“I shall have the fish sticks, please. And a Jaeger Bomb” – What to order on a date

You’re on a date and you’re about to eat. There is going to be some food soon. You’ve stared at the menu blindly for three minutes, having momentarily lost the ability to read and now you’ve actually got to knuckle down and decide what to order.

Well, before you make a rash decision and order something delicious, something that you actually decided on six hours earlier when you browsed the menu online at work, make sure that Future You thinks back to Present You, or Past You (whatever, I’m not a scientist), reading this, in order to ensure that some of this information informs your decision.

I, personally, wish that I’d read something this helpful when I went on a date a while back (seriously, a while. Really a while. A why-yul.). I ordered crispy pork belly, like a fucking mug. Whilst I was cutting into my food I noticed that my date had gone a bit quiet and wasn’t really looking at me properly; I put it down to the food – I mean, I’m generally much more interested in food than I am in people. However, things continued to be a little awkward, so I asked whether he was alright.
“I, er, I find it a bit weird that you ordered pork belly. I just, er, I didn’t think you would,” he said.
“…Weird? …Are you a vegetarian?”
He was eating a steak.
“No. No. I just… I find it a bit…repulsive? I don’t know if that’s the right word. Maybe not. Just a bit…much?”
“Oh. Oh, right.”

If I’d have known that there was a whole thing about what you should and shouldn’t order on dates, then I could still be with that guy. If only I’d ordered a quinoa salad, or a pot of Activia or nibbled on fucking cake pop then maybe we’d be together right this second – him gearing up to watch the football, me flicking through Company or preparing snacks. We could have been so happy.

As ever, I turned to Google on my train home and asked it about date foods. I found two totally useful and non-conformist-to-gender-stereotypes pieces that really opened my eyes to the do’s and don’ts of eating on dates. The first is for the girls, and it’s by Fox News.

Apparently, steak is sexy, ladies, so if you want to be sexy then order a steak, it’s as simple as that. ‘When a man sees you take control of a steak, it’ll make him think of you taking control in the bedroom later on.”

…Will it?

I’m assuming that, by ‘take control’, they just mean ‘cut’. Is cutting sexy? Maybe it’s the fact that you require special, often wooden handled, tools? I don’t know, but this bit does contain the line ‘don’t swallow a four inch piece of meat’, so make of that what you will.

If Italian food is more your thing then you’re in luck, as that can be sexy too! Fox News suggest that gnocchi is the way to go if you find yourself somewhere with red gingham tablecloths; it’s the ‘secret sauce’ (the menu normally gives that away, though) and ‘silky mozzarella’ (indeed, it’s very hard to hold when you first get it out of the packet, very wet) that does it, apparently. Gnocchi is totally sexy, what’s more sexy than a food that is so rich that it makes you want to lie flat on a cold wooden floor after you’ve eaten four mouthfuls?

Figs are next on the sexy menu and according to Fox News they’re ‘visually erotic’. I mean, I have a perfume with fig in it, so maybe that will do? The Fox guys also go on to say that Adam and Eve actually wore fig leaves to cover themselves in the Bible – “a good conversation filler for an awkward first date silence!” So, if you do order figs, tell the waiter to ensure that the chef SAVES THE LEAVES, as those could come in handy for some sexy role-play later. However, seeing as no where actually serves figs, I would suggest nipping into Tesco Metro on your way home and picking up a pack of fig rolls. They’re nice.

As for the foods that girls should avoid ordering when on a date, the general take home message can be summed up as ‘don’t order foods that will make you shit yourself.’ This apparently includes beans, curry and Jaeger bombs (like they’re a fucking food).
I’m not sure whether the ladies over at Fox News suffer from particularly loose bowels, or they heard a story from a friend about a friend of a friend who had some tummy trouble whilst at Wagamamas, but they’re very keen for you to avoid foods that might cause you to shit yourself, so please bear that in mind when ordering.

And hey, lads, don’t think that you’re able to order what you like on a date either – we’re all in this together. Your guidance comes from AskMen, so rest assured that what follows is top notch stuff.

