In the final part of my chat with Mark we start off in Lincolnshire, moving quite quickly to Melbourne, Oz where he settles in to dating and the gay scene and someone gets a warm hand on their entrance....

We also talk about his meaningful tune for the Spotify playlist and I finally get to talk about how I got my lottery numbers, with the number 22.

As per usual, its explicit throughout.

The 2nd part of three with Mark. In this episode we've moved to Japan (Tokyo) and will eventually move on to Thailand (Bangkok) and we will hear tales of bicycle theft, being both Gaijin and Hentai and the perils of dating when you dont know another man's preferences before you got there....

There are explicit reference and swearing throughout and also a description of death.

Mark grew up in Grimsby in the early 1980s with no language for what he was and no one to ask. He came out, got thrown out of his family home at sixteen, and made his way through London, Brighton, Leicester and Sheffield before a cheese and tomato sandwich in Japan on his first night in a country he'd never been to. Three episodes. Quite a life.

Stewart grew up in Lancashire with a strict Catholic upbringing and a faith he never wanted to lose. He talks about coming out against the backdrop of Section 28, Manchester's chief constable calling gay men a cesspool, and the long, careful work of holding sexuality and belief in the same life. He eventually found love somewhere he didn't expect. There is also a squirrel.

In How I Got My Lottery Numbers we talk about the number 1

Tim grew up in Ontario, adopted into an evangelical Christian family, came out at 24 and left without a word. He moved illegally to Alaska, visited Disney World 57 times, and followed a pole dancer to London in 1997 with £500 in his pocket. After one weekend at Trade he had £80 left, the pole dancer told him he couldn't stay, and Tim spent the next month homeless in the West End. This is the story of how he got from there to here.

In How I Got My Lottery Numbers it's 35

Maurice is in his eighties and has lived with HIV since 1984. He talks about a working-class Lancashire childhood, becoming a teacher and then a theatre stage manager, being arrested in a police cottaging sting in 1982, an AIDS diagnosis in 1994 that left him driving to London in a fugue state, and the long, extraordinary life he's built on the other side of all of it.

In How I Got My Lottery Numbers its number 17

Ron was born in 1943 and started meeting men by driving the lanes of Cheshire in the late 1950s, when it was still illegal. He talks about finding love on a country road the week Apollo 11 landed on the moon, fifty-one years with his partner Alan, navigating HIV in the 1980s, and — after Alan died at the start of the pandemic — getting himself on Grindr and PrEP at nearly eighty.In How I got My Lottery Numbers its number 27

Colin came out in the north-east in the late 70s and moved to Manchester around 1980, when the gay scene was three pubs and a basement nightclub. He talks about finding his people through a church curate with a copy of Gay Times on his coffee table, surviving the AIDS crisis hitting Canal Street, and meeting the man he'd spend forty years with — all against the backdrop of the Moss Side Riots, ITV's World in Action, and the filming of Queer as Folk. In How I Got my Lottery Numbers, it's number 37.