Ronald feels old, washed up. As a middle aged gay man on the scene, he cannot help but wonder if his time is over. His frustrations are further exacerbated when he finds himself the victim of a group of thugs who seem to find it funny to torment him in his own home.
Ronald is planning a party, a summer celebration of his middle age, but as he begins the preparations in his hot kitchen, a Policeman turns up to question Ronald about the attacks. Over the course of the interview, Ronald comes to understand that perhaps age is just a number after all.
I always bake when I am nervous. My first reaction to any crisis is to stuff my face. I just can’t help myself. Out come the Kitchen Aid and the flour. It’s the most cathartic thing in the world, to feel my fingers kneading dough, the sensual, sticky mass sliding between my digits. Only I could find the act of making pastry so sexual, but considering my current state of mind, I would rather feel horny than sickeningly anxious.
That was it. The thought of cock now lay firmly implanted in my brain. Was that a good thing? It had been a while, so long in fact, that my ass banged shut when I did a number two. I was that tight. Whoever decided to break that impenetrable barrier would need a pick axe. Was there even enough lube left in the world to slick my ring and allow entry?
Eggs. Even looking at them turned me on. That brittle pale shell containing something so soft. So much protein. Damn it, I had an erection.
Stop it! Behave. Get a grip. Cooking. Get back to the bloody cooking.
My kitchen counter, a glistening expanse of black granite with flecks of crushed glass running through it, lay beneath an assortment of eggs, butter and sugar as I battled with my trusted copy of Delia Smith. That poor cookbook had so many of its pages glued together with ancient cake mix and various sauces that I had to peel the pages apart. As for its cover, well that had long since vanished, consigned to the back of the bookshelf, lost to humanity forever. That book had seen better days, just like me.
Was that what happened when you reached your mid-forties? Did you stop being a sexual being? So I was no Hugh Jackman, and maybe I was carrying a few extra pounds that I could do with shedding, but that didn’t mean I was dead. I found that going out these days felt like a trauma, apart from trying to find something to squeeze into that didn’t make me look like a blimp, that was. It was always the coming home on my own bit that got to me the most. Too many young twinks these days, beautiful creatures always on the lookout for the next beautiful creature, or handsome men my age always on the lookout for the next twink. They looked at me as though I resembled some walking fucking corpse. It angered me.
Oh, I did the usual, tried those dating app things, but they just seemed to breed tossers and cock teasers. Surely, if you fancied someone, you fancied them, no matter the age? As it happened, I liked men my age, and older, or younger. Okay, I just liked men, but that is not the point. How many of those assholes said yes, they would meet, only to block me the moment they found out my age? Really? I was desperate to try those things out in the first place, but they left me feeling deeply ashamed and oh so unattractive. Maybe I was past it after all. Maybe my day had come and gone.
Pastry. I hated making pastry. Usually, I would cheat and buy the stuff ready made, but I forgot to add it to my home delivery, and I could not leave the house that morning to buy some in my local shop. I had to wait in for the Police to arrive, hence my nervousness.
Twenty years. For twenty years, I lived in that house without a problem, but for the last few weeks, my home resembled a battlefield, a target for hordes of monstrous school children, laughingly called our next generation who seemed to find it highly amusing to besiege my front door while screaming homophobic abuse. What could I do? As a middle-aged gay man living on my own, I could not very well retaliate, unless I wanted to end up sitting in a prison cell. Having said that, the showers could prove very interesting, all that soap dropped on the floor. Would I get the top bunk or bottom bunk? I could be the local bitch handed around like an Hors D Oeuvre! Or just a whore, I wasn’t that fussy.