Ask Men do not think that you should order ‘fish sticks’ on a date. Unless I’m very much mistaken, these are just fish fingers. Now, granted, fish fingers are not the most sophisticated choice to make, especially if you’re perusing the kids menu, but a fish-finger sandwich done right, with good bread and rocket and shit, is phenomenal. Luckily, we live in a time during which the fish-finger sandwich has come back – it’s come back so hard that trendy places that you’d probably go to on a date will serve it, so sod AskMen and get those fish fingers.

According to AskMen, you ‘run the risk of looking like a big girls’ blouse if you can’t crack open the shell of a lobster, therefore you should, under no circumstances, order lobster on a date. ‘How could you be a good provider if you can’t crack open a lobster shell?’ they ask. It’s true, most women fantasise about a topless men, stripped down to their waist, blue jeans low slung on their hips, beads of sweat glistening on their skin as they lift their arms to swing their lobster hammer up over their head and down onto the shell. In fact, I think Diet Coke are using that for their next ad campaign.
I say, order lobster if you want it. Yes, you might look a little flash, but lobster is yum.

Also, provider? Fuck right off, AskMen, fuck right off, now.

Salad is also off the menu for you too guys, I’m afraid. Apparently it ‘says more about you as a man that the fact that your belt doesn’t match your shoes.’
In fact, ordering a salad implies just one thing, and that is ‘that you’re watching your weight and the last thing she needs is another person in her life with a weight issue’ – because the other people in her life are women and women all have weight issues.
You know what I would think if a guy ordered a salad on a date? I would think that it’s June, now, and sometimes when it’s humid you just want a light meal rather than an overcooked chicken breast smothered in bbq sauce. That’s what I would think.

Obviously, it really is just as simple as ordering something that you like. As long as what you’re into isn’t just, like, two dry slices of Hovis or something. Also, stick to what’s on the menu – ordering off the menu and asking the waiter whether the chef “would mind doing an egg-white omelet” makes you seem like a bit of a dick.
If someone is too squeamish or up their own arse to watch you eat anything other than a Jacob’s cracker then this does not bode well for any aspect of your blossoming relationship, whether that’s the sex part of your relationship, the ill part of your relationship or the ‘Can you just look at my back? I think I’ve been bitten by something’ part of your relationship.

Also, I would like it to be noted that ‘pork belly’ does not feature in either of those articles at all. I thought I was safe. I didn’t know.
I didn’t know.

How to swear Letts; A guide for girls.

Upon reading the title of Quentin Letts’ latest article, “Why do female stars swear so much? Pass the carbolic soap”, I promised myself that I wouldn’t write about it. Too easy, I thought. In fact, being too easy, if my foul mouth is anything to go by, is apparently something that the article and I have in common, so that’s kinda neat.

However, seeing as I am without a modicum of self-control – again, something that my constant effing and blinding is testament to according to Quentin, I just couldn’t resist.

Am I going to mock his bitchy opening paragraphs? Am I going to point out the hypocrisy of a man who only gets called on This Morning to go through the day’s papers when hateful-gammon man Kelvin MacKenzie is busy using a few lines in his deliberately provocative article to say that Keira Knightley only swears because she is anxious to be discussed? Am I going to ask Quentin whether he actually wrote the majority of that article ten years ago, as the line “Oh no, Mirren is doing her Vicky Pollard routine again” would lead me to believe?

No. No I am not. Instead, I am going to be helpful.

I for one could really do without Quentin Letts shoving his carbolic soap in my mouth, so I turned to Google (as you can see, I didn’t turn to it for very long) for some pointers on how to stop swearing. Ladies, take note.

1. Swear Jar
Let’s start with the classic – the swear jar. For those who’ve never worked in an office in the early nineties, or don’t possess the shrewd power of deduction afforded to only the very best ITV detectives and can’t crack its enigmatic name, the Swear Jar is a jar that you put money in whenever you swear. The price of a swear word can be up to you (flat rate or sliding scale depending on the severity of the profanity, you can have a lot of fun with this) and there is absolutely no one there to enforce payment, so the whole thing works brilliantly.

