Decent Exposure

There are forty-one types of people. I thought about it for like, an hour. Of those, there are twenty-seven types of men. Verdana had green eyes and liked the Beatles; that's one type. Traditional Arabic had a beard; that's another type. I'm not going to list them all.

There are also eight types of houses. I counted them all as Zoe drove me to a mysterious man's house. We had to tell him I was a sexblogger, but we had to make it sound subtle. Publicity was waning – the buzz from Polish Grazia was drying up, and Rupert Murdoch wasn't returning my calls. M&S were sceptical about my offers to model their new burka range. "I have to stay anonymous!", I said. They said they weren't looking for any sexbloggers to model their Islamic religiouswear for them right now, but if they were, they'd let me know.

As we pulled up to his house, I was sure it was a type five – the kind with a chimney, and a door at the the front. So: me. Her. There. Stood. Knocked. Waited. The door opened.

“Alroite. Oi'm Seamus”, shaking my hand with a tight, confident grip. I said my name back. He hugged Zoe close, and led us into the sitting room. Seamus got Zoe and me a Coke, and poured himself a Diet Coke “on account o' me diabetes”. In my opinion, there's two types of diabetes. One where you have too much insulin, and one where you don't have enough. He had the second one, the one I like to call “second-type-diabetes”.

“So what brings ye round moy neck o' the woods?”, he asked.

“Oh, we were just passing by”, said Zoe.

“Really? Doing what?”

“Oh, just experiencing the culture and the sights of... the surrounding area”. That was the trouble with satnav. You just followed it to god-knows-where. We had no idea what this place was called. Had we taken the ferry? We didn't know. It was all hazy now.

Anyway, we had a job to do.

“So what do you think of recent developments in the blogosphere?”, Zoe asked the PR man.

“Y'know, soitis oi don't much follow them no more. There was a few interestin' sex blogs a whoile back, but... soyouknow, I ain't much been followin' them since the divorce.”

“Which interesting blogs?”, I jumped in.

“There were one or two university ones, some crafty loosebits talkin' about their boxes, but I stopped reading them when they made me think of Linda's. God almoighty, I loved her. She took everything from me. Everything!”

“Ah”, I said. “Were they good blogs, though?”

“Sometimes I think about ending it all.”

“Well-written? Commercially viable?”

This was clearly going to be harder than we thought. We could steer the conversation towards me all we liked, but he selfishly kept pushing it away. A bolt of thought shot between me and Zoe. We'd have to abandon all subtlety, here. A quick drinking contest later, we were willing to strike.

“So”, said Zoe, “whatdya both say if you foundout someone you know's a secret blogger?”

“HOWDA FOOK d'you know!”, yelled Seamus, unexpectedly. “Oi'd kept moy being Twenty Major a secret for feckin' years, you fockin' shoitehawk!”

“Not you!”, she shouted.

“You mean about you being WanderingScroibe? Don't worry, we all worked that out years ago. All that child abuse shoite don't mean a thing to me, it's foine.”

“YOU BASTARD!”, she screamed. “WHO ELSE KNOWS!”

She aimed a fist at his nose; Seamus stepped back, picked up a harp and swang it at her face. She ripped the pipe from his mouth, jabbed him in the chest with it, and knocked him flat. The pair wrestled, arms and feet flying in both directions. Seamus swang a sack of potatoes violently, but was distracted by a passing car bomb.

“And I'm Belle des Oxford!”, I said. Zoe kicked Seamus in the crotch. “Did you hear? I'm...”

“Come on.” Zoe grabbed my hand. “We're going”.

There are three kinds of nights. Those that are good. Those that are really good. Those that are bad. And then there are those in between, which aren't quite either. I'm not sure which this was.