Update

I was very touched to note fingers’ concern as to the progress of my love life, not to mention Southern Belle’s slightly more genuine interest.

Please allow me to bring you up to date. At catch-up drinks with some of the Punters a few weeks back, I made the mistake of telling fingers about a very attractive barmaid at the establishment at which we were drinking – the Bank in Newtown.

Said barmaid was very cute and made a damn fine martini – dirty gin martini, of course. She and I had admittedly brief but fun discussions about the merits of the Tanqueray martini vs the Bombay Sapphire martini. Yes, it is a tough life. To the uneducated eye (ie that of an Australian male – despite what we try to tell you, we really don’t get girls at all, then again, like you girls don’t already know that), she might even have been flirting with me, and the drinks were very, very cheap. For the purpose of this story, let’s call her Cute Martini Girl.

The martinis were had on Christmas Eve, a Sunday night. I may or may not have been back to the Bank a few times since (it is after all the newest bar in town and this has nothing to do with cute bar staff in general or CMG in particular), but never on a Sunday night. I didn’t see CMG on any of those occasions.

Let’s skip forward in time, mainly because we can and it is a narrative tool of which I don’t make enough use. Let’s imagine that a week or 2 ago I just happened to be walking past the Bank on a Sunday evening, when it occurred to me that nothing would help my basketball game later that evening than a martini or 2. The Bank looked busy, but this is never a bad thing, so I wandered in, and may have been paying more attention to the staff at the various bars than anything else.

After a while I started to note the preponderance of very fit boys with short hair, tight singlets, short shorts and fake tan. Now I live in Newtown, so this isn’t a matter for note, except for this: They are even less subtle about checking out each other than chicks are. It shall suffice to say that it isn’t altogether fun to:

• Be stuck at the back of a pub that is completely chockers
  
• Have to fight your way back through the crowd of gayboys who have all just checked you out and then done the face that fairly clearly communicates something to the effect of “Ooh, hi sweety, I think you have come to the wrong place, because the ‘former rugby player past his prime’ look isn’t working for me. Oh, and what is that t-shirt?”
  
• Realising that the CMG who was the sole reason for going there in the first place isn’t there anyway.
  

Even doing the “I am just looking for my friends and I am astonished and slightly perplexed that they aren’t here yet” face as I struggled past all those rippling orange bodies wasn’t helping.

So to answer your question fingers, no, I haven’t seen the CMG again.

SB, the girls are already looking out as they are doing a good job of hiding.

The good news is, I can always make a dirty martini at home… as I don’t think Sunday evening at the Bank is an option.