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The Touch Typed Diary

I have been trawling through my old files and found these pages of a kind of diary I kept for a few months. This takes the form of a stream of consciousness rambling about events in my life at the time and the thoughts they elicited. There are 15 entries over a period of four months in early 2002.

As I wrote at the time:
I started this as a way to train at touch typing (hence the title) which I have finally taken up learning more or less seriously. At first I was typing what nonsense came across my mind and deleted it once I had finished. Gradually, it just turned into a diary relating the events (not very numerous) of my life. This has also the advantage of keeping me relatively busy at work when I have nothing else to do which seem to happen rather frequently these days.

When I wrote this, I had been working for a few months as a temp. for a Local Council after a stint in the souvenir shop of one of London's minor museums. There I had made friends with MPB, a polish woman who worked with me at the shop.

Another character appearing here is MFS, a French woman, almost neighbour of mine at the time whom I had met while watching the London Marathon on Evelyn Road, SE8. She was trying to interest me in Japanese Buddhism.

MFP was my best friend and fag hag for several years when I was at Uni. We had met at the student's hall and had spent several years in a very close friendship which had culminated in us living together for a year before I went off to do the National Service. At the time you are meeting her, she had recently moved to Paris. At the same time she had suddenly discovered, to both our surprise, I think, that should she could also be attracted to women and had entered a lesbian relationship.

Other minor characters include J. and B. my live-in landlords of the time. B was/is a musician and they were both trying to launch their own independent music label. T. was a forty-odd year old former banker going through a divorce who moved in the room next to mine for a while. GSJ was already my ex at the time.

At the time when this was written, I was also in the process of joining the London Gay Men's Chorus, after over a year on the waiting list.

I will be publishing this diary over the next few months, trying to keep roughly to the same timescale as that of the writing. Although I will try and keep the thing as unedited as possible, I will change names, correct the spelling and add the missing words.

Enjoy...

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