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So once at work I decided to bounce some marriage plan ideas around with my assistant Toby. He is not gay and he has never been married but he is my only employee so my choice with whom to bounce was limited. I don't think he could have been closely checking the tracker he installed on my mobile phone to monitor my movements because he failed to notice me walk through the door. I caught him red handed reading a comic during work time. One of those weird Japanese comics where the pictures of the characters have little bodies but funny shaped heads and large almond eyes. I pretended not to notice even though just 10 minutes earlier I sent strict text instructions for him to urgently identify suppliers of antiqued wall sconces for a very important client.
"I have got this friend," I said casually, "A very good friend in fact. He just happens to be gay, lives in London, and is also an interior designer. He has incredible taste but let's just say he's got a problem."
Oh?" said Toby, "How unfortunate." He closed his comic as a mark of respect. "I mean him having a problem, not that he sounds just incredibly like you." He had his eyebrow cocked. I was pleased I had him totally fooled.
"Yes," I said, "And his boyfriend of many, many years has just asked him to marry him.
But here's the rub," I said chewing the end of my pen. Toby immediately started frowing and staring at my lips. As he is obsessive compulsive he disapproves of any chewing whatsoever and especially so when there is no actual swallowing. "He is getting a bit lost on the detail."

I try not to be totally obsessed by how I look. I often watch re-runs of that TV show, Extreme Make-Over, purely to keep myself grounded and in the real world. If you have never seen it, it films a person who hates his or her entire body and turns him or her into someone who bears absolutely no resemblance to what they looked like just sixty minutes earlier. Only I think this is edited over weeks or possibly even months because some of the changes are so extreme you would go into body shock if they did it that quick. I'd definitely consider going on it. It's not that I am very unhappy with how I look but I do think there is always room for improvement when you get past the age of forty. I think many of the extreme make-overs the programme undertakes are what you should really call medical procedures. I expect the team at intensive care is never too far away, on call, fully scrubbed up and ready to roll. It also seems to involve some masked expert spending an awful lot of time enthusiastically extracting high volumes of body fat with a sharp ended metal pipe. I hope that is not in any way compulsory. I would be worried some mad plastic surgeon might get too vigorous and one suck with any zest would see my entire body shoot up through his hose. I really would hate to end it, concertinaed to the width of a pencil, forever peering out at the world from a waste disposal unit.
Temptation is all around me. It's a culinary minefield. Sometimes my will power fluctuates but I generally stay slim by pretending peanut butter is an invention waiting to happen and that if I eat a dessert of any kind it will send me immediately into a coma. I can totally recommend this approach. When I look at New York baked cheesecake I always see oxygen tents. So,Stey Fit ;)

Guido finally got round to testing my sexuality preferences and hesitantly asking me out on a first date. Was I married - he wanted to know? Did I have a girlfriend? - by any chance? On a scale of one to ten who did I find more attractive - Johnny Depp or Chuck Norris. He asked if I'd like to go to the cinema with him but when we got there it turned out the Curzon was full and we ended up back at his loft for a drink. Somewhere between finishing that drink and breakfast downstairs the next morning, we went to bed. But here is the thing, we went to bed, and then we went to sleep. I hadn't taken my clothes off in front of another man for about a year. Not since Coleman and that suit of armour. So I had gotten a bit out of practice fooling around. I realise taking your clothes off in front of another man is a bit like standing on one leg because once you have done it once it's one of those things you never forget how to do, even if you do have the lights switched off. Unfortunately on that particular occasion my body dis-morphia suddenly kicked in. This meant that just at the vital moment my underwear hit the carpet, I promptly burst into tears.
Let me give any of you who are about to go out on a first date a bit of advice, particularly if this is likely to involve taking your clothes off in front of another man, do not start crying when you are naked. I can guarantee you this will broke the moment. It was just as well Guido had been awake since five a.m. grilling bacon. Thankfully he was exhausted and not really that fussed either way about making woopie.

