Notes From the Hard Shoulder - James May [25]
Obviously, this quickly degenerated into a huge barney over the number of tools left lying on the floor, but because we're chaps it was all soon forgotten, with no hard feelings, so we went to the pub to play darts. Then we had a huge curry, came home, cracked open a bottle of chilled Orvieto and settled down on the sofa together to watch Where Eagles Dare.
By the end of this we were in a bit of a state and it made sense for Colin to stay over. So I installed him in the spare room with a copy of GQ and went to bed.
The next day, over a gargantuan breakfast in the nearby cafe, we had to acknowledge that, bar the sleeping arrangements, we had become a bit gay. But since we were enjoying it, we thought we might as well carry on. The warm bosom of womanhood has much to recommend it, yet there is a unique bond between men that dare not speak its name but will compel them to go over the top together for sheer love of camaraderie. Also, and despite being a bit of a clean queen, I found I didn't really care what Colin had done to the towels in the downstairs bathroom.
And so, after watching the aerial combat scenes in Battle of Britain (while fast-forwarding through that tedious bit where Susannah York prances around in her pants), we went shopping.
We – I mean I – needed some new crockery and several other items for the home. Now I have always regarded any form of cohabitation as rather unnatural, and balked at those tiresome conventions of domesticity that manifest themselves in a mealy-mouthed desire for co-ordinated housewares. But in a famous department store I was struck by how much more pleasurable this sort of thing is as a couple, and by the realisation that greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his spare time to help his special friend choose some poncy plates. Colin even bought me a pub lunch.
I realised, though, that our diet was sorely lacking in Omega B supplements and free radical scavengers. On the way home we diverted to a supermarket, where I bought the ingredients for dinner while Colin had a free-trade cappuccino in a nearby coffee bar, in case anybody saw us. That evening, after another round of killer on the Cross Keys oche, I cooked my partner free-range shepherd's pie with a medley of organic vegetables, washed down with a couple of bottles of a robust burgundy. By now we were beyond the point where the subject of staying over even had to be raised, and after watching Cross of Iron over a few large whiskies, we went to our separate beds.
The next morning, while Colin knocked up some crumpets, we decided we'd earned a proper day out. An air display in Wiltshire sounded promising. It was a fine day, we could take a picnic and a blanket and I could do the crossword lying in the sun (although Colin doesn't like this because he says it means I won't talk to him). We could also enjoy a pleasant drive in the country.
And here we arrived at the acid test of our relationship; the equivalent, in a normal heterosexual coupling, of that first audible fart. Could we, as two grown men now totally comfortable in each other's company, drive through London in my Boxster with the roof down?
No.
THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF THE CAR OF THE FUTURE
As a schoolboy, I found car design rather frustrating. Long before the days of the laptop and laser printer, all we had was the squared paper in the back of a maths exercise book and the coveted Oxford Mathematical Instruments Set in its burnished metal tin.
The hours we spent on this sort of thing! You knew that car design had taken an unhealthy precedent over algebra when the two met somewhere forward of the staples in the middle of the book, which was always difficult to explain when you were sent to the stock room for a new one.
But there was something about the design language of the mid-'70s, the tyranny of graph paper and the obvious limitations of a plastic set-square, that led the artless youth inevitably