Modern Dating II

This post is sponsored by the words Pot, Kettle, and Black.

A few months ago I wrote a blog entitled Modern Dating. It portrayed any guy who partakes in ‘alternative dating’ (online, personals, chloroform, etc.) as a maladjusted misanthrope stuck behind his computer with a seething erection and crispy tissues plastered irrevocably to his hands, and any girl as the female equivalent; this perhaps involves a cucumber. A number of people more experienced in the online dating world did not take kindly to this astringent assumption. They suggested I should try it myself before mouthing off on the Internet. This, combined with a growing phobia of dying alone beneath a railway bridge and my bloated corpse only coming to light after several weeks of being eaten by cats, encouraged me to give it a go.

I chose a free dating site, which, days later, was in the news after one of its members beat another member half to death with a hammer following a bad date. Now, the very crux of my previous dating post was that no one shows their true self in alternative dating. Gaping flaws, such as a penchant for hammer-orientated violence, become endearing quirks, crippling anxieties charming idiosyncrasies. Even with this insight I soon found myself glossing over my personality defects and listing only my most esoteric of tastes. Yes, my favourite film is Three Colours Blue by Krzysztof Kieslowski! The only photos I uploaded were either pretentious Instagram or pretentious black & white, and all conveniently devoid of bad skin, fat belly, and hairy back. By the time I was finished, my profile was home to a version of myself I’d never met.

Initial interest was exclusively pugnacious transsexuals in bondage gear inviting me to their house for a blow job. Their numbers have been safely stowed for a few years down the line. Online dating is particularly belittling due to the arrival of a notification each and every time someone visits your profile, balks at the abhorrence of your photographs, and hurriedly absconds. It took a few weeks before I made contact with any real females.

This blog is built upon a foundation of disastrous dates and romance run aground. Who else can say the first girl they ever kissed promptly threw a pint glass at their head? However, this entry will be slightly different. Although not one of my four dates was a success per se, all of them, to varying degrees, went smoothly.

The difficulty lies in a superficial notion of imaginary science upon which people judge the future viability of a hypothetical relationship: chemistry. Although I understand the importance of getting along with someone, this apocryphal natural harmony has eluded me at every turn. It might be the fact that I am naturally awkward and take a while longer than most to feel comfortable around somebody new. This, as well as an archaic adherence to chivalry, often sees my relatively unhurried pace to sleep with someone diagnosed as a chemistry deficiency. Whatever happened to taking the time to get to know someone?

This is a disadvantage in the world of online dating. When finally I do meet someone I am plagued with a heightened awareness that I must make a great first impression. I arrive with a gargantuan flashing sign around my neck that screams LOVE ME. So scared am I of failure the date becomes a job interview, a frantic dissimulation, the desperate concealment of all blemishes to try and appear as the perfect man, as someone who isn’t inwardly terrified of being revealed as not worth knowing. Amid the exertion of maintaining the charade there’s no space to formulate chemistry.

The result was three non-awkward but ultimately lacklustre dates. Three separate girls sent near-identical postdate messages: You’re a really nice guy, but there was just no chemistry.

I persisted with a fourth date. Within ten minutes of sitting down in a pub on the Southbank, I knew it was doomed. Every time I spoke her eyes glassed over in a way I’ve only seen before in students I’ve taught. My chemistry vacuum yawned widely between us. So I decided to experiment. If being myself doesn’t work, and presenting a version of myself modified for social acceptance doesn’t work, I would be somebody else.

So the next time I opened my mouth I told her about the years I spent as a primary school teacher for troubled kids in Manchester. I regaled her with the tale of my near-goring in the running of the bulls at Pamplona. I made a devilishly inappropriate joke about Chlamydia.

And she laughed. And she believed. And when I text her the next day to ask how it went, she replied that there was great chemistry.

Although I’m not proud of lying to someone, it was necessary in order to stop deluding myself. Dating, online or otherwise, will not work for me. I will never make an earth-rending first impression. I will never glide inside the doorway in full Navy uniform and sweep someone off their feet back to my villa in the hills to engage them in headboard-abusive acrobatic sex.

So my online dating profile currently stands idle. All that’s left is to wait in the hope that one day there will be someone patient enough to get to know me, that time will outweigh lacklustre first impression. And if not, you will find me by following that smell to the noise of feasting cats underneath the railway bridge.

Easter Bunny

This is as close as I’ll ever get to posting a blog of cute animal pictures. In fact, while we’re here:

Aww.

