“Are you sure you want to go into this pub,” asks my boss, as 4 of us fall out of the car.

It was our quarterly meeting, and social event. Boss takes us out for dinner at some local pub - not your Yates Wine Lodge chain, oh no, these are always small, local places, serving very good food, at prices higher than you would pay for on a regular basis, but not hugely overpriced.

Until it comes to the wine, which always flows freely.

I was staying with one guy from work who lives in the same town as the boss, and two other colleagues. We were meeting up with S’s husband, in a pub described as “having a party”.

Outside the pub were two six-foot men, in leather biker gear, beardy-weirdies both of them. This is what prompted the question to me from my boss.

“Are you insane? This looks like my kind of pub.”

Oh, how wrong I was. Or maybe that should be right?

It was the most bizarre pub I have ever been in. There was a party on for the landlord and landlady, who had been in residence for 1 year (as good a reason as any for a party I guess).

The clientele consisted of, amongst others -

• the two beardy-weirdie bikers
• I counted three 60+ women wearing sequined boob tubes
• the forty-something man with floppy hair, narrow collared suit jacket, red tie and braces (couldn’t see his filofax anywhere though)
• one very skinny 16 year old boy in the obligatory black tshirt
• another similarly aged boy, but with a full beard and the most enormous beer gut
• two people who I would swear were pre-op transexuals
• one 50-ish man with the most obvious wig I have ever seen
• two dj’s for the disco - one about 20, the other looking like Keith Richards…..

“Welcome to rural Oxfordshire……”

Beep beep tweep went my phone, as R2D2 announced the arrival of a text message.

“God, you are such a geek. No, I take that back, a *sci-fi* geek.”

“Hey, I’m not that bad, honest, I just like to pretend at it….”

I opened the text.

Surprisingly, it was from FKM - the first text from him since New Year’s Day.

Geek alert! I just met Sylvester McCoy! Happy days.

I show this to D, as proof that there are many more people much geekier than I am. Okay, they may be my friends, but they are still not me are they?

And of course D is very excited - Sylvester is *his* Doctor after all. We found out where he’d been spotted, but he was long gone by the time we got into town.

We did, however, manage to find Tom Baker’s Ultimate Sc-Fi Quiz dvd interactive game, and spent several hours playing it Saturday night - D answering many more questions than me, might I add!

“Me? I was a good girl.”

“Yeah, right,” was the response.

“No, seriously, I was. While other teenagers were down the park drinking nicked cider and black, I was going to the church youth group.”

“Really? I don’t believe that.”

“I was. I was the lynch pin of the church youth group actually. When I left town, the whole thing pretty much folded. My mom still goes to that church, they still talk about me.”

“So, when did you become naughty then?”

What a damn good question. Just when *did* I become naughty? And what, really, is the definition of naughty?

Was it when I got fed up with the accusations of sleeping around from the boyfriend at home, so decided if he thought I was sleeping with someone else it wouldn’t matter so much if I did?

Was it when, after being dumped by the guy I cheated on the home boyfriend with cheated on me with someone I called a friend, and I responded by spending a week in the bottom of a cider bottle?

Was it when I was a sandwich student, living in a world of mid-20’s men, “finding myself” by being flattered by all these older men?

Was it, after splitting from a husband moving from older men, to much younger men?

Was it when I was I would go out drinking in New York until 4 in the morning, chatting to strange men and taking drinks off marines home on leave with their Iraqi bonus in their pockets to spend?

Are these naughty? Or are these just normal?

Driving home from headquarters, I have 2 choices of route.

Tonight I came the ’scenic’ route - took me an extra 20 minutes, but saved me £5.40 in tolls.

Is 20 minutes of my life worth £5.40?

I texted Q at lunch time as I was headed in to town, warning him I was going to park outside his house (it’s free - well, until I get a parking ticket it is anyway, or until he gets a visitor pass sorted). I always text him, sometimes I get a response, sometimes not, sometimes he will head into town with me.

Today I got this response -

Well I’m still in bed and neckid! Heavy night and feel like death warmed up gonna try and get back to sleep.

Hilarious!

