Filth Angel (noun): an adventurous spirit; one who doesn’t tread on others in their quest for adventure, who remains soft and sweet inside, unhardened by debauchery. Naughty but nice is a thrilling combination; those irremediable miscreants who, for all their naughtiness, have hearts of gold. My friend and fellow author Salvador Altagracia once said to me, “niceness is like golden syrup on a delicious sponge cake; it just makes it so much better.” I’m lucky enough to know loads of filth angels, as friends and as lovers alike. They’ve come from some unlikely places too, not just from the clubs where everyone’s dancing in their underwear, but also from university courses. Even from work. I’m drawn to them like a moth to a flame. Among them is Milan. We met during my great post-university slump, while working tech support at probably the most poorly managed company I’ve ever encountered. Quite the feat. This tech job is one I fell into in the absence of other ideas, having belatedly realised that I wasn’t, in fact, destined for academia. One of those smallish tech companies, too old to be a start-up, but somehow still attempting to operate as one. They do something with artificial intelligence for boring business products. It should’ve been interesting, but it never was. My colleagues are nice, but the job itself is a woeful combination of overwhelming and boring – an understaffed team, no training, no manager for six months, and an ungodly amount of administration. I deal with it by getting wrecked at weekends, and taking Henk’s ADHD meds to survive work. My life’s a mess. I have no idea what I want to do with myself. I possess a cast of car crash lovers (the aforementioned Henk among them) whose numbers I should’ve blocked a long time ago. I keep running into my younger colleagues while exiting club bathrooms. The young developers in question seem to find this amusing and start talking to me at work, at the coffee machine or while standing in line to make ourselves drab sandwiches from the ingredients work provides. A nod and a wink, a light lunchtime chat. I find it amusing to know that, even at a company where only a hundred or so people work, I’m part of some small subculture. We get away with a double identity: professional by day, party monster by night. Well, getting away with it might be a bit of a stretch, I’m fairly sure a few of the colleagues have my number. A running joke about party drugs keeps cropping up, and the Head of Training (who ran the IT Ops department until he had a nervous breakdown and had to go find himself in Thailand) has already seen me all fucked up at Schönefeld airport on a Sunday afternoon. In any case, my small cabal of kindred party spirits is the only thing that sustains me at this bullshit job. I’m particularly chummy with the filth angel Milan, a brilliant young…