almost witty

Here I am, spending my time hanging out with the great and witty surlychick, and watching from the sidelines as men amble up to her, chat her up, before she spins them out and launches the devastating final blow that ought to have them whimpering out of the bar. Except it doesn’t - they just keep going. Oh and ignoring me in the process except for when they have to look like cool guys who can hang with guys. I hate cockboxing.

The first bloke was someone who SurlyChick had met once before, but didn’t like. He was with someone else celebrating their birthday - so they were both chatting her up for a while, while I’m slurping on my beer and occasionally being drawn into the conversation.

I’ve never been a fan of watching men chatting up women - mainly because it’s grossly embarassing or dull, depending on which side of the battle you’re on. Still, in my UN observer role in this culture war, it was interesting just how ineptly it was done. (Because I’m fan-tastic at chatting women up, patently).

Somehow, the men said they were going to celebrate the birthday by going to amateur night at a strip club, and invited us along. And for some reason lost in time to the fumes of alcohol, we thought we’d go along.

So we did, and it was fairly dull as strip clubs tend to be. Every lady was peroxide-blonde with some terrible acne, small breasts and a cute ass. But just when we were about to leave, a small group of theatrical people we’d spotted in the previous bar turned up. So we chatted to them - and in the middle of the latter group was the alpha male. The kind of man with a roguish Han-Solo charm that had the four women he was around hanging on the whim of his every word and movement.

And of course, SurlyChick was helpless in the beam of his charisma. Except unfortunately he kept telling her about his wonderful girlfriend, then snogging her. While the other women looked on with daggers in their eyes. And the two earlier blokes, who also fancied Surly, looked on with equal-but-forlorn daggers.

Later fleeting images include one of the women - a Grace lookalike - sitting on his lap watching strippers, then kissing one of the strippers. And the other ladies - who turned out to know one of the strippers since they’d all gone to Girl Scouts together - sticking dollar bills in the G-string and getting a writhing ass in return.

Incidentally, I’d chatted to the stripper/dancer earlier on - wearing glasses and wearing quasi-civillian clothing - and it turned out she was saving up to be an X-Ray technician. I’m not quite sure why someone would choose looking at X-Rays all day as a fantastic vocation. She was also comparing stretch marks with one of the theatrical group, and discussing colours. Stretch marks have colours?

Anyway, more chatting happened, more snogging between Surly and Alpha Male, and I even somehow got a telephone number from a very drunk member of one of the theatrical group who loved my British accent, man. (Although she didn’t seem to recall the next morning!).

Alas, what with SurlyChick’s policy on not sleeping with committed men, we went home, and then Googled/IMDB’d the actor Alpha Male, expecting to find that he was a hot-and-up-and-coming star with charisma oozing out of every pore of his sinewy body.

But no. It turns out that Ford Austin is an actor/writer/director/producer of sci-fi/comedy/porn short movies. It’s a tad disconcerting, depressing and chastening to realise that someone with all that charisma, who probably has moistening their gussets everywhere, is not even on the F-list of Hollywood or American acting. While the rest of us are behind him, hoping to pick up the left-overs.

SurlyChick’s version of events may differ somewhat.

One of the things I loved about Sex And The City (aside from Miranda *sigh*) was the aspect of eavesdropping on women talking honestly about their sex lives. Only slightly tainted by the reality that it was probably crafted by a crew of gay male writers living in Los Angeles.

Fortunately, the blogosphere comes to the rescue with this revelation on what South African women talk about in the office: dildos. A singularly fascinating conversation that’s all the better for feeling real, and not being crafted for a mass audience.

What does amuse/amaze me is the laissez-faire manner in which women seemingly talk about their sex toys (although I’m surrounded by women at work and I’ve yet to hear them discussing dildos). You won’t catch men crowding round the water cooler discussing their sex toys - mainly because they don’t have any aside from Penthouse, but also because it’s just not done, man. Would men want/need sex toys anyway?

I’ve never really seen the point of dildos either (I mean, as a device … I’ve seen a few dildos in my time, thanks to the lesbian ex-flatmates). You can’t get more artificial than a dildo in terms of placing it inside or around small intimate areas. Surely even a cucumber would at least have that sheen of all-to-goodness nature around it?

Last night, my flatmate stumbled in from the pub a tad the worse for wear for drink, and proceeded to grill me with respect to my life in this glorious city of ours, and the relationship between myself and the residents of this great city. So I proceeded to tell him, at length. Which flummoxed him somewhat.

I stumbled to bed, and had a great huge long saga of a dream (David Lean eat your heart out) of great heartbreak with some woman who I was presumably in love with.

Thusly I woke up this morning rather like the Jim Carrey character in Eternal Sunshine - not too sure why I’m feeling blue, and recovering from a memory of something that never existed in the first place.

The lesson is: Don’t think before you go to bed. And don’t eat cheese. Now I’m off to turn on the radio where every single song will be about great love or great heartbreak.

Johnny Vaughan now presents a breakfast show on Capital FM. His new sidekick will be Zoe Hanson, who I once met on a speed-dating session in Cardiff.

Mind you, she ruined it all for me by telling me how well I was doing…

I nearly pulled last night. Which means I had a conversation with a mystery woman and she laughed at my jokes.

However, this is how classy said woman was. She was blowing bubbles - using her spit. And the bubbles would float away and towards our table.

Also, her and her friends have got to be the most right-angled women I’ve ever seen in my life. Her hair was at right-angles to her head. Her head was a square face with no edges. So were her clothes.

Still, after an earlier evening watching the fireworks at the opening of the Wales Millennium Centre, it was nice seeing the “other side” of Cardiff.