let's hear it for the boys

As the old adage says, anything worth doing is worth doing late. Okay, so maybe that isn't an old adage, maybe I just made it up, but it's still witty and it's still true. For my purposes today. The background to this post is that I got in trouble when our housemates (finally) had the link to the blog emailed them (worth doing late), because they looked at the thing and were dismayed to find themselves not on it. Apparently, the lake district is not as newsworthy as life with four older gay men. Now, more sharp tongued persons than myself might retort that the blog was started to tell of our adventures tramping about the urban/rural british landscape and not the inside details of our domestic lives, but the gentlemen think otherwise and anyway I'm not that kind of guest. So this post is meant to belatedly introduce the boys.

Our housemates are Marc, Graham, Russell and Andrew. Marc is the guy whose email convinced us that we might like to live in this house. We have lots of in-depth chats about books, and cling film (that's glad wrap, Trinidadians), which he avoids at all cost and I apparently can't use often enough. Graham works for the Guardian newspaper and loves 'walking', also known as 'hiking', and Andrew spends half the year leading tourist coach tours all over England (he's a font of useful tourist knowledge). One night I drank them both under the table, completely by accident. They were extremely witty and funny all evening, and I only found out I'd drunk them under the table when neither of them remembered their wit or humour the following day. You might say that the fact that I'm the only one who remembers it is questionable, but this is my blog and I'll write the story the way I want to. Russell works for a bank, but for his non-day job he curates exhibits of antique photographs. His non-day job takes him to places like Poland, Pakistan and Dubai. We also live with Orlando, who is a marmalade-coloured cat. She is absolutely adorable, except for when she yowls, which sounds like a bad feline imitation of a colicky baby. Orlando was not upset about not having been mentioned on the blog. But then again, she doesn't ever cook dinner, so I guess you can't have everything. The men cook dinner - we generally take turns at it - so we've had good exposure to proper english meals, from lamb with mint sauce to Bird's custard on pies. We've also benefited from insider's tips to London, travel advice as mentioned, and a guided trip to Brixton market. As far as living in a strange country goes, it's a pretty nice arrangement.

So now that I've finally introduced our housemates - let's call them the fabulous four - I'll try to keep them in the story line so I don't get in trouble anymore and the experience of life at Clapham Road is fully recorded (as opposed to life in the much less specific 'London'). There might even be a picture or two of them in the coming posts, which are belated accounts of things we did in the last few weeks, of course. Just don't expect anything too soon; you know how it goes.