You don’t know what awkward is until you find yourself choking on a particularly fiery order of Pad Kee Mao at four a.m. in the morning while some random Thai hottie chooses to try and chat you up.

Oh wait. Yes you do. It’s when you can’t actually say anything to him because between tuk-tuk fumes and the battery-acid that is nam pla prik, your vocal cords are disabled.

But all of that pales in comparison to the inevitable conversations you wind up having with relatives about when you’re going to get married. “Never”, you may reply if you’re having a bad day and want to bring the conversation to a screeching halt, “Oh, it’s too soon to think about that, how’re your corns doing?” if you want to jokingly deflect the topic, “What’s your issue, unhappy with your own lack of marital bliss?” if you feel that a good offence is the best defence, or maybe just a simple “None of your damn’ business”, if you want to really hammer the point home.

I don’t really sleep with anyone in Karachi, so I can sometimes really empathise with the familial angst around my dying alone and unloved, especially when I’ve been through one of those days when you really just want to come home and get a hug and cuddle from someone who isn’t actually related to you by blood. Someone with whom the hug and cuddle can turn into a peck on the lips, some feverish fucking on a table-top, more cuddling, naked dinner by the pool, that sort of thing. And the people I meet when I travel abroad are all almost uniformly lovely people with whom I’d want to build some sort of relationship, but they’re…well, you know, X-thousand miles away and more often than not, have little interest in dating someone who lives on another continent.

I can’t say I blame them, if fairness is to be at all entertained.

Sometimes though, you wake up in the mornings and have one of those terrible moments of self-doubt in which you realise that it’s entirely possible for the rest of your romantic life to consist of disturbing intimacy with your bedding.