Bumbling Dad. Midlife dating tales from London.

Nobody likes being dumped.  Although excuse me for stating the bleeding obvious. I got dumped a year ago.  On New Year's Eve, which is already the most overrated day of the year.  And it broke me. The thing that really hurt about the end, above all else, was the way that I was assured that what we'd had was so special, so precious, that it didn't deserve to be discarded like meaningless litter. Right up to the point that I was discarded like meaningless litter; blocked and deleted; cut out and cold-shouldered at my absolute lowest ebb.  Dismantled, depleted, and depressed, then dumped in a fashion swifter and chillier than Bear Grylls can manage a shit on an Arctic expedition. But we live, and we learn. We try to forgive, or we actually, eventually, genuinely, do. Full disclosure : I'd been the one who'd originally undermined the whole thing early doors. I'd dumped her. On her birthday. Whilst mid-air. Flying towards something we both desperately wanted,

I was driving down from my villa this morning in search of breakfast at the nearest beach village when I realised I'd have to turn back for another poo. This, in itself, won't come as momentous news to anybody who experiences morning bowel movements.  Which, all being well, is most people, but I'd already had three between getting up, showering and leaving the property. For the record, I have diverticular disease.  This delightful piece of oversharing i s brought to you by the formation of small bulges in the wall of the colon, which has nothing to do with punctuation and everything to do with the passage of food and its by-products through the body.  It's also hereditary, which explains why both my brother and my mother have it too; although not the fact that I was diagnosed years before either of them, despite being the youngest of us.  Here comes the science bit: Who knew  I'd be younger than my mother? What it means, in real life, is that I have to be care

This was first published as a guest post for @Smutathon2019 (www.smutathon.com): Sex-positive bloggers writing this year in support of the National Network of Abortion Funds.   She :  I have a vision of drinks being finished, a general air of needing to get out of public gaze. You take my hand and we leave. We walk a short way, there’s a pretty alley on your left but it’s dark and there no people. You pull me into it, my back against the wall in deepest shadow, then… You look up at me. Our eyes meet. The gentlest touch of our clothing sends a tingle through us both. My hand on your waist is an electrically charged jolt. He :  I go to brush a piece of hair from your face. You misinterpret my movement. We bump noses. Laugh. Look at each other again. And can’t help ourselves from kissing. Gently at first, then a little more urgently. Feather touches interspersed with probing tongues and fingers in hair and on back of necks… You taste amazing. Your lips are soft, and warm and

If you haven't read Part One, and you're not being deliberately contrary, you should probably  click here .  We'll wait for you to catch up. While the other boys were playing tennis ball football in the playground during both break and lunchtime, I could be found in the library.  I probably still have my "Librarian" enamel badge somewhere.  And there's still nothing you could teach me about the Dewey Decimal System.  My pants are off  right now , girls.  Come at me, in orderly fashion.  Ideally alphabetically, well-thumbed, and with unbroken spines. Strangely, the library wasn't where I encountered any kind of vaginal enlightenment.  Even from the books in the locked cupboard, for which you had to sign for the key.  I wasn't  that  unknowing.  And the decade during which I went from 9 to 19 was the peak of that horticultural phenomenon known as "hedgerow porn."  I was already aware   that naked ladies sported an immense tangle between the

I've been a bit blocked recently in terms of updating my own dating blog.  Mainly because: I'm not currently dating I've written all the tales that follow my typical story arc* I can't write about having my heart shattered, because it isn't funny** * If you haven't read my midlife dating blog before, it's fundamentally full of the various histories of dates I've been on that turned out to be massive disasters, one way or another.  But I try to make them mildly amusing, once I'm over the trauma **Which is basically point one.  But the rule of three applies.  Plus, I've spent ages writing & deleting all my heartache, bitterness & angst. Time has passed, I'm doing my best to let things go. Anyway, there's no angst room here. This was meant to be a guest post. Then Alice  kindly asked if I'd like to write a guest post on her blog.  And I accepted, because, unbeknownst to her, she'd inadvertently caught me at the sw

I really, really want to be kind.  And honest. I've not always been great at it, and in my twenties ended more than one relationship horribly, in a classic remake of "If I Behave Badly Enough They'll Chuck Me" - a movie that nobody's yet bothered to make first time around.  Except me, in live non-filmed documentary form.  Because I was a bit shit at saying, "Sorry, but I don't like you as much as I used to."  Actually, worse than a bit shit. I'm genuinely sorry about that.  Especially to the lovely girl that ended up marrying one of my other good friends.  I went to their wedding.  It's OK.  Honestly.  We're all mates.  Still.  Even after my flailing arms launched a full glass of red wine over her white dress last summer. Phew. Honesty and kindness hadn't entirely worked with Angie, who'd been my first serious newly-single rebound relationship. I adored her.  She'd been the champion grenade-thrower at her Senior School. 

I joined Twitter just over a year ago, not long after I'd managed to fuck up the most important relationship of my shiny, new, post fucked-up-relationship, life.  While I wasn't going to write that disaster story any time soon, because it was all still too raw, there were tales I'd shared with a couple of friends of my previous dating exploits , and the urge was strong to actually write some of them down and tell them anonymously, while I surfed the wake of my broken-hearted malaise and took some time off from Tinder & Bumble . What also inspired me to write a bit, after I finally came out of my miserable funk for long enough to start to read what was going on in the outside world, was that there were a few other people out there on Twitter linking to their dating blogs .  And they were (mostly) good.  And they were (mostly) anonymous, and other people commented on what they'd written and followed them on Twitter.  And although it sounded slightly like a massivel

There's a pub I like, just on the edge of Primrose Hill park.  And on a sunny Bank Holiday weekend like this one, I'm not the only one that likes it.  Now, given the adjacent park; I can't guarantee  that every woman in the queue for the Ladies is a bona fide customer. Presumably nor can the landlord, hence his reluctance to provide anything other than the smallest of toilet facilities; which leads to insanely long queues of increasingly desperate females every time there's a hint of warmth in the air. It's impossible to linger at a table in the same corner of the pub as the entrance to the bogs for too long, though.  As the line of uncomfortable looking women snakes ever longer around the customers and the curved corner of the bar, the build up of uric crystallisation becomes almost solid in its pungency, to the point that the wise have to make tracks in search of fresher air before ingress to the lungs is completely prevented by the formation of that scourge of