Dear Reader, I Am Extremely Out of Practice

In Z’s absence, relieved from the responsibilities of parenting and focused on bar reviewing, I find myself regressing rapidly.

At the beginning of the evening, scars firmly covered, with five-inch wedges and skinny jeans applied to – well, fundamentally, distract attention from my face – I’ve lost about five years.

By midnight, when I drag myself out of a bar that I’m soooo not going to review but want to jump around in anyway, I’ve lost another ten, although as I settle down in a lovely little sushi bar for tuna and salmon sashimi and a glass of Lebanese rosé, I feel quite grownup.

Note-taking is over for the night. “I should go home now,” I think to myself, strolling down Gemmayze Street which is chock-full of young, beautiful people having a bunch of fun. Then “F*ck it! It’s Saturday night! Beirut is a f*cking great city! Letsh go and have jusht one more drink.”

I head to a little hole in the wall bar for which I’ve developed an intense fondness, despite the fact that it’s routinely so rammed you can barely move let alone sit down, figuring that I’ll enjoy a good Negroni – cocktails are always more fun when you’re drinking them for pleasure alone – then piss off back to my hotel some time before slut o’clock.

Now, it’s no great secret that I’m absolutely crap with boys. Always have been. Always will be.

My two best female friends in London did try and explain the art of pulling to me. Even train me in it, in fact.

There we’d be, dolled up in our finest PVC micros and klubwear with a K, stumbling around yet another Soho afterhours joint or 4am-start nightclub in heels not one of us could walk in, our pupils the size of flying saucers.

“So, what you need to do is this,” X would say. “When you walk in, take a good look around, walk the room and see who’s checking you out, and who likes the look of you. Then just dance close to them. See! Easy!”

But I don’t have X’s pneumatic breasts. Or, for that matter, her sense of rhythm.

“There!” she’d say. “Look! He likes you. You’re TOTALLY in there.”

“WHO?” I’d say. “Who?! What? Where? Wanna do another pill?”

“Oh for f*ck’s sake,” she’d say. “The guy on the stairs! Now, pretend you’re going to the loo, and walk past him… Oh, yeah, OK, maybe a quarter…”

Y also had (still has) limited sensitivity to nuance, which meant she typically ended up with the type of guys that drag you out of the club by your hair.

But she’s absolutely drop-dead gorgeous with a figure that’s close to Barbie doll and a face that makes even one’s parents comment on the holiday snaps, “Now, isn’t Y a beautiful girl…?”

Which isn’t to say that I always went home solo in those bygone days. But, basically, I’ve never had a sensitivity to nuance, or either X’s or Y’s strike rate…

Incidentally, chicks, if you’re in your teens or 20s, dressed up fabulous for a nightclub, get the pictures. And keep them.

Because in decades to come, you’ll look back at them in mild awe and pleasure at how very, very young and pretty you once were, and further at how you had ABSOLUTELY no bloody idea of this, or that it would ever end…

Also get pictures of yourself looking young and pretty in your 30s, your 40s, your 50s and your 60s, because given you may well live to 90, every single age will look young and pretty with the benefit of hindsight.

“Are you together?” asks the guy on the door.

“No,” I say, on reflex.

“Yes,” the bloke next to me says, simultaneously.

My mental sequence goes roughly like this. “Ooh! He’s hitting on me! Oh my god, he’s hot. Oh Jesus Christ, he can’t be more than 25. He CAN’T be! Oh, wait a moment, it’s dark in here and I’m wearing makeup, maybe he IS hitting on me…”

“This is really crowded,” he says. “You wanna go somewhere else?”

This is sufficiently lacking in subtlety even for me to confirm that I’m, well, in there.

So, OK.

Maybe he’s 28? Maybe even 30?

“Yeah,” I say. “The bar next door does good drinks and it’s not too busy.”

We go next door, where the lighting is rather brighter, unfortunately, than the lighting in the bar I like, and I rapidly readjust my hair to cover my scars. Aaarrrggghhhh….

He doesn’t seem bothered. I figure he’s drunk.

Hot, drunk and clearly not too picky. EXCELLENT!

Like a good feminist, I wave fifty dollar bills at him when the bill comes, but I’m also – BAD FEMINIST! – kinda chuffed that he is having absolutely none of that.

By the time we’ve got up to the Pigeon Rocks, a pair of frankly not that whelming pinnacles of which Beirutis are mystifyingly proud, I’ve reverted to about 18, except for a mental calculation in my head that keeps going, “Left Beirut aged 17. Last here 8 years ago. 8 +17 = 25. 38-25 = 13. 25-11 = 14. So, just marginally closer in age to me than to my son, and anyway it’s not sex tourism if you meet them in a bar and they’re paying, right?”

