The irony doesn’t escape me. It’s 45 years since I first started hanging out on the steps of the old bandstand on the banks of Clyde, gazing longingly at a 17-year-old skinhead boy. A gorgeous young Glesga guy who I’ve held a candle for ever since.
Let’s call the object of my early affections S. He was handsome and twinkly, with striking green eyes, a light dusting of freckles and a devilish grin. A young man who epitomised a certain type of gallus Glaswegian masculinity I’d find myself helplessly drawn to over the coming years.
Fast forward four and a half decades from that first, unrequited love, and I find myself at the ripe old age of 60, sitting on the now crumbling concrete steps of the self same bandstand. I’m bathed in late September sunshine, but feeling like death thanks to the virus from hell. Despite rivers of green snot, a hacking cough and a headache that’s threatening to explode right out of my noggin, I’m sat alongside an attractive member of the opposite sex who I’ve only just met. This fella, an Aussie on tour, and I have been chatting digitally for a few weeks, but this somewhat surreal get-together is one of my very first encounters in the alien world of online dating.
In fairness, even way back in the day of the dinosaur — the 1980s — dating was something of an alien concept to many Glaswegians. For many of my generation, both late Baby Boomers and early Gen X, romantic liaisons usually came about as a result of daft, drunken chat in a pub, club or party. Most of my mates and I locked eyes with someone we fancied in the city’s trendy pubs and clubs — Hurricanes, the Rock Garden, Maestro’s and Nightmoves. Dotted around the city centre, this quartet of drinking and dancing dens were where the cool kids hung out — the new wavers, new romantics and psychobillies of the day. Torrid snogging sometimes followed, if you got lucky. There was precious little romance involved in our sex, drugs and rock’n roll years but sometimes a phone number scribbled on a tatty bit of fag packet cardboard would be fished out of a pocket the following morning. Remembering who put it there was not guaranteed.
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But back to the present day. The Clydeside set up is not exactly what I’d imagined when, just a couple of months earlier, I’d tentatively dipped a toe into the murky waters of digital dating. Never mind a candlelit table for two in a discreet corner of some swanky Merchant City eatery, this meet-up involves nothing more romantic than a limp supermarket sandwich and an ever-growing pile of snot-infested paper hankies. But my Australian would-be admirer is sanguine about the situation and anyway, this was only ever going to be a walk-and-talk date, because like me, this guy is strictly NONS (that is, no one night stands).
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