Diary of a Lady - 15

Interacting with people frightens me. Loud people put me off. The overly ambitious leave me quaking in my dirty old shoes. The smug ones need a good smack. The intelligent mind makes me feel dumb. I loathe having prolonged conversations with a group of people because more often than not, such 'sessions' highlight my inadequacies. My thoughts get confused, the noise is disorienting… and the pointlessness of the situation hits me in gut.

The evening before last, I was forced to attend a sit-down dinner. I shrank in horror even as I looked at the shiny, happy faces around me. Why can't I be shiny and happy? My friend who knows my insanity throws me a sympathetic glance and tries to involve me in the conversation, but I cannot talk.

After an hour of nicotine and alcohol, I wanted to kill the lot — in true PS3 style. I zoomed in on the faces that irked me the most. The judgmental prig needs a good fuck, and should then be burnt on a stake. The grating laugher. Bang, bang… you're dead. The arrogant boor. I'm going to stab you with my dinner knife. I imagined their blood spilling on the dinner table. It was satisfying.

I have nothing to say to anyone anymore. Yes, winter is slowly setting in. Yes, 65-year-olds are having sex with nubile African boys. And then… silence. I drag my tired feet home and curl up in bed. I welcome my nightmares — they're not as bad as my reality.

Of errant ‘E’s and that idiot Fowler

It wasn’t the best of times, but it just might have been one of the worst, because there I was sipping a beer and gawking, with goggle-eyed inebriation, at the bar staff, who had bleached their hair blonde for some sordid event.

Not only were their heads gleaming like little bobbing suns, but they wore black T-shirts — all of which had “I may be blonde but I’m smart...drink (name of brand withheld as the writer cannot afford to be sued) emblazoned on them.”

Now — apart from the fact that the tipple in question was so vile it would have been unceremoniously booted out of any self-respecting moonshine palace — I am a great supporter of the blonde cause. In fact, I am an ardent fan of Paris Hilton (the actress, not the socialite), Jessica Simpson (Daisy Duke, not Newlyweds) and Anna Nicole Smith (the live version preferably).

But I digress, my apologies.

Now the little ditty on the shirt was perfectly innocuous in itself, but when I spotted one of the male members of staff wearing the same shirt (imprint and all) I was aghast, verging on agog.

“Excuse me,” I said, “do you know what’s wrong with that shirt you’re wearing?”

Now it’s never a good idea to probe a hulking South African fly-half, but a man’s got to do, what a man’s got to do.

“Why? What’s wrong with it,” he muttered, twirling an empty Sol, with cringe-worthy agility.

“Oh nothing major, it just assumes you’re a woman.”

“A what...?”

Thankfully for me the music was loud enough, and the lights low enough to mask my sharp intake of breath, quivering bladder, and eyes that were now the size of pimped-up flying saucers.

“Blonde!” I shouted quickly, already wondering whether a broken nose or a broken jaw, would be a better story to tell the little ones (my sister’s, not mine).

“What’s wrong with blonde?”

“Blonde,” I muttered, “spelt the way it is on your shirt, implies a woman. A man would have been ‘b-l-o-n-d’.”

“Don’t be a smart arse,” he said.

“Don’t blame me, blame that pedant Henry Watson Fowler,” as soon as the words came out of mouth, I knew I had just stepped over a boundary: that which lies between erudite nag and pompous twit (I was twittering like a Tit).

As I beat a hasty retreat to the nearest exit I heard him call out over the din of the Jam: “Who did you say it was?”

I stopped. My left brain recreated the battle of the Somme with my right. I turned and walked back to the burly barkeep and stared into his nasal passages, for purely height reasons of course.

The words were forming, and my tongue was contorting trying to keep them in. It’s tough-muscle status now in serious jeopardy. And then I uttered: “It’s whom, not who...you moron.”

