The caffeine is hitting me hard too (I’m not a big coffee drinker) and my thoughts are leaping about like a bunch of terrified rabbits. “And when you go to a regular spa, is it a gay massage if you get a male masseur?”. What, asks Jarod, makes a massage gay? The answer seems obvious to me: “Well, both the giver and the receiver are male”. We are talking about gay massage, or attempting to. So as we finally get a little sunshine, me and Jarod are sitting at The Breakfast Club in Angel, having a coffee. Jarod is neither and he drives me up the wall all the same. Never befriend linguistics and philosophy graduates, they will drive you crazy. If Pink Floyd said, “we don’t need no education”, Jarod would read that as “we need education”, because of the double negative. He’s just being a devil’s advocate, apparently.

Sometimes when I pin him down at the end of the argument and ask him straight: “Jarod, do you disagree with me?”, he admits that he does not. When he is in a funny mood, he will pick apart everything I’m saying, questioning the meaning of my words. “Do you know what makes a massage gay?” My friend Jarod can be incredibly annoying.