Alfie

Of course not.

You can stay as long as you need to, but I'm worried that maybe you're worried about moving on.

Have you even, you know, been with any lads since?

I asked her if she really wanted an answer to that question, which of course she didn't.

The answer was no.

Sorry, I just worry, my mum said.

You should be in love.

You should at least be out looking for it.

And you need to take fewer shifts at work.

That hospital is going to put you in an early grave.

I told her that at least if I was going to have a heart attack, I'd be in the right place for it.

She was right in the end, though.

Though not in the ways she thought.

I took my sad half-Golden Grahams, half-cornflakes up to my room and wondered if mum was right.

It had been comforting to hear her telling me there was no rush, that if I didn't want to dive back into the dating pool before I was ready, that was fine.

My friends were in the opposite camp, strong believers in that not-so-old adage that the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else.

I did briefly toy with the idea of looking for someone else called Alfie that I could sleep with just to see what it was like, but

Turns out most men called Alfie would be considered geriatric patients if they came into the hospital, and I couldn't even tell whether any of the ones I'd found were gay.

It was one thing to walk up to a pretty guy in a bar and flirt with him to test the waters, and another entirely to approach someone's grandad, who isn't even hot, and say, Hey, you've got the same name as me.

Fancy a shag to cure my trauma?