Back in my youth, I had a friend who I’ll call Kaf. He was a good friend, actually – I knew him at primary school and kept seeing him all the way through secondary. I have bumped into him since (of course, since his family home is just around the corner). He’s now a research chemist working on air purification and the reduction of atmospheric NOx – needless to say, we couldn’t tell you this in year 6.

Kaf was, for a while, my most reliable friend, and I always saw him as quite mature: he kept a fiver in his pocket at all times; he walked around the area on his own and had been doing so since the age of ten; he knew how to re-wire a plug as long as he had the fuse for it; he wore a puffa jacket and affected a deeper voice than he naturally had. He also enjoyed a huge degree of personal liberty: ask him what he was doing, and he’d be free.

At the time I also wrote a paper diary. It wasn’t the most thrilling piece of literature in the world – although I’d always let people read it – but it was, at the very least, relatively chaste and safe for all to read. The first time I ever wrote something which I thought was a little dodgy came when I added

Kaf was free and we went into town and talked about girls

which I then justified with

(it’s the only thing he’ll talk about).

This wasn’t an unusual subject. Kaf was very interested in “girls”. At the age of 14, I also was, and in fact I’d already had crushes, but Kaf was limerent on a whole different level. He would constantly talk about the girls from the local Catholic girls’ school, with whom he apparently flirted with relentlessly every day (“phwoar!” was his description of one of them). He would occasionally look at someone our age in own and say “she’s fit” far too loud. Daringly, he had posters of Melinda Messenger on his wall and wondered if there was something wrong with me for not wanting one too. After playing Worms 2 I taught him how to use IRC once and he immediately started an online relationship with a Swedish girl we had never heard of before.

I, however, was much less talkative around the subject. I had a little sister and a fair amount of female friends, but I knew very little about “girls”. It happened that I certainly didn’t know that they were the reason for the puffa jacket and affected deeper voice. He wasn’t an unattractive guy, either: he was Greek Cypriot, had well-kept dark hair and a physique built from all the football he played. He was also a little taller than me at about 6’1″. I was considering myself average-looking and non-descript, so was much less likely to talk about, as I put it, “girls”.

The conversation wasn’t all that stimulating, either. We were a little too young to talk about sex, but a little too old to send a Valentine to a friend merely because of her gender. I mainly walked along in silence, listening to Kaf talking at great length about his patented ways to “pull”, despite having never seen him with a girl.

But that is why I added

(it’s the only thing he’ll talk about).

to my journal. I was a little nervy, but I did want to assert the fact that I could discuss my awareness of, and attraction to, the opposite sex. Shifting the blame for the topic of our conversation onto Kaf was a good way of assuaging any guilt I may have felt.

Not that I should have. But then I felt guilt for a lot of stuff.

But that was the first time I mentioned “girls” in my diary. They made infrequent re-appearances since, but less and less so as the years went on until I finally asked someone out. I wrote a very heartfelt entry that day, and even then it was still unusual for me to be so gushing (pantomime fairies notwithstanding). When she turned me down, it began the constant flow of “veil of tears” entries, and when I finally moved to LiveJournal a year later, pretty much all my posts were about “girls” (young women, really; we were in the sixth form by then).

Even then, though, I kept feeling like I had to justify the things I was saying. If I had a crush on you, of course I’d write about you. That’s what journalling was for, right? But I had to be respectful. Kaf took it a bit far. I could keep my integrity…

…as long as I didn’t start writing about sex.That would be ALL SORTS OF WRONG.