Now that we’ve satisfied that Internet quota, I have a rare uplifting story to tell; a tale of heroism against the odds; a legend about the time I had to finger a rabbit to save its life.

...I didn’t say it was going to be a typical uplifting story.

For some years I worked in a pet shop. Contrary to popular belief, this did not entail daily communions of hugging fluffy creatures nor the animal-induced learning of saccharine life lessons. Rather it required being soaked in urine at 6am, dangling hamsters from my fingers by their teeth, and generally battling to prevent idiotic customers from inadvertently murdering their pets.

The rate at which people are able to off their new friends is really quite impressive. Common sense rarely hinders customers from leaving their brand new gerbil in the car while they go shopping. For five hours. At the height of summer. My claim to fame is selling a hamster to the head anchor at ITV news, only for him to return a week later to inform me that his son had ‘thrown it down the stairs.’

So when an elderly gentleman and his young granddaughter approached me about their new rabbit being ill, I was less inclined to care. The girl had likely fed it Super Noodles or tried to sync it with iTunes. I was soon informed that two months prior the little girl’s father had been diagnosed with cancer. Then he’d died. A rabbit had been bought to cheer the girl up. It died. And now its replacement had refused to eat or poop for three days. Half-hourly syringe-feeding was required throughout the night or it would... well, you get the picture.

At this point, to emphasise my heroism, I should point out that this was my tenth work day in a row, with a combined total of near a hundred hours. But like the cold-hearted rom-com businessman who answers his door to find an abandoned squalling babe, my heart melted just enough. I took the rabbit home.

He was tiny, only two months old, ginger and white in colour. His stomach had bloated and hardened like a condom packed with gravel. Every half an hour I forced a feeding syringe behind his front teeth and injected formula that smelled approximately of regurgitated afterbirth down his throat. It’s lucky that rabbits are unable to vomit.

By midnight I had christened him Wilhelm and we were cuddled up on the sofa in front of the TV. Four feedings later, just after 2am, the exclusive first showing of Cheryl Cole’s new music video came on. Wilhelm was clearly not a fan. A gout of diarrhoea lashed across my trouser leg. A torrent of it soaked my crotch as I hoisted him up. I ran for his cage, Wilhelm at arm’s length, splattering a trail of diarrhoea across the carpet and up the stairs. I dropped him into his cage, and with his steely rabbit indifference he filled the corner with a puddle of half-digested formula. When he was finished, I flipped him over to clean him up.

The rabbit had prolapsed. Where usually his exit hole would be obscured by fur, the urgency of his bowel evacuation had forced his bottom inside-out. A shiny pink lump like a pierced tongue protruded from his brown-stained fur.

The diarrhoea was a good sign. But his stomach was still bloated, backed up like a blocked pipe. It could not be cleared while he was wearing his bumhole as a belt. It would have to go back in.

I paused to rub Vaseline on my finger, the rom-com businessman burdened with changing a soiled nappy or consoling his distraught love interest. This was my animal-induced life lesson. Wilhelm must live! Live!

I pressed my fingertip to his flagging behind and with one firm shove popped it back inside. Then I pulled out and watched as the diarrhoea resumed, worse than before. I begged for his bottom to hold. I was an engineer manning the shields on the USS Enterprise, Tommy Lee Jones praying for his lava diversion to take the strain. Until 7am I monitored his butt as the flesh flexed and rippled, but held true.

Later that day the customers returned for their rabbit. Wilhelm was out of the woods. I had been awake for thirty hours and sexually violated what had become my best friend. Like the final scene where the softened rom-com businessman loses custody, they took the rabbit and left. There could be no appeal. They didn’t even bloody say thank you.

Digital Ghosts

An old school friend of mine recently died. I hadn’t spoken to him in approximately a decade. The only reason I’m aware of his death is Facebook. As has become customary, my former class mates and I have vacuously honoured our past acquaintance by becoming friends online, while in the real world crossing the street at the first sniff of an awkward encounter. We occasionally ‘Like’ someone’s status or photograph when they get a job/get a baby/get fat, and exchange asinine comments about bygone halcyon days whenever an old class photo surfaces. So it was only when these shades of the past began leaving their condolences on this old friend’s page that I realised something had happened.

