The good, the bad...

And I’m the ugly…

My first date on Wednesday night was with ‘E’ who I met through gaydar, but who seemed nice and very keen (hmmm, reading that back its sounds like I’m a bit down on gaydar – more on that later). I met him at a floating pub we both knew near my offices, and that I go to a lot with colleagues.

I arrive before him and settle down with a soft drink, but of course forgetting that at low tide the boat sits on the riverbed at an angle; so then said drink immediately slides off the table and ends up all over the floor. Not the best way of settling my nerves (I am very shy, honest I am, and not good with new people. Thank God he wasn’t there!).

He arrives, looking pretty fine, well turned out and just generally gorgeous. Problem is he immediately decides I’m not for him; sometimes you can just tell these things (the look on the face, the horrified recoil, the tears of shame welling up in his eyes at being seen in public with troll-boy hogzilla Mike!). So we have a couple of drinks before he has to leave, apparently consumed with the need to get to work about three hours early…

So then, three hours to kill - and nothing but a general feeling of bewilderment to kill them with. What to do? Well, I decided straight away that this simply wasn’t good enough; so I jumped on a train, went into town, bought new clothes, and a few other gentleman’s essentials; headed back to my office where I changed, dumped the old stuff under my desk, and a sent short text to ‘A’ to say I was free unexpectedly early so 'come and get it'. Refreshed, I head out back on the town. This, by the way, is what I view as exemplifying the positive changes in me through coming out – any other time I would have just gone home in a strop and been beastly to everyone the next day.

‘A’ and I meet at 7 instead of 8, in a very nice part of town indeed, and we go for the by now clichéd drink. We both had unfortunately forgotten that there is a big football match on that night, so the place was rammed and boiling to boot, but we settle down to talk. At this point I’ve basically decided to have a good time regardless of whether the date was going anywhere, so I twitter on about this and that without being too self-conscious about it and after a couple of drinks in the pub he chose we decided to move on. He took me to a charming Belgian sea-food restaurant where we found a secluded table for two and after a couple more drinks, in the candlelight, after staring into his gorgeous eyes for hours, I made it clear that I was all for cockles and muscles alive alive-O, yes indeed.

Sadly he had to go to your actual Belgium very early in the morning so I headed home later that night, yet another with not enough food or sleep! But, he contacted me today to let me know where he got some jewellery I had admired (nice of him to remember I think), so in my immediate reply I suggested we meet up again soon.

And, in the meantime, ‘V’ has asked me out again and we’re going out in Greenwich on Sunday. Oh boy oh boy oh boy.