Shitty time at work. I spent last Thursday and Friday trying to figure out why something I had done didn’t work. Given that I had worked 3 hours over, I had agreed with the fuckwit I would leave at 4, but as she went off to her meeting at 3 she seemed a bit miffed that i wouldn’t be around to tell her all about it before she left. Well, if she hadn’t spent 40 minutes getting a coffee, then 30 minutes on the phone to her mum we might have got around to talking about it before I left!

I sent her an email, detailing what was wrong, and exactly what I had done to try and get to the bottom of it, even down to links to the websites I had been looking at to try and diagnose what was wrong.

I had a series of really stupid emails yesterday, including, “Why can’t I see this user when I log in as the restricted admin user, but when I log in as unrestricted I can not only see it, but change it too?” Fuck off, witch, the clue is in the name……

Turns out today, after he making a song and dance about how she spent all day yesterday looking at it, she never bothered to completely read my email, and by the end of the day she was halfway through the check list on one of the sites I had already been through, having found it late afternoon.

Anyway, after deleting the whole fucking lot, I reinstalled the whole thing, just in case there was something wrong with something I did in the original (turns out there was - apparently “installed with no errors and no warnings” does not actually mean everything I requested installed correctly - gotta love helpul software). After the first step, the initial install, done with her watching over my shoulder and asking stupid questions along the way, she announced, “Well, that hasn’t installed it.” “Yes, that’s the installation completed, but we hav e to now do a whole lot os configuring.” “No, it hasn’t installed, it’s too quick.” “yes, it has done the install, but configuring it right will take a while.” “”No, I can assure that you have not installed that software.” This is the software I am a specialist in. It is my job.

While she went off to her desk to try and ‘prove’ she was right, I just carried on with the rest of it.

Stupid bitch.

Anyway, figured out the problem, and at 5.30 I finally got it to work. And all I got to feel was the “Thank gos she’s *finally* got that sorted,” not a “Well done for really working at that and figuring out the problem….”

So, instead of going to aerobics I’ve come home and had a bottle of wine.

Also feeling a bleurgh actually. Bloody men. D is doing my head in. I really don’t know what the hell is going on. I so think he is interested, but I don’t know if I want the baggage. I don’t know if I could deal with the baggage. After spending most of last year trying to figure out what was going on in FKM’s head, and helping him deal with his depression, I don’t know if I *want* to do it again.

He is coming to stay in a few weeks, see what happens then.

Of course there is the small matter of the 200 miles……

And of course there is Q. My friend L was here Saturday, was talking about my life and harem of men I seem to have going at the moment (M was thrown in for good measure, love him!). Her take is that there must be something going on for us to sleep together.

I have slept with an awful lot of male friends, and nothing has gone on. Nothing ever did go on. Nothing was ever going to go on. There was a time when Q was one of those ‘nothing is ever going to go on’ blokes. He used to work for me - he never even hit the ‘considered, rejected’ pile, as someone who reported to me he was just not even on the radar. Even after that, flirting with him was just a bit of fun. However, I have to admit after that party in the autumn, seeing him in those skin tight stretch jeans, top off, first becoming aware of the tattoo, there was a definite, “Hello, big boy…” going on.

Plus, no matter how loudly he snores, a man has to be aware, when he has a woman cuddled up to him and her hand on his chest, and he takes her hand and moves it down to the waistband of his boxers of EXACTLY what he is doing.

Especially when he does it twice.

Went out Friday night, but I left quite early. I guess partly running away (there was a girl there who I know has slept with him before - partly courtesy of FKM and his complete disregard to friends confidences, partly down to her telling me herself they had a ‘history’, however, she was also telling me about her boyfriend moving in next week - it was just too damn messy), but also valid reasons for needing to be home to get to the opticians at 11 the next morning.

All things equal, and assuming that a choice was actually a viable option, I would choose D. However, Q lives in the same town, D lives 200 miles away. In terms of baggage, D is carrying way more than Q.

D is jealous of Q, which is something I (a) don’t want to have to deal with, and (b) encourage.

Bugger it.

My cat is beautiful, and a lot less hassle than men!