By about 3am, after some time tooling around Beirut in his X-5, I’m approximately 15.

Or, as he says, it’s like being in high school.

Which can’t have been that long ago for him, but was over two decades ago for me. Jesus.

I make it into my hotel, which has a firm “no guests” policy – despite the sexual freedom of sectors of Beirut nightlife, both male and female, Lebanon is fundamentally more conservative that it might at first appear, and anyway I don’t want some chap in my space right now, thank you very much – around 5am, feeling refreshed, not to say rejuvenated.

My UK number doesn’t work here and, although I’ll quite happily drop 50 bucks on frivolities such as food, drink and clothes, I’m too tight to pay 50 bucks for a Lebanese SIM card, so I give him email and Skype instead.

Anywise, he emails that evening. I call him. We chat and he says, “Call me in an hour.”

I get dressed and do so.

It rings out.

B*gger. WTF?

I borrow a mobile from a nice chap of my sort of age who’s staying in my hotel and ping him a text with my approximate movements for the evening: going to eat at X bar, after that will be in Y bar, and head on out to dine on a salad of foie gras and green haricots with an extremely palatable basil, cucumber and gin cocktail.

If he shows, he shows.

If not, more fish in the sea.

Beirut, I conclude, as I savour my enormous slab of foie gras and wonder whether the foie gras mayo is a bridge too far and they should really just have stuck with the surprisingly plangent dressing on the haricots (answer: YES, you’re in Beirut), is really rather fun.

Beirut, let it hereby be written, is also absolutely bloody dead on a Sunday night, especially in summer where a lot of the action that’s not on the rooftops is up the coast in Byblos or Jounieh, and perhaps also impacted by the ongoing action of a different sort in Tripoli.

In big cities, nights like Sundays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are good nights for bar reviewing, and fun in general, because the cool kids are out and about and the bridge and tunnel aren’t, and you can actually get up to the bar to order your test cocktail without wading through a heaving crowd of…

… Well, I was going to say chicks in orange foundation, but as, since the scarring, I’ve been on the orange side myself at night – it’s hard to match foundations to Caucasian skin in Asia – people in glass houses…

But Beirut isn’t a big city. Like Tel Aviv, it’s cosmopolitan with a buzzing bar scene, but in population terms, it’s tiny.

So the stretch between Gemmayze and Downtown is like a ghost town.

I wouldn’t say I feel unsafe walking this strip solo in a skirt and high heels in the middle of the night, but I think a more timid soul might do, what with the cars slowing down and all (pace this rather excellent blog post, solo female travel is different from solo chap travel in this respect), and I’m quite pleased to see security guards about.

And the bar I’m headed to, one of the runners for best cocktail bars in Beirut, is also absolutely bloody dead.

Which doesn’t matter, because a) the Negronis are really good b) the bartender’s nice and c) the bloke shows up, having driven from a town down the coast at Lebanese speed, fronts up for a nice hotel and appears not to give a monkey’s about either my advanced age or my scars.

RESULT!

One thing about the ageing process? Your recovery time is slower. (For a more, ahem, grown-up perspective on this, read this from the excellent Wandering Not Lost.)

In my teens and early 20s, I routinely dated guys who were 10 to 15 years older than me, and I always wondered why they were so unenergetic.

Back in the day, I could party until the afternoon, grab what we used to call a “disco nap” for a couple of hours, inspect any of what we used to call “unidentified disco wounds”, eat something, start drinking, then head out and do it all over again.

Gentle reader – no more.

And, kids! Don’t try this at home!

I always thought I looked rough when waking from a disco nap. But it is only now that I begin to understand the meaning of “haggard”.

Because, here’s the thing, when your age is closer to a 4 than a 3 and you’re trying to keep up with someone a decade or more younger, if you don’t get enough sleep, your face collapses. The lines get deeper. The pores open into bloody great craters. And anything that sags, sags further.

And, oh Jesus God! Eye makeup!

Huge, dark panda swirls of defunct eyeliner and mascara can actually look kinda hot – read, really hot! — in the mornings when you’re fresh with the dewy gleam of youth.

At my age? You’re redefining “raddled”. And, the contrast to the dewy youth beside you is really quite unsettling when you currently look, as a lady tabloid picture editor once phrased it, rough as a badger’s arse.

Chaps! It’s not just the beer goggles (though they may, of course, be a factor). It is perfectly possible for a lady — and I use that term loosely — of my age to pass for close to a decade younger, when made up, well rested and, optimally, dimly lit.

On an hour and a half’s sleep, following on from four hours’ sleep, in daylight with a gin hangover and smeared makeup? She may, quite easily, look at least a decade older.

