I'm surrounded, but can't surrender Friday night, expecting to be overwhelmed by the competitiveness of our quarterly games of mah jongg (well, overwhelmed by the wine we drink as well as the task of remembering how mah jongg is played). I, instead, sat whilst K. & A. and L. & A. filled the conversation with pregnancies and babies and house repairs. Even when they attempted to about something else under the guise of not leave me out it sprinted back to those topics. We didn't even play mah jongg.

I've became that rarest of animal. A gay man in a sea of breeding homeowners.

I'm not being judgmental. I don't begrudge them anything. I don't find it tiresome. I don't pout and push the conversation back to me.

I'm envious. Louise and Andrew have a new stunning home. Acres of bedrooms. A bathroom the size of my entire flat with a sunken tub. Kirsten and Andrew took that first leap onto the property ladder and fill their weekends at B&Q and bloody Mothercare and await a little Rose.

Me, I bought a rug. A 3x5 foot Kashmiri tribal rug. It's now the most significant thing I own, besides the television. Yes, a tv and a rug are my most worthy domestic purchases.

Pathetic.