never going to show. Now I could perhaps understand it if these guys were in their sixties, or fifties, even in their late forties although God knows I have friends in all of these age brackets who live as full if not fuller a life than ever they did in their teens. But these guys are my age, or at least in the same tick box as I on a survey form. And the survey question has to be, “Since when did our thirties become the cut-off point for finding lasting love?”

I must admit that when I was younger – I should say ‘even younger’ of course – I craved a lasting relationship. For the first few years after coming out I was very promiscuous, and not just closeted-country-boy-moves-to-the-big-city-and-hits-the-scene-with-a-vengeance promiscuous, but rampantly, insatiably, by-the-time-I-was-twenty-I’d-lost-count promiscuous. But underlying it all was not so much a voracious appetite for sex (though that played a part) but the perhaps misguided and certainly naïve hope that if I slept with enough frogs I would be sure to find my prince. I thought I’d found him a couple of times too; I was absolutely besotted with my first ever boyfriend – are not we all? – and with the benefit of hindsight and a little psychotherapy I can see now that the man who I thought was and would ever be my one true love was in fact a substitute for the father I had lost just a few weeks before our meeting. Then of course came the two big relationships, with The Ex and The Other Ex (God these pseudonyms are imaginative, aren’t they?) both of whom I loved – and still do love, each in their way – and both of whom I thought, in the early stages of our relationships at least, might be ‘The One’, until it transpired otherwise.

(I’m going to go off on something of a tangent here but mentioning my father triggers memories of his and my mother’s relationship. Meeting at the ages of 31 and 34 respectively, and both having had several prior partners, it was, as mum tells it, love at first sight; they were married within the year, Big Sis followed almost nine months to the day later, I came along three years after that, and they enjoyed twenty-odd almost uniformly joyful years of marriage until death quite literally they did part. Just food for thought.)

Since becoming single last time – well over a year ago now – I have embraced bachelorhood and all the benefits it has brought. This is not triumphalism nor is it in any way meant to denigrate the several good and happy years I had with The Ex, but is a simple statement of fact. Certainly since my own break-up I will admit to having been, if not instrumental, then at least facilitative in a few others, through on the one hand my championing of being on one’s own, and on the other, through my firm and unwavering belief that it is better to have no relationship at all than to be stuck in one that is less than perfect. I am lucky enough to be able to say that I have not one but many boyfriends, and indeed girlfriends, in the shape of my many and wonderful friends, from whom collectively I receive easily as much and probably more love than I ever got from one man alone. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t one day like to meet Mr Right and be so swept off my feet that the ‘Single’ in Thirty, Single and Fabulous becomes obsolete; but would I ever crave companionship so much that I would let convenience outstrip desire? Could I give up the search for Mr Right and settle for Mr Right Now?

To be honest it’s impossible to say and indeed it would be reckless to do so with any degree of certainty. I mean, if in a few decades time you and I are still here and this is ‘Seventy, Single and Fabulous’ then yeah, ask me again if I want a relationship and the answer will still come back ‘No’. But what if it’s ‘Seventy, Single and So Bitter About It That I Might As Well Be Dead’? Will I be so sure then that those two boys who got together through one’s loneliness and dwindling self-esteem and the other’s besottedness and dogged persistence were really doing anything all that unreasonable? I wish I could lay claim to having come up with what I still believe to be the perfect assessment of why people enter or don’t enter into relationships, but Carrie Bradshaw gets the credit for this: ‘Some people are settling down; some people are settling, and some people refuse to settle for anything less than butterflies.’ Those two boys may be settling, and that may make me profoundly sad, but thinking about it, only they know what’s best for them and if settling is what’s best for them right now – and if given a few months, that moves on to settling down - then all to the good.

Me, here and now, I’m sticking to butterfly hunting.