Lunch. Another restaurant. Japanese this time. (I'm eating and dating around the ethnic spectrum.) A banker. Another very nice man. A lovely, gentle, very, very nice man with a soft voice that I have to strain to hear, who asks me all about myself, pays the bill and asks me out again - tomorrow, the next day, Saturday, Sunday, one day next week.
Damn it.
Where do they all come from these lovely, keen, very nice men, apart from The Guardian? I realise I don't know what to do with them. They are wasted on me. I'm unused to handling them. As the Frenchman asked of my books, 'what are they for'?
It's incredibly good for the squashed ego to see someone smile at you across the table with interest and appreciation, but rather than preening like a well-fed tabby and asking to be stroked some more, I can't resist the urge to look behind me to see who they are really looking at. I miss Worcester. I have come to realise that I quite like chilly, cold men because there is no chance of getting overwhelmed by the heat no matter how much you try to warm them up. And you can complain about them with impunity rather that feeling resolutely not nice by comparison.
Just as all the lovely men turn up, so in touch with their feelings that they've got them electronically tagged to their ankle, I realise I'm a shallow, commitment-phobe who would prefer that they merely sent them the odd Christmas card. How did that happen? It's not that I'm not a touchy-feely, even gushy, person myself when the fancy takes me, but at the moment I would rather be a fickle, teenage boy who has taken mature, female form.
Nice men are like beautiful hand tooled, fine leather bound classics - too good to do much with except admire and store safely out of harm's way. If you do pick them up and flick carelessly through their pages, you know you're only going to sully them and ruin their value. For now, I prefer the big thick large-format paperback type of man that tells a good story, but may have big flaws in its plot and execution, with occasionally brilliant prose but is not soooo well written that you feel diminished by it, and which can be thrown out or passed on when you're finished with it.
You know where you are with a bastard and I don't want to stray too far out of my comfort zone. All these awfully nice men just make me feel bad, really bad. But not in away that's any fun.
