Now I am old? I don't think so! Reflections on turning 40

So the big 4 - 0 hey? I have no idea why certain milestone numbers - yes we are still imperial when it comes to big birthdays it seems! - suddenly have to be spelt out, like you are trying to hide something from someone. Reminds of when my parents would spell something out when I was child so I wouldn't know what they were getting or doing - it may have been true that I couldn't understand that the spelled word was, but I understood the act of spelling all right and the fact that it meant something! Somehow saying the two numbers separately doesn't disguise the fact that I am officially sliding into a gloriously vigorous middle age.....not that I am all that worried really. 40...sorry 4 - 0....is the new 30 I am told, and 50 is the new 35, which places me back at the start of my 30s, which thus far has been my favourite decade. Lots of wisdom about me and how the world operates coupled with youtful zest (no, not lemon zest - too bitter) - lt's see of the 40s can top that! As ever, my cup is half full....full of Vanilla Coke that is!

The birthday was marked by a 12 day visit to Canada on frequent flier miles, where I got to help celebrate (and organise the party of) my wonderful friend, Sandra, who also turned 4 - 0. (See I still know what I mean!) I spent 2 days covering the greater part of Port Coquitlam (in Vancouver) with Ilesa, Sandra's friend and neighbour, for lots of food, red and yellow everything (inspired by the balloons we ordered) and even a birthday tiara (plastic) and a sash saying "Birthday Queen", which also somehow ended up on me at the 40th. Thats right - make fun of the gay man! LOL The party went off a treat....I drank lots of Sangria, Sandra got to see some close friends, and there was cake! Mmmmm....cake....when I wasn't doing the Queer Eye for the Party Guy routine, I was shopping in Kitsilano (funky neighbourhood) and downtown (with Sandra where we stopped in for sushi at good ol' Tsunami Sushi, and lots o' CDs at HMV Megastore), and checking out dead frozne salmon in a stream.....well I was supposed to be checking out live ones rushing to spawn but I was a tad too late....

Flew back into Sydney Town on the day of my birthday, where I was not wished Happy Birthday by the customs officer (so much for my tax dollars at work!) and carrying a very bad cold picked up courtesy of Sandra and her partner Ken's two lovely kids, Katie and Graham. The one thing I didn't have was jetlag but after some shopping and a birthday lunch of Indian with Susie, a very good friend, I had to come home and crash out for 3 hours to sleep off the effects of the cold. Do I know how to party of not?! Got up, felt way better, got an SMS from Warren (this great guy I met via Yahoo Personals, who may yet turn out to be the best birthday present yet) right at 6.18 pm when I was born - very sweet! - talked to various wonderful freinds, and Mum & Dad and headed out for fish and chips from the local in Gymea with John and Susie. Yes another night of wild and frantic partying that may or may not have included drunken sheep and small people with killer abs (long story) but more than likely didn't....

Got home, watched some "Queer As Folks" I'd taped, and then rang Warren at 10.30 pm for what I presumed would be a quick chat prior to our get together on Sunday. We talked for 3 and a half hours with a single stop, awkward silence or anything. Way cool. (Its very hard to make smart remakrs when you're happy isn't it? That could become a problem real soon, methinks). We did try a couple of awkward silences just for effect but they inevitably ended after 5 secnds when one of us lost concentration. Let's face it Waz - we suck at awkward silences! It was a wonderful end to my birthday and was followed by a quick call to my friend Kerry in Briz Vegas, who's a complete night owl.

The next big event on the 4 - 0 calendar was the Big Birthday Dinner That Ate Paris on Saturday night.....OK there were only 7 of us but they were very good friends (Andrew, an old housemate, Ellen & Tracy, John & Susie and Ross, a friend who travelled down from Newcastle, which was wonderful of him) and everything went like clockwork.....had the dinner at a fantastic restaurant called "Sealevel" at Cronulla, and we tucked into gloriously rich food (Szechuan Pork Fillets with mango, and pear dressing and rice rolls for me!) we looked onto the night ocean , lit up by a spectacular storm. Conversation flowed freely, as did the Southern Comforts and Coke (here's to not driving!!), and we followed up dinner, after a frantic dash through the rain (me with a ton of helium balloons including a giant Tigger one!), with Toblerone Cheesecake, silly party hats and presents at Ellen's. If you have to turn 4 - 0, then I figure this is the way to do it - great friends, great food, and cheesecake.....and you can quote me on that....

Right now to my 41 st year....roll on !!!

