Sniffing Herbal Tea Makes Me Strange

Some of the best days of my childhood were those spent off school with a cold. I watched terrible makeover shows, played Super Nintendo (and later Nintendo 64), generally drugged myself up on Vicks and Lemsip and loved every minute of it. Perhaps this is why I have this unfortunate habit of sniffing my herbal tea. Which I’m doing right now. It means I can’t drink it in company, or people think I’m strange.

Not that I’m not strange anyway. In fact, I’m not normal. Whatever normal is.

A friend who isn’t necessarily homophobic, just had great difficulty understanding lesbianism. She does keep asking me how we ‘do it’, and I suspect she thinks I may have a secret willy (I don’t by the way). She is somewhat bewildered by it all, but is rather excited to have a lesbian friend. She ran to me on Monday morning to tell me her exciting news – she had been in a local gay bar with her friends.

Her friends are drama and dance types who were on a class pub-crawl. In her description of the company was ‘Katherine… you know… my friend… oh, but she’s normal… I mean… not gay’.

I could argue with this friend over the true definition of normal, however she hates me being philosophical. So we talked about her new manicure instead.

I could just stop being friends with her for being so hurtful, but she genuinely doesn’t realise it. I could force her to understand and be more politically correct, but her innocence amuses me greatly.

Maybe she’ll realise someday that gay people can be normal too. And that normal is boring.