This morning I had a meeting about a design job with a construction company at their head office in Athens. Despite the number of people travelling on London Underground it never ceases to amaze me who I can just randomly bump into. Tanya and I were, I'll describe this in the loosest possible sense, colleagues ten years ago. I recognised her immediately on account of the fact that she was wearing super sized spectacles and was waving at me with both hands whilst wiggling her exceedingly long fingers.
Rewind ten years and if you happened to have been living in the county of Kent and you used to routinely listen to the radio, then you very well may already remember who I am. I wouldn't exactly call myself a celebrity but I regularly took part in a radio talk show dispensing advice to callers about interior design dilemmas. I was desperate for work, and exposure, so did it for free. The show was like a form of psychiatry only rather than discussing callers' personality disorders I analysed their choice of scatter cushions. On occasion I could cause quite a stir in Tunbridge Wells with my colour combos. The show used to air on Daytime Live and was slotted in between a political debate show where everybody screamed blue at one another, and a paranormal spiritualist medium who channelled dead people live on air. If you'll pardon the contradiction. Once a week any lunatic was encouraged to dial in and ask probing questions like "How can I make my wood chip wallpaper resemble Italian marble?" Sometimes if it was very light on calls the producer would brazenly trawl the lines for unsuspecting callers on hold just waiting for the next show to start. So someone who was actually anticipating a chat with his dead aunt could find himself unexpectedly discussing the adaptability of cork floor tiles with me.

Just to explain why we were in bed but not sleeping or having sex, I like to watch TV there. Last night I was trying to decide whether or not I was really enjoying the latest Scandanavian drama to be imported over here. Although the TV in our bedroom is only at the end of our mattress it's still too small for me to read subtitles and unfortunately I can't speak Danish. They talk fast in Denmark and keeping up to speed with the plotline was impossible. Guido was propped up next to me flipping enthusiastically through the pages of a glossy new cookbook he has added to his collection. This one had an ominous photograph of a meat cleaver and a headless chicken on its cover. As you can tell the two of us really do have some pretty exciting evenings at home these days.
We should start to think about organising our wedding." I announced. Taking this kind of approach was quite a bold tactic for me. My strategy for raising difficult topics to discuss with Guido has always been to slowly reel him in, like that great British idiom, so he's done up like a kipper. Apologies to my international readers, I realise you may have to go look that one up. What I mean is that whilst we might start out talking about one topic, like say Spanish football, in my mind I've already mapped out where I want the conversation to end, and that invariably involves agreeing that we should wallpaper the bedroom. Trust me my comment about marriage planning was said without any hint of Machiavelli plot or anything which might eventually involve having to rent a waterproof marquee.

Last night Guido and I were in bed. I am getting a bit worried you might be thinking that there may be parts of my blog which are inexorably slipping towards innuendo describing Guido and me in the sack. I do apologise if it's beginning to have a rather familiar ring to it. However I thought you might be interested to know that statistically I had more hits on my blog called, "Faking it," than any of the others put together. I think this must mean there is a disproportionate number of people surfing the net for whom faking orgasms is more of an interest than having them, so they must have been pretty disappointed when they read my blog. To boost healthy search engine figures from now on I am considering tossing in a reference to sex in the title of all of my blogs so perhaps this one should be renamed "In Bed With Machiavelli."
Just to explain why we were in bed but not sleeping or having sex, I like to watch TV there. Last night I was trying to decide whether or not I was really enjoying the latest Scandanavian drama to be imported over here. Although the TV in our bedroom is only at the end of our mattress it's still too small for me to read subtitles and unfortunately I can't speak Danish. They talk fast in Denmark and keeping up to speed with the plotline was impossible. Guido was propped up next to me flipping enthusiastically through the pages of a glossy new cookbook he has added to his collection. This one had an ominous photograph of a meat cleaver and a headless chicken on its cover. As you can tell the two of us really do have some pretty exciting evenings at home these days.

I used to do this silly thing when I went into the café each lunchtime just to attract his attention. I know what you are thinking. Pass the sick bucket. I thought I was being really cute and flirtatious but other customers used to look at me like I was a complete whacko. I'd stand infront of the specials board and the sandwich fillings list and then ask Gudio to make something which wasn't up there. I'd say crazy things like, "I am in the mood for peanut butter and banana on toast," (if you are dieting avoid this) or, "Make my day special with stilton and marmalade on rye,"

It got to the stage I was visiting The Spanish Onion so often under the pretence to eat that I was actually finding it difficult to fit in any work around my eating schedule. I was beginning to feel like some kind of stalker with an eating disorder. I thought Guido was hot and I was just praying that he thought I was at least lukewarm despite the fact that when he threw culinary references into our conversations I didn't know whether to fricassee or deglaze.

With hardly any knowledge of Spanish, you can become proficient in Grindr Spanish too. Truthfully, guys on Grindr are generally not so imaganitive, so a few stock phrases to use and understand can be very helpful. Save these to your phone and you'll be able to maximise your Grindr experience wherever you are in Latin America or Spain.

Let's be real. One of the best things about going to a Spanish speaking country is having the opportunity to hook up with a Latin lovely. But when your Spanish is less than perfect, this can be an obstacle. It is certainly not the case that all Spanish speaking parts of the world have English speakers, and from my own experience of living in Oaxaca, I almost always had to use Spanish with local gays.