Tag Archives: boys

Shoop Shoop

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Sometimes, conversations on Twitter rumble on in the background for so long, I forget what the original point was. This was one such conversation and I had to actually go back and retrace it to its roots. Turns out I started it. Colin Firth: would he be good in bed?

Most of Twitter said no. ‘He’d take it *way* too seriously, ‘ seemed to be the most common concern. And from there it spiralled into a conversation about what makes us assume a man will be good in bed. Dancing appeared on the list, as did ‘quiet confidence.’ But kissing? Kissing came up again and again and again.

I make no secret of the fact that that’s a long held belief of mine. Potential partners have lived and died (not literally) by their kiss.

Way back when I was seventeen or so, there was a guy in a nightclub. He may well not have been attractive, but the Smirnoff Ice  had been flowing and when he approached me on the dance floor it didn’t take much to persuade me to snog him.

‘Who was that guy?’ one friend asked, as we stumbled home. ‘He looked like he’d fallen from the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.’

Harsh.

But fuck me, he could kiss.

I think he was only the second guy I’d ever kissed, in fact. He was the first to show me that good kissing (and ok, ok, a well-placed thigh between my legs) can make me wet faster than anything else. Kissing makes me want to both rush headlong into full on sex and delay full on sex for as long as possible so that we can just keep on kissing.

Cher had it wrong, sadly. You can’t tell if he loves you so from his kiss – like it or not, that is in the way he acts. God knows good kissers can make you feel like it’s love, though: I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve said to friends, ‘But how can he kiss like that and not *mean it?*’

With sex, I think if you asked me to rank positions by preference, I could do it pretty easily. Missionary, WoT, Doggy. If you asked me to list my preferences regarding kissing, I’d struggle. Those butterfly-soft kisses all over my face when his cock is deep inside me? The ones that are so punishing they bruise? The first one of the evening, when, for a few moments at least, I get to stop worrying about when I’ll next see him and just get to enjoy it?

How on earth could you ever choose between any of those?

I kissed a Scot (and I liked it)

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She wasn’t even a friend.

It was my parents who said I had to go – she was the daughter of one of my mum’s friends, and the family had moved to Aberdeen five years earlier.

I flew from London to Aberdeen on the worst flight I’ve ever taken. This was long before the days of budget airlines and fairly large planes on domestic routes – there were propellors and as we approached the runway at Aberdeen we had to abandon the first attempt at landing because the wind was so strong one wing looked as if it was about to touch the ground.

I was wearing court shoes I could barely walk in. I don’t remember the dress. I didn’t know anyone apart from L, her sisters and her parents.

I was 17 and I’d never been kissed.

Looking back, I think hanging out by the bar was the equivalent of hanging out in the kitchen at grown up parties. Most people were dancing, or gathered around the buffet table. I was perched on a stool, knocking back Smirnoff Ice after Smirnoff Ice.

And there was a boy sat next to me.

I can’t really recall what he looked like. He was skinny, I think, tall, and he wore glasses. We talked about what we hoped to study at uni.

The kissing too, is a bit of a blur. He leaned towards me and we snogged for a few minutes. When I surfaced, L’s mum was staring at me with barely disguised horror. She always was a bit of a judgemental cow.

The boy took my number. L wasn’t impressed, when she found out.

‘He’s a geek, ‘ she said.

Maybe. I still wish he’d texted though.

Call me

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I’m not much one for phones, even though I’m retro enough to still have both landline and mobile. Sometimes when my parents call I forget you have to press the green button to answer and I find myself standing there with it held to my ear, still ringing. No, seriously.

The boy and I never spoke on the phone before he went away. Never. We made arrangements by text, discussed more complicated stuff by email. I was ok with that. I’m pretty sure I sound stupid on the phone. I can never think of what to say, especially when I first pick up. I’m always tempted to say ‘Hey!’ but then I’m basically 15-year-old me, sitting on my mum’s bed, wrapping the cord around my fingers for hours on the phone to my best friend.

I don’t know why he started calling. It just happened. I liked it. When I phoned him, it was usually to fight, but when he called, it was always more interesting, both more light-hearted and more intense. Especially once I started doing teacher training in the evenings.

I’d rarely be home before midnight and I’d be knackered, but still running with ideas. Still desperate to talk to someone, to bounce my thoughts off them. And once, maybe twice, he called at just the right time for that.