There is a small but growing number of Facebook profiles on my friends list now that belong to the deceased. They have been maintained as digital memorials, a more convenient alternative to tending a grave. Once a year erstwhile familiars unearth their blanching memories, like estranged relatives at an obligatory family reunion, to type a few words of remembrance. Some profiles are even created posthumously as a contemporary take on the inevitable idealisation of loved ones when they’re gone.

There is often anger or chagrin when a deceased celebrity is employed from beyond the grave in the name of advertising; Marilyn Monroe expressing fondness for a perfume she could never have worn; Gene Kelly unable to contain his hither-to unknown break-dancing passion at the sight of a car he could never have driven; various genocidal dictators being wheeled out to testify their love of Nandos chicken. I may not be famous, but need I still worry how I will be represented once I am dead?

A statistic recently revealed that 11% of Britons have included their various online passwords in their will, the ultimate tick of the ‘remember my log-in’ box, so that, amongst other priorities, their Facebook/Twitter/secret fetish dating site profiles can be dealt with accordingly when they die. We used to worry about our souls being consigned to infinite damnation. Now we worry there will be no wi-fi connection in the void.

The last time I left my Facebook open within a 5 mile radius of any friends I returned to find I had become a fan of Ballbusters Gay Porn and had left comments to half my female acquaintances offering them a thorough spit-roast. What would happen if they had my log-in details once death had rendered me defenceless? The thought of being mercilessly ‘fraped’ for the remainder of eternity concerns me more than it should. Most people will respect a gravestone. Far fewer respect a social media profile. 

Many years ago I came across the MySpace page of a teenage girl who had committed suicide. Years later random men still visited her page to express their anger at never having had the chance to fuck her, no doubt spurred on by how much longer it was taking them to knock one out over her pictures. The profiles of other suicides become a breeding ground for religious propaganda, insincere declarations of remorse, finger-pointing depression awareness campaigns. The cacophony of voices drowns out the person at the heart of it all.

One day soon I expect Facebook to cater funerals. An event invite will appear on your homepage, the ceremony and wake taking place over chat. A sarcastic commentary can run alongside on Twitter with the hashtag, in my own case, #DeadDave. Those people I used to know can pay their condolences with memes of sad-looking cats in bowties. Then for the rest of time I will be immortalised by my pictures of drunkenly humping a tree and old status updates of smart arse pretentious banter until my inexorably lengthening Timeline stretches too far into empty space for there to be anyone else left to remember. Meanwhile, my physical body can be fly-tipped down the verge of the M27 and devoured by voracious badgers.

I’ve come to hope that I will be forewarned of my death in some way. Just to give me time to delete every last kilobyte of my online presence so that I will require no plot in the ever-expanding digital graveyard.

I knew this old friend for 11 years. I consoled him the best a 9-year old could when his parents got divorced. I bought what was very likely a stolen copy of Mortal Kombat from him. Years later he pretended to mug me in the street then laughed when I fell over with fright. These are my memories of him. I did not go to his funeral. I do not even know how he died. I visited his Facebook profile once to register my condolences. And now I have no reason to ever go back.

Double Chin

I’m a big fan of hypotheticals. They come in several different flavours. There’s the arbitrary test of morals (how much would I have to pay you to bite the head off a live kitten?), the kebab house test of sexual deviancy (would you rather drink a pint of semen or have sex with a Shetland pony?), and the Twilight Zone test of time paradox social activism (If you could go back in time would you murder George Lucas before he could make the Stars Wars prequels?). Then there’s the brand of hypothetical more commonly found in confessional poetry or Hollywood body-swap rom-coms: what one moment in your own life would you go back and change?

(Just to clear things up: £1 million, a pint of semen, YES GOD YES QUIT BLOCKING THE DOOR TO THE DELOREAN. No offence, George.)

I’m fairly certain that if I had a time machine the entire population of Earth would be made of toast and live by panning for nutritious jellyfish placenta in rivers of liquidised atmosphere that float in the newly polka-dotted sky caused by the uprising of our tyrannical mollusc overlords. Such would be the devastating butterfly effect that would result from my daily journeys back to correct some niggling mistake. So it’s difficult to choose only a single mulligan.  

With some thought, I’ve dated all my troubles back to a visit to my dad’s flat when I was around 10 years old. Dad, my sister, and I went in the lift, a lazy habit as it was only one floor up. We stepped out into the chilly grey-tiled hallway and walked to his front door. He had recently been burgled, and the door had been replaced with white-painted solid wood and fitted with three individual locks. My sister and I waited as Dad fumbled with the first key. Then for some reason he turned to look at me.