Now, I understand that a washed out Marmite pot is not the most aesthetically pleasing item to sit on your desk, so why not make a girls night out of customising your swear jars? I’m seeing Echo Falls, glitter pens, ribbons, zig-zag scissors and a whole lotta fun.

If you do choose this option, depending on how filthy your mouth really is, you can rack up quite a few princess pennies – shoe fund, AMIRIGHT GIRLS?

2. Elastic band
A slightly more controversial method offered up by Wikihow is one in which you wear an elastic band around your wrist and snap it against your skin every time you swear. If 50 Shades of Grey (in fact, given the take-home message of that book and the fact that the film is soon to be released, I’m seeing a BIG merchandise opportunity here) is your bag, then this could prove to be incredibly effective, because, yeah – OUCHIES, but it’s not a particularly chic option, is it?
For the fashion conscious female who’s looking for a more stylish anti-swearing solution then why not try a Pandora bracelet adorned with savagely bejeweled charms?

3. Fill your mouth
If all else fails, keep your mouth busy. If your face hole is full of stuff then you’re not going to be able to speak, let alone swear – unless you’re particularly uncouth, so if you’re feel like you’re about to swear, shove something in your mouth. Suggestions include – macaroons, yoghurts to ease bloating, cake pops and penises.

It’s worth mentioning here that, if you’re reading this in your council house and your response was “You can fuck right off”, then that is fine – Quentin is ok with that. His real issue seems to be that “beautiful blooms” (a phrase that does nothing but make him sound like a serial killer that carves a flower into his victims’ foot, or dries their skin into petals or something) like Dame Helen, Keira Knightley and Kate Winslett are making themselves appear to be working class, or uneducated trollops, as he so eloquently puts it.

So, if you’re less beautiful bloom, and more yellow dandelion then you can swear all you like – Quentin couldn’t give a fuck.

4 Things my dad has taught me since he died

The keyboard sized slabs of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut and novelty golf club covers filling Tesco right now tell me that Father’s Day is approaching. It’s a day that I usually remain fairly indifferent to, but this year I’ve been getting a bit emosh. I haven’t been breaking down in tears every time I’ve come face to face with a pair of novelty cufflinks whilst out shopping, but I’ve felt, for the first time in 9 years, like I’ve wanted to mark the occasion by doing something dad related, so this is it. This is the dad related thing.

In the fourteen years that I had my dad as ‘my dad’ for, he taught me a lot of stuff. Just off the top of my head, he took care of teaching me how to draw people really well, teaching me the lyrics to I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles, teaching me how to take the shell off a prawn really, really quickly and, I suppose, teaching me how to walk and talk. But, without sounding like a movie shown on Channel Five at 3pm in the week, he’s taught me a fair amount of stuff since dying too. It’s all stuff that I would have preferred to have learned another way, in an ideal world, but sometimes you’ve just got to deal with what you’re given, haven’t you?

So yeah, here’s the stuff-

1. Awkward social situations are inevitable and fine
A gift given to all people who lose a parent earlier than is expected is the deliciously awkward moment when you have to tell people that you’re actually part of the one-parent club. There is literally no way that you can tell people that your dad is dead without making them feel awkward and, as a result, I am completely comfortable with the awkward silence that follows - just call me The Atmosphere Killer.

I tend to favour a bulldozer approach when the time comes and tend to make people flinch by actually using the word ‘dead’, but I have to. My dad didn’t pass away. ‘Pass away’ implies that he lay in a bed with too many pillows, surrounded by his family, saying inspirational yet funny things. Reality wasn’t like that - one day he was here and then, after a poorly timed chicken bake from the Greggs at the hospital, he was gone. It really was as quick and as brutal as the word ‘dead’.

Prize for the best response to hearing the news goes to the guy who I was on a second date with, who, upon me telling him that my dad died when I was fourteen (I’d like to say here that I generally try to keep the whole ‘dead dad’ thing out of light-hearted, filtered-version-of-who-I-really-am date talk, but sometimes it’s unavoidable, unless for the purpose of the date, I pretend that my dad is alive, which is weird) said “Oh, well at least I don’t have to worry about meeting him!” Now, I know that he was joking - he just wasn’t joking very well.

