Sam: You know you're getting better when...

When I first came out of surgery and was in recovery, one of my best friends came to see me. He asked me how I was, and apparently all I could say was "ARRRGGGHEEERRRUUUUGHHHHH".

The other day, I spent 47 minutes on the line to a bureaucrat who kept asking the same questions over and over because apparently the system was broken. I had to really bite my tongue and stop myself from saying; "Yes, I fucking know the system is broken".

The reason I was on the phone for that long was to apply for a programme that will help me get back to work and provide the assistance I need, but good Lord - expecting someone who's disabled to spend 47 minutes on the phone is ridiculous. But when you can get through an ordeal like that, you know you're getting better.

As opposed to; "ARRRGGGHEEERRRUUUUGHHHHH".

'Mr Sex' sees the writing on the wall

A Young Friend of 'Mr Sex' regaled me over the weekend with information about the house she's just purchased, but unlike every other story I've ever heard from someone whose just bought a house, it's actually interesting.

Before I relay it to you, a minor proviso; we were both pissed up when the tale was told, so my recollection may be a little shaky - but the main point is absolutely, unquestionably true. I have pictorial evidence.

Now then, said mate purchased the house from a couple in their seventies; a chap called Tony, and a lady whose name I didn't catch, unfortunately. They'd been there for nigh on 40 years, and the house was in good nick, although a bit chintzy. So, when she got settled in, she got on with the job of availing the walls of manky 70s wallpaper, with a view to putting up something that someone else would find disgusting and dated sometime in 2041.

Whilst removing three layers of wallpaper, she chanced upon the following letters;

I L

Awr, she thought, trying to imagine Tony and his new bride moving in at the start of their married life, picturing him tucking his kipper tie into his Bri-Nylon tangerine shirt to avoid splash-back as he proclaimed his love for his True Intended, waiting to see shards of unadulterated glee explode from her little face when she came home from work and saw it. Then she scraped back a little bit more;

I LIKE

Hm. That's a tad noncommittal, isn't it? But no matter; gripped with an almost religious fervour to discover the hidden message, just like that scene in The Da Vinci Code - even though I've not seen it, but I bet there's one anyway - she set about the wall with the scraper until every shred was removed.

This is what she discovered. Round about the same time that the Americans left a plaque on the surface of the moon, this is what someone in my home town had similarly hewn for future generations to discover and ponder the meaning of. This is what my mate has to stare at until she gets the right wallpaper sorted out.



Naturally, there's been ramifications. For one, my mate absolutely dreads the approach of workmen to her door, and is shitting bricks that one of them will be called Tony and will think she's trying to tell him something. Even worse, Tony's missus has found out, courtesy of a neighbour who still knows her, and it's safe to say that Tony is in for some shit. Possibly because it's taken her this long to find out, when it's too late to do anything about it.

Personally, my sympathies are completely with Tone. Being the romantic that I am, I choose to see him as a crusader for the sanctity of the female orgasm, stuck in a dark age when cunnilingus was considered as something that only depraved women would want and even more depraved men would offer, unleashing his inner turmoil with a passionately anguished flourish of erotic samizdat. Because if I don't think that, I'm led to the more prosaic conclusion that he'd been working through a crate of brown ale and flicking through a copy of Titbits while his missus was at the bingo, and it was all too much for him. And I don't want to think about that.

So, lovely readers of TT - what disgusting filth have you secreted for future generations (and possibly aliens) to discover? I'll be the first to confess; there are more than a few drawings of cocks with all spunk coming out them in the lift shaft of the TK Maxx in the Broadmarsh Centre attributed to me, when I was a lift boy and it was a Co-Op. There. I feel much better. Your turn.

(Oh, and Tony, if you're reading this - why didn't you rely on Manbits to get you out of this awful situation? I would have advised you to style your way out of it by telling the wife that you were only expressing your love for Fannetone, a made-up pasta dish that came in a packet in the early 70s...)

