My mate fancies you

In Glasgow the other day Arty, perhaps as a way of preemptively dismissing any ideas I might have been forming about nipping across to Superdrug to buy a toothbrush, said something about sex being an expression of a close relationship. It can be, but just now, I didn't say, I'd settle for a right good seeing to.

It's always interesting to see the people chosen by the women who aren't interested in you in that way. There was Faye, a foxy Jewess with a rarefied job in literature whom I met on a dancefloor at my friend's 50th. We bopped together a bit and she seemed to lodge in my mind rather. I emailed my friend afterwards asking her if Faye was single. She was, and so, again through my friend, I suggested a post-work drink in Leeds. Fairly quickly we realised it wasn't going anywhere, both of us thinking too hard about the next question. But never mind; afterwards Faye told our mutual friend that it was flattering to be asked and that she admired my initiative, if not much else.

A year or so later I found out that she was engaged. I did some rummaging around and found of photo of her fiancé on the internet. I had been passed over in favour of a stumpy, rotund man, with a big bottom clad in skin tight, high waisted black trousers. I thought he might be going to a fancy dress party dressed as a Mexican, but then I found out he was Mexican.

The other day I saw Denise in town, holding someone's hand. Denise's physical charms and her disarming personality have been described on several occasions in these pages. I made a swift adroit move into the doorway of Poundland from where to espy the couple. Her beau was a skinny young man with clothes from the Socially Conscious school of couture, the ensemble being best suited to a day which ends in a police cell with the moral high ground for company. Scruffy pale green trousers with several pockets, and one of those loose jackets with thin vertical stripes of different colours, which I imagine is meant to evoke memories of the time when he couldn't update his Facebook status when there was no signal in the Andes, but a poor person emerged from a hut and gave him a cup of tea and offered a simple room in which to lay down for a while, after which he discovered that he'd mislaid his phone and the four hundred dollars he was carrying as emergency money, an unforgettable experience which taught him how much Westerners could learn from the generosity of humble Peruvian peasants in the face of their extreme poverty.

Of course, a sceptic might say that that's an extrapolation too far, and that my views are provoked by jealousy that he gets to remove his ethically-sourced underpants in the company of a gorgeous 27-year-old girl, but I'm leaving personal sentiment aside here as far as I can.

And now, a word from our Executive Editor: As a result of a site review, and following another media owner's example today, the previous post "Shh" has been deleted. "Shh" failed to meet standards in three quality control metrics: "Lack of Pretension" (viz., "the unpredictable consequences of the male gaze", which only shows the damage that reading Susie Orbach as a teenager can have on a man in later life), "Clarity of Sentence Structure" (not good when a commenter requests a chart to explain something), and "Having Something Worth Saying" ("Man Has Pint Whilst Playing Football With Daughters Before Seeing Former Sociology Teacher On Other Side of Street" needs a stylist of greater talents than mine to make interesting).