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Miss Claire's Feeling for Boys

Thursday night was another sharp reminder of just how nostalgic I can get. I was out at the thoroughly antipodean Slug and Lettuce in Fullham for the first time in almost five months.



Since then I had moved to Old Street and started going out to bars where my accent was the only Australian accent in the place. My subsequent move to Leytonstone placed me even further from the Kangaroo valleys of South and West London and deep in the Indian and black end of London. Being back in the bosom of London's Australian population was a shock for me on Thursday. Firstly, they just don't make boys like they do in Australia.

My nights out in Old Street were nights when I was the same height as the crowd and too many men were disregarded because they were just too short. The only men that topped me were the black guys. Try to make your way through the crowd at the Slug, though, and you are nose to nipple with chests I took for granted back home and was all too happy to oogle again. I was out with Jacinta and some of her friends who were coming through London and this meant the addition to our usually exclusively female group of some muscle-bound footballers. After the thuggish and usually deceitfully slick advances of drunken Brits, the straight forward mating call of the Greater Drunken Australian Footballer is refreshingly hilarious.

The thought processes are basically 'like to drink beer, like to hug girl. Will drink beer while hugging girl. Happy.' While I deftly dodged the dripping beer I did not try to dodge the bear hugs – especially from the blond who kept on hugging me with his shirt off. A girl can never get enough of a good thing. At the end of the night this selfsame blond declared me a 'top bird'. Thanks dude. I am unsure if that is because I snuggled him or whether, when I discovered he had an absent girlfriend, I took a polite leave of his offer, but I haven't been declared a 'top bird' by a soddeningly drunk Aussie boy for ages.

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