[Ciaran]

Just under two months ago, for religious reasons, I decided that I would abstain from alcohol for a year. As someone whose social life centres on bars and alcohol, I'd resigned myself to a year ahead of austerity as regards making new contacts.

However, I'm actually having luck meeting women who appear to be interested in me, totally randomly, in coffee shops. I should add that these coffee shops are located in Soho, the largest LGBT district in London and I am rather genderqueer looking so that's probably got something to do with it.

The other aspect to this is that, strangely for someone who's involved in diverse business interests and interacts with a lot of people in my day-to-day life, I'm actually rather intimidated by coffee shops.

This is because, to me, coffee is either black (without milk) or white (with milk), whereas the whole language of modern coffee shops is overwhelming for me as I don't know my latte from my frappuccino, I always assumed that macchiato was the name of an Italian dictator and that lungo was some sort of tropical disease.

Therefore, I'm giving off an air of vulnerability (and, in all honestly, probably subsciously playing on this a bit) in these shops which makes some women more likely to make initial contact with me.

So far, I've had some really nice conversations and three women have given me their contact numbers. In particular, over the past 24 hours one young lady who is very feminine looking (I can only assume that she IDs as femme but I'm not certain) and works in one of these shops that I've been visiting regularly over recent weeks and have been chatting to when there has asked me out on a date. In reality, I'll likely politely decline but it does show that it's possible to make nice, good contacts in environments that I usually wouldn't expect to.