‘Yes?’ I’d say. If you don’t want to sound like a 15-year-old girl on the phone, why not aim for harassed secretary instead?

‘I was thinking about something,’ he’d say, ‘And I wondered if I could run it past you?’

I loved those conversations. I’d pad back down the stairs, with the phone tucked against my shoulder and open the fridge in the dark. Pour myself another glass of wine without turning the kitchen light on. Pad back upstairs. Put the wine on my chest of drawers and unzip my dress, chatting the whole time. Hop into bed in my knickers, asking questions, disagreeing, laughing…

We used to go on for hours like that, sometimes.

Game changer

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Mini-breaks are game changers. Literature (in the loosest sense of the word) and film both tell us so.

Take Lydia in Pride and Prejudice. It’s not Wickham & co. being stationed in Hertfordshire that causes problems here. Oh no. It’s when she goes to Brighton for a spot of seabathing (I may be paraphrasing) that it all goes dreadfully wrong. And how do Wickham and Lydia get punished for their flighty behaviour? They are, according to Mrs Bennett, “banished to the North.” The death of lust is spelt out by having to spend an indeterminate amount of time in one (fairly grim) place.

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It’s not my intention to give you blue balls

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Last night, Laurie over at My Potential One True Love wrote this, about dating and being single. I liked it and it resonated, so I shared it on Twitter. Since setting this blog up, I don’t think anything I’ve tweeted has been retweeted so quickly and so widely. Clearly it’s not just me for whom it rings true.

If you read this blog regularly, you’ll know I don’t really date. I say I’m going to date, but in reality my patience levels with OKCupid are similar to those of an eleven-year-old boy with ADHD.

And here’s why.

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Nice dress

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Changing rooms in high street stores are shit.

They fall, broadly, into two categories: the Topshop type, boiling hot, with those little size cubes all over the dusty floor and a sales assistant who insists that anyone who accompanies you must themselves be carrying a Size 6 peplum skirt and a Size 18 poncho and the more upmarket type, à la Jigsaw, where sure, your boyfriend can sit on a comfortable chaise longue right outside, but the sales assistant is constantly flitting back and forth and no sooner would you have invited him in for a quick blow job in front of the mirror than she’d stick her head round the curtain to ask: ‘Did you see we have it in pink, too?’

It’s a shame, because boys give the best compliments on new clothes.

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I wouldn’t buy a 3D telly, so why would I want a 3D man?

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This post has been many inspirations in the making, but I nearly didn’t write it. Believe it or not, if it’s deeply personal, I don’t write about it here.

Men on paper (or, more likely, on screen) are full of promise. There’s a guy on OKCupid at the moment who likes long walks in the country, pub lunches, and, get this: art house cinema (Do you know how rare that is?!) I should message him. And yet, somehow, I just can’t get that excited.

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Fresher’s Pack

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I had to canvas my uni friends today to establish what was in my Fresher’s pack. I can remember the good bits (two condoms: one ribbed, one extra strong, a sachet of lube, teabags) but the rest is hazy. Depending on who you ask, there may or may not also have been: a map, a packet of microwaveable pasta in Dolmio sauce, a pen, and a NatWest rubber in the shape of a pig.

I have no idea what happened to the contents of mine, but I do know what happened to Mark’s.

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Better than hugging

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Among the stranger conversations I’ve had in the past few days was one with my former boss, when I asked how things were going with her (relatively) new boyfriend.

‘Good, thanks’ she replied. ‘Except he’s a moody bugger and I can’t so much as do the washing up without getting smacked on the arse with a tea towel.’

I have *no* idea how we got there.

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This too shall pass

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Mentally, I sometimes think I never left my old job. When I come back to visit, so much is still the same – my Charlie & Lola mug is still in the cupboard, I’m still not brave enough to carry a round of tea up the stairs and there’s still a note on the biscuit tin that says ‘Reminder: gingers must be segregated.’

I *loved* that job – it was my first job after uni, and I got to play with words and make stuff in a way that my job now, working in ‘real’ publishing, just doesn’t allow. My colleagues were genuinely close friends (hence why I’m visiting this weekend), and the drive in every morning was through some of the UK’s most beautiful countryside.

So, why did I leave? Yep, you guessed it: because of a boy.

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