Midnight Cowboy

I've always had a tendency to live as though there were 28 hours in each day, packing in things to do and people to see (In reality, I just cut back on sleep but that sounds much less fun). I don't think there was a time in my life where this was more true than in the year between my leaving secondary school and leaving for England. Particularly at the point where I didn't yet know that I would be leaving. My friends had either gone on to Junior College or to study in England, the US or the UK, or were sitting around FEP all day. A small number of the older ones had started national service or gotten jobs. I threw my lot in with these, not enlisting, which would probably have involved sweating and getting up early, but signing onto the payroll of a company that was later to be embroiled in scandal. After I'd left, naturally.

The company was essentially a holding company that pandered to the discerning gay eye. There was a magazine, the name of which escapes me, an advertising subsidiary, and a media company. I initially wrote copy for the ad agency before being roped into freelancing on the magazine. A couple of months in though, this all changed and I became a full time devotee of the media company. Why? Simple. It was time for Manhunt International.

My role on Manhunt was officially titled "Media Liaison Executive". What this meant was that I ran everything from scheduling press to managing the boys on the day. One of the first things I had to do was run the pre-press, which involved getting a hot white dude and a hot Asian dude (note the science involved) to look enthusiastic, moody, sultry and serious on camera. Preferably all at once. This was the shoot where I met my Midnight Boyfriend, as my mother likes to term him.

MB was an expat kid of the German variety (tall, big in the shoulders, smelled good - other varieties offered different traits). When we met it'd been years since I'd dated anyone German, and any German I'd once spoken was almost entirely lost to me, but for one very appalling phrase. I was pretty much where I am now, come to think of it. This was incredibly useful since the appeal of MB wasn't his conversation. Whenever there were gaps to fill in our time together, we had to think of other ways to occupy our lips, for the best really since we had pretty much nothing in common and no genuine interest in establishing common ground.

The one key thing we did have in common though, was that we were busy people. He had his girlfriend, I had my boyfriend and the FEP crowd. Quite how we ended up hooking up is totally unknown to me now, since he knew it would be a problem for him more than I should we be discovered, this was a point where expat kids were growing less welcome around FEP, and there were a lot of safer bets out there. Some would probably even have put out, which I refused to at the time, for reasons that I never understood.

In any case, at some point on this photo shoot one of us "forgot" something and as a result we had to meet a couple of days later for this to be returned. I'm not sure why but almost all our meetings took place in his car. Possibly down to the tensions I mentioned - the first time we met up I got in and he gave me a ride home, the next day the word was out and I took a lot of hassle. I suppose he did too because he never picked me up out front at FEP again, only slightly further afield. What were the chances of this going anywhere, seriously - every meeting was in 3 to 5 cubic metre space. It must have been like being in the diary room of the big brother house, but with handbrakes and less comfy seats. There was one time I allowed him into the house and, if anything, that was the beginning of the end. Suddenly he needed to know why I enjoyed spending time with him, when I'd always thought that was communicated whenever our lips were moving.

Anyhow, this was my staycation romance. It must have lasted about the length of a summer holiday, though there was never any sunshine. This weekend, a decade later, we became friends on Facebook and he sent me an email, probably the longest exchange between us. Both of us seemed slightly stunned that the other wasn't a total deadbeat - MB is now MD of the Vietnamese subsidiary for a German company following a degree at Cambridge (I hadn't even thought he could speak much English) and an MBA at one of the better European schools. If I'd realised he was potentially smart, maybe we would have spoken!

All of this leads me to wonder, am I actually more shallow now than I was at 18?