bzzzzzzzzzz

I'd like you to meet my new NSFW friend .

I think we're going to be very happy together. 

...holy crap

Well, this really is incredibly lazy of me, but I seem to be getting chatted up on Twitter. By possibly the scariest-looking man I’ve ever seen.

This guy started following me on Twitter (the real me, not the Twitter for this blog – plug plug) a few weeks ago, but since Twitter’s a general follow-fest, unlike Facebook, where you generally know the people befriending you on there, I didn’t really notice, or check out his profile or anything. But the other day, in response to a tweet of mine, he sent me a private message, which I returned. This went on all day, getting to know each other – or at least getting to know as much as you can convey in 140 characters.

He seems quite pleasant actually, and hasn’t gone straight down the route of blatantly trying to hook up, and demanding my phone number, which is quite refreshing. But still, he seems quite apparently interested, and eventually asked me if I was on Facebook (which I am). So, the appropriate clicking and accepting was done, and I read a bit more about him. He’s my age, he lives quite near me in London, (although based elsewhere in the country during the week) and he’s a Royal Marine.

Now if you’re not exactly up to speed on military personnel (I wasn’t), this is what the Royal Marines do:

'The Royal Marines are the marine corps and amphibious infantry of the United Kingdom and, along with the Royal Navy and Royal Fleet Auxiliary, form the Naval Service. They are also the United Kingdom's specialists in amphibious warfare, including the operation of landing craft; mountain warfare; and Arctic warfare. (...) highly trained as a commando force. It is trained to deploy quickly and fight in any terrain.' (Wikipedia - the font of all knowledge)

In other words, they’re big buggers who you’d rather not be on the wrong side of. And with that in mind, I then had a look at this particular Royal Marine’s pictures of himself. One of which (well, many of which, in fact) was of him with his shirt off.

Holy. Crap.

The words ‘brick shithouse’ are woefully insufficient. Confronted with this guy, an actual brick shithouse would run away back to its mummy brick shithouse, tail firmly between its legs. I have never seen anything like it in my life. His pecs are bigger than my head. His arms are wider than my thighs – and trust me, those things are WIDE. Around one of said arms is a tattoo that, if cut off and rolled out, may well be enough to cover the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. All in all, he looks like he could quite easily march uphill 100 miles a day in full body armour, fight tooth and nail to defend Queen and country, and kill me with his bare hands.

Anyway, once I’d popped my eye back in their sockets and resumed breathing , I decided to share the picture with my good friend H, a long admirer of the male form. And admire it she did, in a conversation that alarmed me to my very soul.


  ‘Ooooh, a Royal Marine!’ she said. ‘They’re mental, aren’t they?’


  ‘...I don’t know!’ I squeaked. ‘Are they?’


  ‘They are completely mental,’ she continued cheerfully. ‘They’re like soldiers but very, very brave and complete hard nuts.’


Someone hold me.


  ‘Still, wow!’ H said, poring again over the photo of The Marine. ‘Look at the size of those arms! Don’t think I’d say no if I were you!’


  ‘Hmm,’ I hmmed. ‘We’ll see what happens. He hasn’t even asked me out yet. But if he does, for the moment, I’m picking a busy, well-lit place and not going back to his. Seriously, he looks like he could crush my head with two fingers.’


  ‘Really?’ H agreed. ‘But just think about that stamina...’


Stamina indeed. The merest glance at the training regime undertaken by your average marine was enough to leave me exhausted, so if he’s capable of that, God knows what he’d do to me. Anyway, numbers have been swapped, so we shall see what comes of this. 

Crush injuries, probably.  

aha – noted

Happy New Year everyone! Hope you all had a lovely festive season with your nearest and (maybe, after a few days) not so dearest. I spent the holiday back with my parents in the sticks, and rather surprisingly, I didn’t revert to my sulking, bitch teenager self quite as much as I’d expected. Gosh – I must be growing up. But if my parents had been annoying me, then I would have most definitely got my own back on the day I took them for a walk in the woods and it ended up turning into ... umm... three miles. My parents are hardly decrepit, but I swear, I’ve never heard so much panting and complaining, and threatening to disinherit me. Whoops.

I spent New Year’s Eve with my best friend K, jumping around in his living room, drinking champagne, watching the fireworks on TV, and out of the window, and playing word games that increasingly involved gesticulating and screaming. We were also joined by his young male companion of the moment – 19 (yes, 19), a dancer, and cute as a button), and spent most of New Year’s Day in bed, watching films, eating bacon sandwiches and ice cream, and dozing off. All quite innocent, you understand, but it did make me feel ever so slightly like Eva Green in The Dreamers.

And speaking of two men in quick succession...

I went out with some friends on Christmas Eve, and with some workmates the night before that, and ended up going home with a different guy’s phone number each night. One called Simon and the other was Toby. Both quite nice lads, and on both occasions, they both hurriedly took my number as I was leaving the bar – having spent a good part of both evenings making a lot of smiley eye-contact. Clearly they’re not familiar with the ‘three-second rule ’ favoured by the likes of The Pick Up Artist – which is probably a good thing, since it means I must be attracting normal people for a change.

Now I’m not actually bothered about seeing either of them – just flexing my flirting muscles, so to speak. But it appears that the common thread between the two guys is that I texted first, and quite soon – quite vaguely, along the lines of ‘nice to meet you, hope you have a good Christmas’, etc. But they didn’t reply.

Aha. Now. Maybe there’s something in this. Maybe texting first isn’t the way to go. Of course, they could have just woken up the next day minus their beer goggles, but still, methinks not texting first could be a theory worth trying out. I’m out a couple of times this week, so if any more number swapping takes place, I’ll leave it there and see what happens. One of my problems in the past has been getting in touch a little too quickly – henceforth, this year, I do not chase. Let’s see how that goes...

I also had a one-sided date, I think, with an old friend from college, P. One-sided, because I’m pretty sure he’s reading a lot more into it than I am. We keep sporadically in touch by text, Facebook, etc, but I hadn’t seen him in years, and before I moved to London, I used to see him nearly every weekend. Nothing’s ever happened between us – in fact he used to spend most of college telling me to sod off, but I can’t help wondering now if that was the sixth form equivalent of pulling my pigtails in the playground rather than admit he liked a ‘smelly girl’. Anyway, we went for dinner and drinks on a weekday night, and while we had a great time and a fantastic laugh, a few things worried me slightly:

a) he turned up in a suit. I had on a jumper and jeans.
b) he insisted on paying.
c) he walked me to the tube, even though it was mere metres from the bar we were in.
d) he texted me straight away, saying he’d had a lovely time.
e) the next day, his Facebook status said he was in a 'really good mood'.

Yikes – right? Now that’s all very lovely, and he really is a great guy, and we have a great time together – and I know how ungrateful this all makes me sound – but honestly, I don’t fancy him.

Now normally, as a general policy this year, I’m going to be strict. If a guy is appearing too keen, and I’m not feeling it, then I’m going to have to be quick and final about letting him down. But I can’t do that with P – he’s a really good friend. I’m going to have to pull back here a bit, I think. It’s one thing to adopt a ‘love ‘em and leave em’ attitude, but it’s quite another to ruin a friendship.

So basically, what I learned over Christmas? Don’t call!

Oh, and that since there was a distinct lack of Mark Ronson under my Christmas tree, Santa is in fact, not real.