2. Anything can be funny at any time
I like funny stuff. I like funny people and funny tv shows and funny places – I’m all about funny. However, when someone dies, you accept that for a while ‘funny’ is going on sabbatical from your life and its replacement is a polite, tight smile.

Well, ‘funny’ left my life for about 48 hours.

I don’t know whether it’s because grief exhausts you, and you get a bit delirious, or whether it’s because you’re so relieved to find something funny but the smallest thing can set off the kind of laughing where you actually think that you might be sick as a result. For me, that moment came when my mum, sister and I were shopping for black coats a few days before my dad’s funeral and I found myself stamping my foot in temper in H&M, saying “Mum! I just don’t think this coat looks sad enough.”

I, er, I think you had to be there.

3. Everything will be, mostly, fine
You can be forgiven for thinking that, most of the time, I do not think that things are going to be fine. I cry, really a lot. Old guy in Sainsburys buying a lot of ready meals for one? I’m crying. The stray dog that was running around our street but ran off before anyone could catch it and never got found? Yep, I’m crying. Boy I like doesn’t like me back? I’m crying. I make a relatively minor error at work? I’m crying. Anyone says pretty much anything to me at the wrong end of any given month? You betcha, I’m crying. I’m not afraid to cry, even when I should be. I’ve thought about this a lot and for a while I thought that I was, to use the medical term, completely fucked up, but have since realised that I’m just not bothered about feeling sad, whether it’s for seven minutes or seven months. I’m happy to feel sad, because I know that I won’t feel sad forever.

I can remember the night that my dad died so clearly, which is frustrating because I feel like I remember everything that happened before that less and less every single day, but I remember very clearly that when I lay in bed that night, not able to close my eyes because they felt so sore, that I accepted that I would always feel sad from that day on. Nothing would ever be good or right because my dad wasn’t here, so how could it be? Turns out, that everything does become good and right again and if everything that can be mostly fine after that, then it can always go back to being mostly fine after anything else that happens, can’t it?

PS
Things I forgot to say-
3.5. Always have your picture taken with people, one day you’ll really want those photos.
4. Never cry at school because some kids are saying that your dad “talks funny.” I would love to hear my dad say “batter” instead of “butter” now.

Why everyone who cheats should be made to do a kiss and tell.

“Because it was winter I was coming straight from my plastering job filthy and wearing long johns.”

No, that’s not a line from a game to teach syntax and punctuation to children who have expressed an interest in plastering from a very early age; it’s actually a quote from Keiran Hayler’s (you know, Katie Price’s latest ex? The guy who looks like he’s definitely, after a night at Yates, hung out of a cab and shouted ‘bus wankers’ to people wearing headphones at a bus stop) kiss and tell story, published in The Sun last week. I realise that I will have lost a few of you here, but, in my defense, at 5:27 on a Wednesday, when you’ve finished everything that you had to get done that day but can’t risk leaving early because someone will shout “PART-TIMER” across the room and draw attention to you, this kind of shit becomes interesting, and so I found myself reading the grisly details of Keiran Hayler’s ‘full blown affair.’

At first, I felt sorry for ol’ KP, having to read that her husband banged her best friend in a pub car park, whilst wearing long johns. Then, around halfway through the article, I stopped feeling sympathetic and started to feel jealous.  

I didn’t get a kiss and tell when someone cheated on me and I think that I really would have appreciated one. I know that, upon finding out that someone has cheated on you, you’re supposed to be concerned with the emotional side of things. Was there a level of intimacy between them? Did they lie next to each other whilst reading books and feel totally ok with it? Had he helped her through a particularly vengeful bout of cystitis by holding her hand when she peed?
Well, I didn’t care about any of that, initially. I just wanted to know about the sex. I was very concerned with the sex that they’d been doing. How many times? What was it like? Was it better than our sex? Where did they do it? What positions did they do? Was it better than our sex? Was she always waxed? I mean, like always impossibly waxed? Did she do things that I wouldn’t do? Was it better than our sex? Honestly, I was one step away from tracking down a fucking plethysmograph.