Which is why, dear boys, they call it “beauty sleep”.

Things are left vague, by which, having seen the state of me, I’m not in the least surprised.

Anyway, I’m not sure whether I’m going to stay in Beirut until Wednesday or Saturday, because that depends on whether I can get my camera fixed and buy a new lens for it here.

If I can’t I’ll need go to to Cairo, and Cairo appears to be going through one of its periodic spasms of crazy violent stuff, so I’d really rather get it fixed in Beirut then fly straight into Sharm and get settled in Dahab, writing, but if I can’t get it fixed, I need to be in Cairo and dropping off the camera before the Islamic weekend starts.

This is not something that’s particularly easy to explain to someone who leads a fairly normal life and is not in the slightest location independent.

Further, all I really want to do right now is get a decent night’s sleep and do some of this bloody work I’m supposed to be doing while I’m here.

For Beirut, dear reader, during the summer rooftop party season, is not a good place in which to get some quiet work done.

I go to bed round teatime and sleep through till 9am.

When I wake, I look ten to fifteen years younger than I did when I went to bed, and – yay! – find a camera store which means – drum roll! – I don’t have to go to sodding Cairo, and proceed to book flights to Sharm.

I ping the bloke a text saying thanks for the fun and that I’m around till Saturday, but I’m not particularly expecting to hear from him, so I toddle out bar reviewing perfectly happily.

You know those mornings where just everything seems to go wrong? Deals fall through. A website mysteriously goes down. The internet breaks down. Skype stops working.

And then the ticket company through which I’d thought I’d bought my plane ticket charges my card not once but TWICE while simultaneously cancelling the booking and is only contactable by a number so phenomenally expensive (£1.53 per MINUTE from within the UK) that it’s not actually possible to dial out from Lebanon? (It was eDreams. Avoid. Even if the prices do look cheaper than the actual airline’s fare.)

Anywise, I’m having one of those mornings.

So I am beyond chuffed when the bloke friends me on FB.

Excellent, I think! A FB booty call! Yay! Great sex incoming!

(I should add, gentle readers, that he also seems like a genuinely nice, sweet, decent guy, but given he’s almost a decade younger than me and lives in the States, there’s clearly nothing going down: and I don’t take the perspective on these things that this gay blogger does.)

I ping him a message saying, “Hey! Nice to hear from you, I’ll give you a call.”

And that’s a nice thing to look forward to, — after spending megabucks calling my bank, which will only accept Skype calls on the sort of super-fast connections that don’t really exist in Lebanon, and sodding eDreams to ask for at least half of my money back and my tickets, please — that booty call.

It’s quite a nice conversation, if rather mystifying. He seems a little confused to hear from me, and is up to his eyeballs seeing people he hasn’t seen in eight years before he goes, but whatever, I can go and see him in the US and hang out on his boat.

No, I can’t, I say. I’m in Israel, Turkey and Greece and possibly Italy, not the US.

Well, yeah, quite, he says, knowing that full well, and then various flattering things, and off he goes.

“That was a long phone call,” says the guy whose mobile I used before.

“Mm,” I say.

I’m perplexed. Not to say a little vexed.

I’m thinking, WTF was that all about? How WEIRD is that?

Why FB friend me when you’re still in town if you’re not up for a repeat?

I log onto Facebook.

Where a different chap, also from Beirut, with the same name, who I now recall meeting last night, is also seeming rather mystified.

“Do you have my number?” he messages. Then a few more messages.

Oh f*ck, I think. Two guys.

Same name. Potentially identical (face obscured) FB profile pic.

What are the f*cking chances?

F*CK!

Gentlemen of Lebanon. If you’re going to use English names in your personal life, your professional life, your Facebook life, PLEASE use unusual English names. Something like Roland, Maurice, Eugene…

And show your motherf*cking face on your FB profile?!

Please, pretty please?!

Now, I have an extremely high embarrassment threshold.

But this exchange not only reveals how fundamentally out of practice I am but leaves me foetal and cringing, oscillating wildly between the desire to drink a bottle of tequila and the desire to hit myself repeatedly over the head with said bottle of tequila.

And, if it weren’t for the professional requirement to complete my bar reviewing and the fact that my camera was being mended, I would have found it extremely hard to even leave the hotel…

To Be Continued – Or Not?…

Now, there’s at least one more post in this potential series on my solo adventures, while the boy’s in France and England with his dadda, but I do wonder whether that would count as, well, oversharing. I’m thinking perhaps you’d rather have a picture post on the lovely wildflowers of Lebanon (which I’ll do anyway, I promise), or those shots of Beirut I’ve been promising for a while now. Let me know…