Next week: How to prevent organ failure by curling up into a foetal position, while being stomped on by a 150 kg supertanker of a man

Execution for making a call

North Korea has resumed frequent public executions, among them a factory chief accused of
making international phone calls who was shot at a stadium before thousands of spectators, a South Korean aid group said Monday.

Diary of a Lady - 14

Penises are redundant. I’ve arrived at this glorious conclusion after spending a weekend alone – no men, no lovers, no horny exes… just me and good old Thomas Hardy. (And I would never have slept with Hardy – give me William Butler Yeats any day). OOoohhh. It’s not Yeats’ penis that interests me as much as his mind. But I digress.

Last weekend, I switched off my cellphone, curled up in bed and pleasured myself. It was me and my rabbit, with the strains of Amadeus Mozart’s Symphony No. 29 wafting from my cheap laptop speakers.

And I came and came and came – even Leda would have been envious.

But at night, after two bottles of wine, I needed a hug, and there was no one to give me one. Somehow, I can satiate myself, but I can’t comfort myself.

Ye olde white bird and her dark fantasies

Jeremy Clarke, reporting for Reuters from Mombasa in Kenya had this rather interesting feature on the wires. Send in your comments on this trend.

Bethan, 56, lives in southern England on the same street as best friend Allie, 64. They are on their first holiday to Kenya, a country they say is “just full of big young boys who like us older girls”.

Hard figures are difficult to come by, but local people on the coast estimate that as many as one in five single women visiting from rich countries are in search of sex. Allie and Bethan — who both declined to give their full names — said they planned to spend a whole month touring Kenya’s palm-fringed beaches. They would do well to avoid the country’s tourism officials.

“It's not evil,” said Jake Grieves-Cook, chairman of the Kenya Tourist Board, when asked about the practise of older rich women travelling for sex with young Kenyan men. “But it's certainly something we frown upon.”

Also, the health risks are stark in a country with an Aids prevalence of 6.9 percent. Although condom use can only be guessed at, Julia Davidson, an academic at Nottingham University who writes on sex tourism, said that in the course of her research she had met women who shunned condoms — finding them too “businesslike” for their exotic fantasies.

The white beaches of the Indian Ocean coast stretched before the friends as they both walked arm-in-arm with young African men, Allie resting her white haired-head on the shoulder of her companion, a six-foot-four 23-year-old from the Maasai tribe. He wore new sunglasses he said were a gift from her. “We both get something we want —where's the negative?” Allie asked in a bar later, nursing a strong, golden cocktail. She was still wearing her bikini top, having just pulled on a pair of jeans and a necklace of traditional African beads. Bethan sipped the same local drink: a powerful mix of honey, fresh limes and vodka known locally as ‘Dawa’, or ‘medicine’. She kept one eye on her date — a 20-year-old playing pool, a red bandana tying back dreadlocks and new-looking sports shoes on his feet. He looked up and came to join her at the table, kissing her, then collecting more coins for the pool game.

Grieves-Cook and many hotel managers say they are doing all they can to discourage the practice of older women picking up local boys, arguing it is far from the type of tourism they want to encourage in the east African nation.

These same beaches have long been notorious for attracting another type of sex tourists — those who abuse children. As many as 15,000 girls in four coastal districts — about a third of all 12-18 year-olds girls there — are involved in casual sex for cash, a joint study by Kenya's government and UN children's charity Unicef reported late last year. Up to 3,000 more girls and boys are in full-time sex work, it said, some paid for the “most horrific and abnormal acts”.

Emerging alongside this black market trade — and obvious in the bars and on the sand once the sun goes down — are thousands of elderly white women hoping for romantic, and legal, encounters with much younger Kenyan men. They go dining at fine restaurants, then dancing, and back to expensive hotel rooms overlooking the coast. “One type of sex tourist attracted the other,” said one manager at a shorefront bar on Mombasa'’s Bamburi beach.

“Old white guys have always come for the younger girls and boys, preying on their poverty.... But these old women followed, they never push the legal age limits, they seem happy just doing what is sneered at in their countries.”