Dan: Flyering Low

Being the director of a company should have gravitas, should come with power and should drip with respectability. A live events production company no less, a funky business that deals in comedy, live music…you know, fun stuff, with cool people who wear massive sunglasses that hide the dark circles from the coke-fuelled parties the night before.

In reality, I spent yesterday handing out flyers for an event we’re running in Madame JoJo’s in Soho and getting ignored. By far the worst were the looks of utter disgust from office girls – you try offering a flyer to a girl dressed in work clothes and looking all ‘pouty’, and see what reaction you get. One pair of girls actually laughed at me, with one saying as she walked past, "obviously can’t get a real job" which I felt was rather…well, nasty.

It’s funny as well, because the traits a lot of women like (or seem to) involve hard-working, dedicated and outgoing types, not forgetting GSOH. Lets look at the evidence here: I run my own company, I’ll do whatever it takes to make stuff work including flyering or dressing up, and I do my own stand-up comedy during the week. I’m all over those qualities, surely – and also, I'm flyering for a charity event with five major UK charities being represented (RNLI, Teenage Cancer Trust, Oxfam, Centrepoint and International Medical Corps) so I’m giving too! Although I confess the phrase ‘kill two birds with one stone’ popped into my head. But there was no loose masonry nearby.

It always gets my goat when people dismiss others – especially when it’s me!

Anyhow, if any of you lovely readers would like to come down tonight, all the details are here at www.crowntheclown.com - and if you turn up on the door mentioning 'Todger Talk you can have the £8 price usually reserved for those who book on-line. All the door takings are donated to charity so you can have a good laugh and give something.

Manbits and Something For The Ladies

OK, the good ship Todger Talk is slowly coming back together, but you may have noticed that our advice sections - Manbits and Something For The Ladies - have gone a bit AWOL. I can only surmise that either;

a) all our readers are in completely brilliant relationships

or;

b) you need a gentle reminder/kick up the arse.

So, once again...

Ladies: If there's ever been anything about men you've wanted to know but were afraid to ask, or wanted a male viewpoint on a certain relationship niggle you're going through, drop an email to us at todger dot talk at googlemail dot com. And chaps; If you're male, and you want a bit of advice on your sexy, sexy mither, drop us an e-mail at - you guessed it - todger dot talk at googlemail dot com.

As a treat - or possibly punishment - here's a lovely video Dan came across when he was dossing about through YouTube the other day. God knows what he put in the search engine to get this, but it's nice to see that someone in Prague is Thinking Of The Children;

'Mr Sex' watches smoke leave his lips and fill an empty room

Readers of TT may be pleased to hear that while Sam's inner cynic has died, mine has been ripped from the grave, reassembled itself like Terminator 2, and is currently lurching around and scaring kiddies, utterly impervious to bullets and guided missiles.

Long story short; for more years than I dare admit, I have been wondering with creeping dread about how I would react when my ex - the woman who I consider to be the love of my life, the first and only I-want-to-spend-the-rest-of-my-life-with-you, I-can't-wait-for-you-to-meet-my-Mam-and-Dad, when-are-we-having-kids partner, the one I still dream about and tell friends never to mention in my presence, the one who it still feels like I'm cheating on whenever I'm with someone else, the one who... fuck it, THE ONE, full stop - got married. I have spent an embarrassingly huge chunk of my adult life with a self-imposed gun to my head, waiting for the bullet to strike.

Said bullet arrived six weeks ago, approximately 110 pixels tall by 200 pixels wide, due to an accidental click of a mutual friend's Facebook profile and saw a thumbnail I could have done without seeing. So that's it. The door - that was slammed, locked and bolted a long time ago - has now had a lorry-load of wet concrete deposited against it. There is absolutely no coming back from this one, even though I knew there never was.

So, this is how it feels;

1. You feel numb as fuck.

2. Then, you have a million questions, even though you know that the answer to any of them would be like a knife in the chest. What song did they dance to? (was it something I introduced to her?) Was her Mam happy? (I hope so - I miss her almost as much as I miss her daughter) Did her Dad (who never liked me) lump me in with the abusive shitbags she went out with before and after me in his speech? Did I cross the mind of anyone there who knew me?

