I'm gonna tell you something personal. I'm a straight guy. I've had a couple of gay male friends.

I'll tell you about one of them first before I tell you the thing I wanted to say about myself.

He had a slightly posh name that wasn't Ainsley but something of that sort. He was a science teacher, a supply teacher of science in Middlesbrough Schools. He used to perform - ensemble singing not stand up - at the Edinburgh Fringe.

He never got into any trouble while I was working with him - which wasn't for long - but one day many years ago - probably twenty - the liberal veneer of Cleveland County Education Authority fractured.

This teacher got talking to some pupils and they asked him a fateful question.

Do you fancy the headmaster?

All very well employing gays in schools but if it comes to the children inferring that the head gave him the jop because he too was gay....

So much fuss even I heard about it.

What I was going to tell you about myself was somewhat different. I'm lazy, not adventurous, timid, whatever but when I had to go and work in Guildford for a while I signed up at the Y.M.C.A. At the time they had one room flatlets - two single beds all men.

Being from 'Up North' I first shared with a lad who had gone down from Tow Law or some such to be an apprentice in what was then the Hestair Dennis fire engine factory.

At another time I shared with a lad who said his dad was somebody important at Shell.

Most of the time though I shared with Bahrat Mystri. He was an aerospace engineer and kept shifting form company to company because he was a Kenyan Asian and these firms kept wanting to send him to their office in this place he'd never been - South Asia.

He was tubby and he snored but we were mates. I had single rooms at Wimbledon Y.M.C.A. and South London Overseas Student Hostel association around the same time.