...need to get something off my chest, it’ll probably be incoherent and rambling but who gives a fuck? I’ve had a lazy day (no, that’s not it) and I was laid in my hammock in the garden I drifted slowly back over my life. I won’t do the early stuff (bad things happened) but suffice to say I think I was somewhat precocious as a small boy. For instance at the age of 5 I used to read the newspaper upside down (that is the newspaper was, not me) just because I could. Oh I did all the childhood things of building dens with my friends, riding (and falling off) bicycles, climbing trees etc., but I was described as quiet and more often than not would rather sit in with a good book or be doing schoolwork than be outside. Awkward adolescence followed and though I knew I wasn’t attracted to girls (albeit peer pressure meant I had to have girlfriends) I was singularly unaware that I was attracted to boys for many years. Then I found Prestel, which had daisy chat, ah the late nights of linking up through my trusty old (new actually) VTX500 (was it 2400 baud?). I was 23, so it was 1985, my mother lay terminally ill in the next room to mine. I found a shag. He lived just down the road. So off I trot (sneak really) and into bed we go. Looking back it was OK-ish as shags go (no penetration) and once we’d finished I got dressed and went home. And I was horrified with myself, I have no explanation why, I just felt dirty and sordid and horrible. The guy recontacted me and wanted a repeat performance, hey who knows, perhaps he even wanted a relationship, but I shunned him and very quietly closed the door on my sex and sexuality. Twelve years passed and I end up working in Cambridge in 1987. I’ve got a new computer and am connected to the world once again. And once again I’m drawn to the ‘gay scene’ that exists on the internet. Oh don’t doubt that I still hated myself (loathe wouldn’t be too harsh a word) but old feelings were just too strong. What followed can only be described as a series of nightmare sexual one-night stands, each one making me loathe myself more and more, and becoming ever more sexually inadequate (or feeling that way). So 23 + 12 = 35, yep I’m 35, despise who/what I am have had a 12 year celibate gap and am sexually incompetent. Cripes. Move on a year, I move to north Wales bringing all my hangups with me. And then I found him, a man to whom I lost my heart. Alas it was no good, he had hangups and I had hangups and we never really got it together. I think I was so frightened that it would all go wrong that I couldn’t move it forward.