Dates, Figs and Various Other Types of Fruit

So I know that you have all been waiting with baited breath - I can't use that phrase without picturing a tiny, shocked worm desperately clinging to a teensy weensy hook, hanging from a minute piercing on the upper lip, while suspended over the gaping maw of someone's oesophagus: presumably someone did that once I 'd like to think unless there's a more prosaic reason for the phrase's evolution which would frankly be a bit disappointing - to see how my date went. Well so have I really! I am still waiting for a phonecall or email two weeks after the second date, which I was asked out on about 3/4 of the way through the firs date, which went exceptionally well. We met at a trendy cafe in Newtown, a funky inner city Sydney suburb, inside the Dendy arthouse cinema complex, and to my delight (I delight easily it seems) the man in question, Phillip, turned up in his work suit, looking suitably well dressed and handsome. So far so good. Thankfully there was a minimum of syllable-barren awkwardness, and we soon fell into a wide ranging discussion of our upbringings, backgrounds, families and the deteriorating geo-political situation in the Abkhazia region of the old USSR. Just kidding about the last bit but that would have been an interesting twist in the conversation. So engaging was the conversation, and so well did we get on that he asked me for a second date, even settling on the Thursday two days later.....

So fast forwarding to the Thursday, we agreed to meet at a funky (there's that word again but hey this is Newtown, and besides its a very cool word, right up with there with 'plethora' and 'soporific') Thai restaurant at 7 p.m. Only we didn't quite make it there, or in actual fact to anything resembling a real restaurant. He called me when I was already driving to the funky eatery (see you just can't use that word enough!) and proposed a switch of venue to the Taxi Club, which is just off Taylor Square, right in the heart of the gay heartland. All well and good, but City traffic is a bi-artch, and finding a parking spot recalls the search for the Yeti, Loch Ness Monster and Elvis all rolled into one gloriously frustrating quest, testing even the most half glass full of people (which would be me). As all sorts of funkiness slipped from my mind, replaced instead with 300-400 circuits of the roads around the Taxi Club, a lovely drive if you like construction work and bitumen, I had the vague feeling that this date was slipping into a coma even before it got going. But rallying my optimism (ya gotta love a Sagitarrian's ability to cultivate optimism), I persisted till dizziness (one too many circuits of the same block) and a dying wanderlust for discovering new and unknown neighbourhoods, forced me to call Phillip and propose another change of venue to Fox Studios, near where he lives. He didn't sound too thrilled but agreed and so being the nice guy that I am, proposed parking at Fox, and driving in his car - he has free parking - to the Taxi Club.

Happy to do this, we rocked up to the Taxi Club, and I wandered into something akin to a rundown RSL full of cross dressers (not an issue) and old carpet and ambience from a forgotten decade with bad decor. In its defense, I had one of the best salmon fillets EVER there and the French waiter, camp as an entire tent factory, was a lot of fun, and made ordering a vaudeville experience....and Phillip and I talked non stop....so mostly all good right? Well on paper yes, but something niggled at me as we drove back to Fox. Phillip had lost some sort of spark, and having not admitted to a yearning to marry him immediately (absent I can assure you), sympathies for right wing dictatorships (past or present), or a love of clog dancing to polka music at midnight while nude, I couldn't think of anything I could have said to put him off. There was much talk of keeping in touch via email and SMS over the next week, when he would be busy fixing up his rental house, and couldn't see me, and after a half-hearted hug that put human embraces back a few thousand years in terms of warmth and intimacy, he walked off, and though I tried to stay upbeat and positive, had a funny feeling that was it.....and it seems it has been. I am not entirely sure why gay man cut and run, and never even call you to say 'thanks but no thanks', but I find it faintly amusing that he thinks his rejection of me, when he didn't even know me, would send me into some sort of Cecil B deMille-esque melodramatic rant involving much crying, gnashing teeth and copious amounts of ash flung over hastily stitched together sackcloth. He would have actually got more of a mildy ambivalent shrug but let him run with his ridiculously over-inflated sense of his own magnetic attraction!

At least I found out he had great claim to flake status before he sucked me dry of money, hope or the will to live which some previous boyfriends have done. OK not the will to live, which I am rather fond of, but you get the idea. The upside to all this is that another man who said hello via the online personals at about the same time, had quietly snuck up the inside and he and I are well on the way to becoming brilliantly good friends, with the very real promise of more substantial things to come. Yes, happiness isn't as funny as dating disasters but I am happy to put aside witty barbs if it means I find true love...or as close you get to it in this life.....