Quote Of The Day

"Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last mistake - Chessmaster Savielly Grigorievitch Tartakower (1887-1956)"

Thursday, August 09, 2001

A bit on the side...
As some faithful readers may be aware I do a bit of work on the side. This second job takes me to some strange places. But last night was an exception. I was simply doing some IT work for a local design company. I turned up just after 6pm and set to installing Win2kPro, the odd McAfee update and sorting out some of their intranet stuff. It’s a small firm and everyone else had gone home except for the guy whose computer was getting the new OS. He was hanging around looking over my shoulder and making idle chit-chat (you're ahead of me I can tell). Now I'd met this guy once before. Last year when I was doing some work for the same company I’d clocked him. Cute, Italian, tall, dark hair, green eyes, eerily deep voice, late twenties at a guess. Back then I thought he was straight. He looked straight. He acted straight. He never made any eye contact (always a good sign of straightness). Hell, he even had a girlfriend. Well, last night when he was leaning over me to get a closer look at the screen I wasn't so sure anymore. I put it down to the fact that as he's Italian the encroaching of personal body space was just something that came with the territory.

I finished up around 9pm and he suggested going for a drink as he had had 'one hell of a day'. I was bit surprised but thought, why not? He’s cute. What did I have to lose? Ten minutes later we were settled in at a local hostelry. We chatted about work and about why he was living in London. It was the usual story of wanting to travel and see the world. We seemed like a nice guy. I just wasn't sure why he had wanted to go for the drink with me. Is that what straight men do? Just invite each other out for a drink? As he spoke I noticed he was knocking back the double G&Ts like they were last year’s colours. Five in the first hour. Wow! He's really going for it, I thought. As the alcohol had its effect his tongue started to loosen. He started to tell me more about his personal life. He said that he’d been having ‘doubts’. Doubts about what, I wanted to know. He told me he had split up with his girlfriend six months ago and was looking at ‘new things’. “So you’re gay, are you?” I said with my usual casual directness. “Oh. Er. Hmm. Not gay exactly”, he said, “But not 100% heterosexual either”. “I see”, I said. We chatted some more. And he started to bat his eyelids and flash his green eyes in my direction. As the bar was about to close I said pointedly, “Where do you live?”. “Nearby”, he replied. I smiled. He smiled. We left.

So that was another late night (note to self: schedule some time tonight to see boyfriend).

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