The perverse tricks of St Valentine.

I've never celebrated Valentine's Day. I've never had a card, or flowers, or chocolate, or some schmucky poem. This year was the closest I've come to observing it, albeit rather unusually.

On Valentine's night I went to see some fringe theatre with KCG and his boyfriend, HD and his boyfriend, and, at the last minute, a guy I'd met on Scruff with whom I'd had coffee on Sunday. He'd expressed an interest in the theatre I was seeing, and asked if he could come along too. I told him that was fine, and he met us there.

He's bald and more than a little overweight, but strong and confident and fun and full of life. As soon as his back was turned HD and his boyfriend expressed, unprompted and with a little too much alacrity, that they liked him a lot more than Mr Singular. I like him too, although I wonder if I'm not too boring for him to be willing to sustain a relationship with me in the long term.

But I get ahead of myself. The late night show was an extremely edgy caberet, filled with full frontal nudity, magic tricks involving vaginas, and some audience participation that I'm pretty sure left the participants completely traumatised. But we knew what to expect, and the weird stuff was leavened with humour, song and dance numbers, and kitschy vaudeville tricks.

Following the aforementioned traumatic audience participation act, the performers told all of us in the audience that, in honour of Valentine's Day, they wanted us to turn to the person next to us and kiss them, for ten seconds. They didn't say it directly, but there was an ominous implication that non-compliance would be noted. The audience giggled nervously. As they counted down 3.. 2... 1... my date looked at me and said, "Do you want to?", and I looked at him, shrugged and said, "Yeah, sure," so when the performers cried "Go!" we kissed.

Not just a liplock-and-hold for ten seconds, but a genuine, ardent kiss, with just a hint of tongue on each others' lips.

Being forced into your first kiss by a naked, sweaty, beer-drenched man (don't ask) is an unusual way to reach a milestone in a relationship, but hey, it's something to blog about. And it definitley broke the ice. When the show got out at midnight, he walked me back to my car and he kissed me again, twice, in the street.