3. (The one question you don't need to ask, of course, is 'Who did she get married to?'. Because it doesn’t matter. There's only one proper answer to that; 'Not me')

4. Then you want to thank all those mates there for not telling you beforehand, as you don't want to think about what you would have done that day if you'd have known.

5. Then, when its sunk in, you refuse to talk about it, for fear that 'Yeah, I heard my ex got married' will come out as 'Oh, by the way, I really fucked everything up, did you know?'

6. Then, you resist the urge to mentally lacerate yourself by playing this, this, this and especially this.

7. Then, when some semblance of lucidity returns, you calmly and rationally despise the world and everything in it. And then, through a process of elimination, you whittle that number right down to one; yourself.

8. Then you feel the urge to apologise to every girlfriend you’ve had since, for pissing them about and letting them go because – despite the fact that they were all attractive, intelligent, considerate and understanding – they all committed the crime of Not Being Her.

9. Then you feel the urge to apologise to every one of your mates who went from one relationship straight into a better one, as you realise that, no, they weren’t being heartless bastards while you were keeping the faith – they were behaving like grown-ups while you were continuing to be a hopelessly naïve martyr.

10. Then, you let on to your friends why you’re being such a horrible, pinch-faced shitbag, and try to accept their sympathy with as much grace as possible, even though none of then could ever understand your predicament because what you’re going through has never been experienced by anyone else, ever. And you bite your tongue when they try to cheer you up with videos of fat dads dancing really badly, not realising that every clip is set at a wedding reception (it made me laugh, though).

11. Then you don’t feel like updating your sex and relationship blog for ages, because you don’t want to think about either. Ahem.

12. Then you write a massively rambling post, stating that you’ve finally realised that you can’t live in the past, what you had is gone forever, it’s never coming back, and you know that. Yes, you’re still numb, and you know that one night - when the beer’s been consumed and someone says the wrong thing or the wrong song comes on - it’s going to properly hit home with an outburst of remorse and regret and snot, but at the end of the day, there’s still time to find what you really want, the world is rammed out with amazingly brilliant women who could make you happy, so you’re going to have to remove the crushing weight of your past, get hold of one and do it right this time.

13. Then you start worrying about how you're going to react when you hear she has a kid.

Sam: Death of a Cynic

Before my stroke, my view of human nature was pretty hard-nosed and cynical. Essentially, I was sure we were all just self-interested animals, only focused on eating, fucking, carving out territory and then protecting that territory and our own self-interest.

I survived my stroke, but strangely my cynic has died. In leaving hospital, I have been astounded at the incredible kindness shown to me by so many of my family and friends, particularly my mother and father-in-law, who have come and helped out with my recovery literally every other day and some of my very loyal friends, who have slept over when times are hard and spent days on end “working from home”, which really meant running around catering for my little needs during the day. And my extraordinary soon- to-be-wife, who has been a mixture of Wonderwoman and Supergirl, being incredibly loyal, loving, seemingly indefatigable. And many members of my own family overseas, including my mother who came all the way from Australia to visit me. And my stepfather whose wise words and steady character have helped keep me on course. Enough American-style gushy sentimentality!

My new view of the world adheres more with that of one of my great intellectual icons, Desmond Morris, who still says we are all animals, but that we are programmed to want to co-operate and help other members of our own species. Our brains are rewarded when we help other members of our own tribe.

A huge thank you must go to Mr Sex, who has pretty much single-handedly kept Todger Talk alive, kicking and thriving. So dear readers, in the comments section, can you please lavish your appreciation on Mr Sex.

And lady readers, if you live within commuting distance of Nottingham and you fancy lavishing more than words or you would like to make his next visit to London more exciting, please remember that Mr Sex is that rarest of men: he is single, can make you laugh, can talk about his emotions openly and his first published book was nothing less than ‘The Going Down guide’. I mean, ladies, what more could you want in a man? You can contact him through his blogger profile…