Large Nick

Before dinner this evening, we went to play pool at a bar down the street from the hotel; unlike England, where proficiency at pool indicates not just a mispent youth, but a tendency to hang out in dodgy joints where men get beaten to death with cues, Canadian pool halls are bright, clean places where you go to smack balls together. Although there's still a buzzer on the door to let you in, which makes the whole thing feel a bit like Prohibition.

I'm terrible at pool, and my friends, although gifted engineers, also have trouble translating their knowledge into ball control, so we had several very long and quite inconclusive games, won via attrition and blind luck, not skill. Leaving the pool hall, a man told me what a fantastic camera I had, and demanded that I took a photo of him. And that I email it to him.

To largenick@hotmail.com. He stressed the 'large' and indeed stressed the hotmail, although perhaps he meant 'hot male' and this was an elaborate chat-up routine, where he first told me what a big ... piece of equipment I had, and then tried to get me to give up my email address.

I didn't have the heart to tell him that I'm getting married tomorrow, but I also feel bad about not sending him the photo he (ostensibly) wanted. Luckily I have a whole panoply of anonymous email addresses that I can use to communicate with largenick, rather than exposing my ... credentials. After all, I'll be a married man - I can't just have strange men with boastful email addresses approaching me on the street. Not that this ever happened before, mind. (The closest was probably a man in Hong Kong in 2008 trying to rob my shoes from my feet, but that's a whole other story.)

Anyway, I'm on the verge of catatonia now, after last night's drinking and today's odd meeting. Why wasn't my mother around to tell me not to talk to strangers? Off to bed for me...