‘You’re starting to get a double-chin, David.’

My sister looked too and laughed. ‘Yeah, you are!’ she said, tapping the flesh underneath my jaw.

There was nothing malicious about this. If anything, it was a warning. The problem was that at 10 years old I didn’t know what a double-chin was. So I made the assumption that they meant this:

And I was pleased. Puberty was fast approaching. A vaginal chin would be a sign of growing up. I would apply the word ‘chiselled’ to myself at every given opportunity. I would grow my hair long and pose for photos in a meadow with a harem of golden retrievers. I could store letters and other correspondence in the cleft and use it to retain my sandwiches until lunch. Within seconds I had convinced myself that I had been paid a compliment. I walked into Dad’s flat with a smile on my face.

It wasn’t until years later that I realised what they really meant was this:

That photo is taken approximately one year later, after the period in which I single-handedly devoured Britain’s entire summer harvest and polished off two younger brothers about which the family no longer speaks.

I am in constant need of something upon which to blame my current failures as a human being. My past weight, approximately an additional 7 stone to my weight now, is like a small person I can practice all my violences on in preparation for the invention of time travel and my long-awaited meeting with George Lucas. If I had only known what a double-chin was and taken the warning, I might have done something to prevent its expansion. I might be a whole better person today.

And failing that, I would wait until my 10 year old self is alone, abseil through the window, kick the pie out of his hands and puncture his neck with a biro so he can never eat solid food again. He’d thank me for it one day.

So I’ll leave you with a hypothetical. Would you rather eat human faeces or... no, wait, not that one. If you had the chance, what single moment in your life would you go back and change? 

Stand Up

I’m last on stage at a comedy club in central London. I’ve just told the best of my new jokes, an altogether misjudged anecdote about eating sweetcorn that had already passed through my girlfriend’s digestive tract. Nobody laughs. My date shifts uncomfortably in her seat and glances back at the door, no doubt judging how far it is to run.

This is everything I had feared stand-up comedy would be. The blazing spotlight coaxing rivulets of sweat from my brow like worms wriggling out into the morning sun. A deathly silence begging to be shattered by cantankerous heckling Muppets from an overhead balcony. The realisation that, despite having 3 minutes to go, the remainder of my material is about as funny as a kitten spray-painted with a Swastika.

The comedy club is every cliché of the open mic scene rolled into one. It’s underground, a scantily lit elongated cellar, so low in places that I am forced to duck my head. The makeshift stage is deep inside, as far from the exit as possible, bedecked in shabby curtains and, I can only assume, the broken dreams of countless comics. We are led to tight rows of folding chairs, usually at home being smashed across a wrestler’s spine, by the exaggerated cockney owner. There is a strong sense that, if fewer people were around, he would cave my head in with the condom machine and steal my shoes.

A group of young guys huddles at the bar under a fugue of hair gel emissions. The kind of banter usually reserved for late-night kebab houses flies around unchecked. We take our seats, and they eye my date and I with suspicion as barely concealed as their beer guts. They are obviously regulars, and we the intruders before I’ve even stepped onstage.

The performance order is determined by names drawn from a hat. With each announcement, one of the hair gel posse peels away to answer the call. It soon becomes clear that the kebab house banter is also their act. There’s a young guy who, sporting a shiny waistcoat and top hat, has strived for a unique look, and, with his resemblance to a transvestite Abraham Lincoln, found some success. His only story falls flat as the basic premise is impossible to believe: that he has lost his virginity. Later, a guy staggers to the stage with a half-emptied bottle of wine clenched in his fist. He slurs through his only joke, a hastily scrawled Venn diagram of a tit-wank, and then invites us to heckle him. For five minutes the audience hurls abuse (‘Alcoholic!’ ‘You’d be better off dead!’) until he stumbles back to his seat. Both men are politely applauded.

Worst of all is Steve, a sexagenarian in a cheap suit and broken glasses. The hair gel posse cheer wildly his approach to the stage.

‘Roses are red, violets are blue...’

‘PREACH IT, STEVE!’ screams the posse.

Steve grins. ‘...And I’m gonna fuck you.’