I think it’s at this stage of the post-cheating-discovery meltdown that a kiss and tell would come in handy. Sure, you might vomit so violently that you turn yourself completely inside out whilst reading it, but it would give you the details that your brain uses the eight hours in which you would normally sleep to imagine. I’m not talking the details that you see in films, or the details that your own cruel mind is busy coming up with; a lip being tenderly bitten, a solitary bead of sweat running between two breasts, fingers digging into a muscular back. No, the details that are given in kiss and tell stories are always much more mundane and at times slightly bizarre, often geared towards landing a sponsorship deal. In the case of Mr Katie Price, he’s clearly hoping to at least get a meeting with the guys over at Ford- “I arrived in my Ford Focus and she arrived in her Ford Fiesta.” I bet you did Keiran, I fucking bet you did.

For a start, the questions about how many times they’ve sexed someone else and for how long they sexed someone else are always dealt with in a kiss and tell story; they really like to focus on figures, so that’s those queries ticked off right away. If you reduce sex down to nothing more than statistics, then it really starts to lose its sexiness. Keiran Hayler tells us that “the sex usually lasted around ten minutes.” Sidestepping the obvious jokes here, I’ve always found that if you can recall, with any amount of accuracy, how long sex lasted, it really wasn’t all that. The story later goes on to say that “Keiran had 25 secret trysts with Jane over the course of seven months” – past the count of 6, I’m not sure that there is anything less sexy than being able to say without doubt how many times you’ve had sex with someone.

Most importantly, in every kiss and tell story, there’s always one detail, often made into a sub-heading, that renders the whole thing about as sexy as leather-look t-shirts (or leather-look anything, for that matter). For Joey Essex it was the fact that he’d eaten too many sweets before sex and gave himself stomachache and for Keiran Hayler it was the long johns. These seemingly insignificant details prove one thing to a person who’s imagining the person they love doing impossible sex positions (the kind that More! Magazine used to have to illustrate using Barbie dolls because they were that impossible) with the bitch who you once leant a hair band to on a night out, or whatever. That thing is this- the sex they had with the other person is no sexier than the sex that they had with you. It’s prone to exactly the same impracticalities that your sex was prone to. He probably did keep putting all of his body weight onto her hair, she probably did keep getting her hair in her mouth ALL THE BLOODY TIME and someone’s digestive system definitely did let out a poorly timed gurgle.

I actually managed to find out two bizarre details about my ex’s cheating. The first being that my ex was banging a girl on his desk when the whole thing gave way, landing on his foot and turning his big toenail black (he originally told me that this was a football injury) and the second being that the girl who he was sleeping with wore underwear that had Snoopy on it. I found this out when, during one of those silent ‘talks’ that happen after a break up, I found a pair of Snoopy pants in his room, which he later tried to convince me were mine.

Those details actually really helped me stop being mental and start being fine again. Luckily, I don’t prescribe to the opinion that people have sex so hard, and so good, that they break furniture – the furniture is cheaply made and that’s why it broke, so the desk landing on his foot really did feel like some sort of karma. It was the thought of those Snoopy knickers being pulled off and hitting the floor that really made me realise how ridiculous the whole thing was. The more I imagined it, the more absurd, and less sexy, the image became - like when you say a word over and over again until it has no meaning. The image just becomes two people having sex and I soon stopped thinking about those two people having sex, because when I imagine two people having sex, I prefer it if I’m one of them.

However, I had to turn into a puffy eyed, knotty eyed, permanently pajama clad Nancy Drew to find out exactly what happened when I got cheated on and I don’t think that’s fair, which is why I’m putting a case forward for some kind of organization (possibly just use the guys who work at the Job Centre, because they do fuck all) to enforce a new rule – if you cheat, you have to do a kiss and tell. It doesn’t have to make it into a national newspaper, let’s just start things off local, and I don’t care if you write it or dictate it, but honestly, it really would save everyone a lot of time and humiliating conversations with your mum asking if she’ll help you pay your phone bill if, upon being found out, The Cheater was made to submit an 800 word account of what they had been doing. Preferably with a covering note, held together with a treasury tag.