It’s yesterday. It’s just after midday. I’m walking somewhere – the toilet, as it happens. It’s the first just-after-midday I’ve experienced with my new hair.
“Excuse me,” a girl says to me, walking in the same direction a few metres away, accompanied by some other person as far as I can remember. “Are you a boy or a girl?”
“A boy,” I reply, bemused. “I think…” I mutter as an afterthought, in a bit to be slightly less boring.
“Well, you have man boobies.”
At this point, I possibly mutter “do I?” or something – what the macaroni is one supposed to reply? – and both of us disappear through double doors – a different set of double doors each.
That final detail, about going through the doors, may convince you that she had a point. “Ha, he needs a whole pair of double doors to himself to squeeze those gargantuan growths through.” Wrong, I tell you, that is. Quite wrong.
The girl did not appear to be very clever. Anyone who has watched Extreme Male Beauty – or simply overheard Tim Shaw’s Piers Morgan–like bleats whilst marinating in the bathtub one evening – knows that they’re called “moobs”.
What’s more, any allegation that I own a pair of those anatomical abnormalities is complete and utter bollocks, and the alligator involved should be severely reprimanded. There’s nothing there but skin, nipple, bone, muscle, and blood. I am simply well-toned – rather like rugby players, and my chemistry teacher. It’s an unfortunate illusion, raw ripply muscle which looks like other stuff.
I look nothing like a girl. I was quite hurt by the whole affair. I would hate to be someone whose gender cannot be instantly determined. It would be so selfish – how dare someone allow passers-by on long car journeys to speculate about “is that person a man or a woman?”? How dare they allow people to agnonise and sweat about whether to say “Mr” or “Ms”? – and to think that I could be among these nefarious people is a sickening thought. I think I might make myself a helpful sandwich board for people who I meet, just to clarify matters.
I assume, of course, that the girl was bowled over by my biblical ripply masculinity, and was making a cheeky little sarcastic jokey comment. Jolly good. Nothing else to say on the matter.
That was possibly quite a good bizarre true incident. I could have done a funny anecdote. But instead I sucked all the potential out of it, and spat it into the urinals. (That, readers, is your cue to reassure me that it was very funny and clever indeed, and that I am still as phenomenally brilliant as I have always been.)
My hair clippings, I believe, have been scattered outside. Birds, no doubt, are carrying it away for nest construction purposes as I type this. Must be a bit of an arousing and humbling honour for them, and a refreshing change – ever since Oprah Winfrey typed “TWITS”, they’ve been carrying whales about.