Happy Lesbianniversary

by Red Velvet

Who would have thought ten eventful years would have passed so fleetingly with more than a healthy dose of misadventure and calamity. So what’s changed in the ten years that I traded dick for dyke and teenage kicks to Sapphic licks? Certainly not the dating drama that’s for sure! Talking nostalgically over a morally challenging game of Scruples last night, I got into a retrospective with old friends Eva and Alexia. So the story goes that Alexia and I first started sniffing around lesbian bars back in 1999, when the repression of a single-sex school finally got the better of our libidinous curiosity. Cue a totty mission to the Candy ‘Randy’ Bar where a late night snog prompted Eva and her sidekick Jessie to invite myself and Alexia on a date to Hampstead fair. Enter pre-date mass hysteria and an endeavour to straighten hair pre-GHDs, my barnet was once referred to as a brillopad by a friendly classmate. Oh young girls can be so cruel to be kind!

So, Eva and Jessie rock up in a convertible outside my teenage parental house in middle class suburbia. I break out into frenzy. Sauntering to the car proved to be yet another exercise in the failed rigmarole of coolness, as I landed arse over tit after getting my skinny stiletto heel stuck in a driveway divot I wish the parentals would have sorted. The duration of the day spent manically finger combing hair and re-applying lashings of cobalt blue mascara.

The battering of my demure exterior was complete after howling like a baby on a fairground ride. This, inevitably, after getting pissed on half a glass of house red. You know, things haven’t really changed though (except for my alcohol tolerance). Girls still get nervous before dates, grooming still facilitates a two hour bathroom flap and years later, many first dates can turn out to become the best of friends if platonic trumps sexual chemistry. Facebook updates have replaced phone calls, tweets have bypassed texts and diarised blogs have ousted the common written letter. However, once you’re in a room with someone face-to-face many of the first date principles still apply. How to dress, impress and sound your best certainly chime heavy in my mind. As I embrace singledom once more, I will throw caution to the wind and celebrate my lesbianniversary with the adrenalin-fuelled trepidation of my formative years.