The posse erupts with delight, slapping each other about the shoulders and spattering their drinks across the bar. This encourages Steve to launch into a story about taking a young girl home from a club, tying her up, and abusing her (‘Tell us what you did to her, Steve!’) My date shifts uncomfortably beside me. I consider getting up and forcibly inserting a shard of beer bottle into Steve’s eye. But the atmosphere is becoming fevered (‘You put a courgette where, Steve?!’). One wrong move on my part could tip us over into some kind of pub brawl, my face dragged comically along the bar, knocking glasses and bottles in all directions, until I’m in range to have the access hatch slammed repeatedly on my head while Steve masturbates into my trouser pocket.

‘Steve! Steve! Steve!’ chants the posse in rampant support.

Steve is a dirty old man, no doubt the subject of endless depraved folklore amongst neighbourhood children, a repellent to even the friendliest of local cats. Macaulay Culkin would scream through the fourth wall and flee to militarise his empty family home. Steve is a laughing stock, but does not realise it.

For years I was told by friends that I should try stand-up comedy. It’s a standard platitude when you have built your reputation on being the class clown. It was only through fear of being Steve, of maintaining my pitiable and unfunny nature, but in public, that prevented me from taking the advice of my peers for so long.

When Steve is finished, the owner announces that there is only time for one more act. As he delves his hand into the hat, I beg in soliloquy, please not me, please not me. The owner looks up and calls my name.

I have just told my best new joke. Nobody laughs. The hair gel posse has disappeared to smoke self-congratulatory cigarettes. I wipe the sweat from my forehead and try not to meet anyone’s eye. My mouth opens for the next joke. I have 3 minutes of material left, and I realise that none of it is any better than Steve’s. So I close my mouth, whisper a ‘thank you’ into the mic and leave the stage.

Nobody applauds. 

The Gym Girl Myth

There are a number of reasons why people are often surprised that I go to the gym. Many friends from my past remember me only for single-handedly breaching the maximum occupancy of an elevator, or clandestinely trying to eat their first born child when their back was turned. To these far-flung acquaintances, the concept of my setting foot inside a fitness establishment is as unlikely as Henry VIII winning an Olympic decathlon. 

Then there are guys who brandish my eligible bachelorhood as a challenge to my gymnasial veracity. A certain faction of men staunchly promulgate that the gym is the ultimate venue in which to pull women. If I do indeed attend the gym, either I must have met an interested female party there, or elsewhere as a direct result of my testosterone-engorged pythons. I must secrete hormonal nectar from between my pectorals and ensnare women like a Venus fly trap. They simply will not believe me when I tell them that, despite visiting the gym 4-5 times a week for well over a year now, the only thing I will ever pull there is a herniated disc.

An inherent flaw taints the logic that the gym is a prime locale for attracting a mate. Before exercise has even been flirted with there’s the simple fact that I will never look my best at 6.30 in the morning. Then as the session progresses, any flex of a picayune bicep is swiftly equipoised by the dark circles of sweat that spread from various recesses like a body odour fallout zone. Some cite mirrors as an excellent means of catching a lady’s eye. This is not of benefit when cursed with a weight-lifting face like I’m giving birth to my lungs. On the one occasion I did use a mirror to flash a girl my least ominous smile, a snot bubble the size of The Prisoner attack balloon bilged from my nostril and burst in my mouth.

Every gym, at any given time, has its alpha male. He of the premium motley jogging bottoms akin to the engorged hindquarters of a concupiscent baboon. All others step aside to grant him his lord’s right with the water fountain. While I strain to the top my 3^rd rep of the lowest weight imaginable, the alpha bench-presses a suntan-jaundiced groupie on each arm, juggles a clutch of his latest bastard offspring with his well-developed calves, while simultaneously injecting steroids into his hyperbolic track-marked cock.

One day the alpha will be challenged and perish in a tragic spotting ‘accident.’ Until that day, the rest of us must accept that simple comparison highlights us as inferior specimens unworthy of female attention.

I perpetuated this theory when, in passing, one of the female personal trainers complimented my Super Mario t-shirt. There are any number of smooth responses to this opening gambit. For instance, ‘Come over to my place and play on my Wii,’ ‘How’d you like a little Italian in you?’ or, and Mario fans should recognise the true genius here, ‘Do you ever get locked up in castles? ‘Cos baby, you’re a Peach.’ It is my belief that any one of these lines would have resulted in furious love-making against the floor buffer in the cleaner’s cupboard. Instead I just sort of smiled and tugged hopelessly at the door until I realised it said PUSH.

