It’s a strange phenomenon – your phone bleeps, your email pings – it’s a message from a friend – a guy, suggesting a pint/gig/game of coits, all is well, as it should be, the usual bantering trot of the message is in its allotted place; and yet…

An ugly blot blights my pleasing pixellations – like an illiterate’s signature, or a hairy pirate’s treasure mark. X! X!

What does he think he’s playing at? Since when is it ok for men to kiss men? We’re not in unrepressed South America, We are English! An Englishman gets tachicardia kissing his mother, let alone a fellow chap.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this is an attempt at being debonair, an aspiration to the social ease of the bistrotheque, the equivalent of a fawn pashmina raffishly draped over brawny shoulders – risky yet a real-crowd pleaser if attempted correctly.

Then there is the still more controversial ‘xx’ – this has been attempted only once by one particularly smarmy metrosexual friend [you know who you are] and was immediately forwarded to my brother as evidence of his unerring ‘beh!’-dom.

Occasionally, a heavy cloud descends on my world, when failures in public transport and romance lead to wild thoughts on my doomed role within it, and I consider adding the ‘x’.

Until now modesty and an inherent sense for good and evil have prevented me. This may not last.