When I was flat-hunting in Cardiff, I saw an ad with a flat to rent above a psychic’s shop. So I called the number, and ended up speaking to the psychic’s son, who said that she’d fallen in a serious accident and was now in hospital.

I could see the joke coming towards me – and insensitive as it was – I just couldn’t escape the full-on headlights of the joke as it hurtled towards me.

And inevitably I uttered: “Sorry to hear that – did she see it coming?”

Surprisingly, the son carried on talking to me, and invited me round to see the flat. Although I shouldn’t have bothered. When there’s weird splatterings on the wall and floor covered with gay pornography, it’s not exactly a selling point for the flat.

Then again, this shouldn’t come as a complete surprise to me. When I was living in Cardiff and hanging out with Miss H (naturally, a lesbian), I’d end up chatting to an intelligent, attractive, funny and uninhibited woman, only to find out from Miss H that she was, indeed, a lesbian. Hell, one night I was chatting up a lady who seemed inordinately keen and interested in me – and somehow, Miss H managed to pull her instead.

Also, when I look back at some of the celebrity ladies I fancied – as much for their wit or personality as their curly hair – they turned out to be lesbians. Cynthia Nixon, Sue Perkins, Donan McPhail to name but three.

To this day, five years on, my Cardiff friends will often remind me of the fact that I used to share a house with a lesbian couple, and give saucy nudgy winks about what must have gone on in the house. Indeed, one of my Cardiff colleagues once gasped with amazement at the stuff said lesbians left behind when they moved out – ignoring the fact that being a lesbian doesn’t mean automatic entry into the cool and fantastic division of people. Nor does being anything else for that matter.

What is the fascination with girls kissing girls anyway?

(inspired by Swiss Toni)

At first, it was little minor skirmishes – she loves loads of pillows, I’ll just settle for one hard pillow. She likes her mattress soft and pliant, I like it hard. She tends to leave things all over the place – whereas I leave things in an organised pile of mess. Instead of asking me to allocate her some drawer space, she complained to my friends that she didn’t have one drawer. So I emptied a drawer for her, and as far as I know, she hasn’t used it.

Then I came home after a particularly hard day at work to find she’d rearranged the furniture to split the room in half, and create a relaxing space and a work space. I did point out that the original layout had been specifically designed to meld the relaxing and work spaces together and to create an open feeling that would be welcoming to guests. At which point she fixed me with a stare and challenged me as to how many people had dropped by in the last two years. Pwned.

The feeling gradually crept over me that something was *wrong* with this. I couldn’t put my figure on it – then I realised. Thanks to the rearrangement, things had not been allocated their proper place. Everything had been piled onto the coffee table, so consequently you couldn’t put coffee on it. Instead you put coffee on one of the remaining bookshelves – the bookshelves on that had been temporarily moved to a spare side table. The papers on that were temporarily on the sofa.

Things were not in their rightful place. This is wrong.

I should have tried to relax. But I just couldn’t. We were watching an episode of House - top marks for drama, but really, the patient-of-the-week had been involved in a side-on collison with a bus, her heart had stopped, they’d cracked open her chest to see what was what, her lungs had been pumped full of a freezing solution to induce hypothermia, her kidneys were shot to buggery, and yet they were able to revive her for one long last farewell before she died – and I just couldn’t relax. Even mild surfing on the Internet wasn’t doing it. It wasn’t until we embarked on an organisational orgy that I was finally able to relax. And then it was time for bed.

Now I’m wondering what other mild mental malladies will be sparked by the ongoing co-habitation wars…

(The BBC documentary that was actually made partly from these rushes is The Virtual Revolution, presented by the divine Dr. Aleks Krotoski, Saturdays at 8.30pm on BBC Two)

Incidentally, it’s nice to know that I have finally achieved my ambition to have my name listed on a BBC network programme’s credits. Even if it’s only my netname, and it’s only listed on the website…

For instance, like driving a Ferrari on the wrong side of the road and into traffic islands across the city of Houston, at 3am on a Saturday night, a bit the worse for wear on a malt liquor beverage.

It was 1994, and I was an exchange student at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, America. The friends I was hanging out with decided that since there apparently were no nightclubs in Baton Rouge, we should make a weekend of it and go to the next nearest major city. Alas, New Orleans (the logical choice) was nixed, and thus the destination was set for Houston. Six hours away. I hadn’t realised that the parents of my cohorts were so rich that they had tiny Ferraris, but they did, and I was in the back seat for six rumbling hours.

It was somehow decided that we didn’t have time to check into the motel that we’d organised, so instead we drove straight to the nightclub, arriving for about 9pm. Whereupon, with my training in British student bars, I headed straight for the bar and ordered a bunch of Zimas – then the coolest “malt liquor” drink being advertised on American TV.

Fast forward to 2am, and the group gradually assembled for the drive home, all of us a wee bit the worse for wear. Astonishingly, the main driver announced that he was too drunk to drive, and as I was the most sober person in the group, I should drive us home back to the motel. Even though I was still quite drunk, it was a sports car, and I pointed out that I was used to driving on the left side of the road. My objections were blithely over-ruled – and hey, how often do you get the chance to drive a sports car? – and I got in.

The group’s general assumption that i would be fine to drive were almost immediately quashed when I reversed the car, and turned it to the left – which is what you’d do in the UK. But apparently not in the US. The screams were almost comical, but fortunately we didn’t hit anything.

Unfortunately, over the next few minutes, I did scrape along the kerb, hit a traffic bollard, and mount a traffic island. In my defence, there’s not actually not much windscreen space in a tiny sports car – and of course, I’m not used to driving on the wrong side of the road. Fortunately, I was driving quite slowly, until I got the hang of things. After a while, the group calmed down enough to realise that I was asking for directions they didn’t have, so we all ended up looking around for signs to an Interstate or highway of some sort.

Eventually, we found one, I finally had the confidence to put some gas on the pedal, and somehow we managed to arrive at our designated motel. Why the hotel staff didn’t raise alarm bells at seeing a Ferrari pull in at 2am and four kids get out, clearly the worse for wear, is beyond me.

What was worse was the same six-hour journey back across a rumbling highway, crammed in the backseat, but this time all of us hungover.

Unsurprisingly, these days, when there’s an evening of drinking to be had, I get a taxi.

Better yet, if you then do the same search but concentrating on images, there’s a Google Ad inviting you to travel with 1200 lesbians. Sounds like my average dating night out to me.

Indeed these days I find I don’t get the holiday spirit until I see the words ‘Airport’, and once I’m actually sat on the plane, I tend to collapse and snore like a donkey…