There is nothing I would love to believe more than the gym girl myth. For many years, I believed that if I lost weight and developed some muscle, girls would ring-toss their underwear over my head and, once I’d beaten them off with the optimist’s metaphorical stick, use chloroform and a plastic cup to steal my semen as I sleep. Yet now that I have achieved both of those criteria, and still found little success, I must deal with the less glamorous truth: I can grow as much muscle as I like. But it’s all for nothing if my personality doesn’t grow to match.

How Not To Be A Man

I’ve just signed up for this: Warrior Dash

5 kilometres of partially-dressed men smothered in cold mud, screaming abuse as they tug one another over sheer walls, under barb wire, across freezing swamp pits, before packing into a mass shower to wash each other down and apply talcum powder to delicate male areas. It sounds just like my visit to that really colourful nightclub in Brighton. What could be manlier?

Ever since the first drop of testosterone hit my blood stream, like a hardened convict banished to community service in a kitten-grooming centre, I’ve been obsessed with trying to be more of a man. School was an extensive exercise in emasculation. My weight granted me a curiously asexual rotundity. When my friends wrote Valentine’s cards to the girls they had taken to harassing on the journey to school, one of them referred to me as ‘Lonely Red Coat’ and apologised for my mere presence at their encounters. Each and every PE lesson was preceded by a joyful chorus of ‘Boobies!’ when I removed my shirt.

So upon shedding 7 stone (98 pounds) I had rather a lot of ground to make up. There were guys to punch! Women to conquer! Overpriced sports cars to drive off bridges before parachuting improbably to safety in a silhouette of roiling fire. I would be a man!

(Chronologically, what I did instead was grow my hair long, wear tie-dye in public, and generally make myself the least desirable male specimen this side of Andrew Lloyd Webber. However, I’m skimming over this three-year period as it interrupts the already clumsy development of my narrative.)

At university I took to tackling my male friends and dry humping them in a bestial display of dominance until they begged for mercy. In hindsight, doing this in front of numerous girls I had a crush on may be responsible for my gargantuan lack of sex during my university years.

When I tried to equal the bench press of the bigger guys at my gym, I got trapped beneath the bar for five minutes before someone noticed and hauled it off me one-handed.

Last year I did a bungee jump so that I could add adrenaline-junkie to my list of less manly pseudo-addictions; ice-cream junkie; fragrant shower gel junkie; sing-a-long-a-Sound of Music junkie. Hurling myself over a 300ft drop would make me a man! Except that I accidentally jumped feet first, pulled my back so that for a subsequent 3 months it hurt when I breathed, and made this face as I leapt:

 

I’ll leave the caption blank and let you offer your own. The best wins a delightful My Little Pony play set.  

I enrolled in a mixed martial arts class so that I would be able to punch/choke/lay perspiringly on top of any other man that questioned my masculinity. After ten minutes of the boxing session, my sparring partner informed me that I throw punches ‘like a T-Rex with a stick up its arse.’ The humiliation continued in the grappling session, where a fat guy farted on my head while choking me unconscious. I never went back.

It’s only until I took a look around that I realised I was doing it all wrong. To be a modern day man, I need to spend over half an hour in the morning preening my hair into symmetrical spikes more rigid than a Rhino’s horn, scrub my face with overpriced designer exfoliator sourced from the most perilous depths of the rainforest (or a warehouse in Bolton), and douse my morning’s 5 Weetabix in milk directly from the cow’s udder because I murdered the milkman with a sharpened lip balm and mounted his head on the satellite dish.

I don’t belong. I haven’t started capping every sentence off with a mock-cockney exclamation of ‘Mate!’ and eloquently referring to bad news as ‘gash!’ My gut isn’t so pregnant with beer that I can barely tuck it under the football shirt of whichever team happens to be doing well this year. So far, I haven’t contracted medicinally-resistant gonorrhoea from a sexually ambiguous Thai masseuse.

Most damning of all: I don’t find The Hangover remotely amusing.

If this is what it takes to be a man today, I’ll happily remain the frowned-upon outsider. Although it occurs to me, now I’ve already signed up, that it will likely be thousands of just this kind of man accompanying me over 5 kilometres of faintly homoerotic obstacles this summer. Perhaps it will be transformative? I’ll start the race a stringy whelp whimpering for his mother’s breast, and, like a snivelling conscript beaten in his bed with soap-crammed pillow cases, emerge the other side with flawlessly sculpted hair, a destructive disdain for anything in a skirt, and my genitalia rotting off from disease. A boy can only dream.