Fiction: Know-it-all

Every morning, I go to the café at the end of the road and the man behind the counter tells me that he can’t stand me.

He has all kinds of reasons. For starters, he doesn’t like my outfit; my trousers are too short for his liking (something which hasn’t escaped my notice, believe me). I should get some new ones, but department stores make me nervous. I’m putting it off until a quiet weekend, or a Sunday morning when nobody is around. He finds my shirts cheap and nasty – no argument there, because they are. I’ve never had the time for ironing. He doesn’t like the way I ask for my coffee (always latte, skinny milk, no sugar). Now that is something I can’t help; I’ve got the kind of voice which makes questions sound like statements. A lot of people have told me that. If I had to guess, I’d say that it’s because I pretty much always know what the answer is going to be. It’s beyond my control, it’s just how I was made; people tell me things. They tell me everything.

It isn’t just my clothes with the man behind the counter though, it’s more than that. “The man behind the counter”, listen to me; if it was a proper café, or a proper machine, or my drink had ever tasted half decent in the last two years I suppose I’d call him a barista, but they’re not and he’s not and that’s that. He reckons that something went wrong when everything was being handed out, because he knows he’s better than me. He should be the one placing the orders and I should be the one on the other side, frothing the milk – which I’d do better than him, we have a machine at home – tamping the coffee, measuring things out. I like making coffee at home. The noises, the gurgling and gushing, take my mind off things.

If he was the one placing the order, it wouldn’t be a latte. He likes a mocha with two sugars, a triple shot of espresso and lots of squirty cream on top so it looks like an ice cream sundae – I know that, because he told me once. The radio on top of the counter was playing something upbeat and tiresome, and I wished it was just a bit louder, loud enough that I could tune him out. He told me that he couldn’t understand why anybody would drink the muck I order. He always looks like he’s been two days without shaving, and I see him every weekday. I don’t understand how he manages that. Some people are just like that, I guess, like Don at work. He comes in clean-shaven and he almost has a beard by half-three. Don’s one of my favourites – he doesn’t tell me much. It’s because he doesn’t have a lot to tell, but I like that; usually it doesn’t stop people.

The man behind the counter at the café doesn’t like his job, really doesn’t like it. He tells me that all the time. I have to say I can understand; I’d go insane if I had to listen to all those people, day in day out, every day. Half of them don’t know what they want and the other half just kid themselves that they do, and they’re always wrong. Fucking morons. I wouldn’t want a job doling out disappointment to others, I have enough trouble managing my own. But as far as he’s concerned, I wouldn’t know about that. He tells me that it’s okay for me with my cushy desk job and my incredible salary and my studenty lifestyle. He’s the kind of person that spits out the word “student” like it’s right up there with sex offender.

He couldn’t be much more wrong about me if he tried. My job entails chasing people for payment on orders, filling out forms and sending back forms that haven’t been filled out properly. It involves as little human contact as I can get away with. I deliberately picked it for that reason. Even my desk, in a room away from the main open-plan bedlam, has been carefully selected. My shared house hasn’t been vacuumed in months and I’m only there because I couldn’t find anywhere with a cheaper rent and because there’s nobody living there who I actively want to kill. That’s progress, actually. Alex hasn’t bought toilet roll in as long as any of us can remember, so now I buy my own – the good stuff, because I have standards – and I hide it in my bedside table. Every night, I sneak to the toilet with my own stash and when I’m finished I take it back to my bedroom, and it’s going to carry on like this until Alex puts his hand in his pocket. Which means it’s going to carry on forever; Alex told me once that he doesn’t care because he knows that if he waits long enough Steph will crack and go to the corner shop.

I could mention all of these things to the man behind the counter and explain how lucky he really is, the grass is always greener, blah blah blah, but I don’t. I never have much time to tell people anything, because I’m always too busy being told. Besides, I don’t like him. I don’t like a lot of people though, it’s hardly like he’s special.

He told me once about his unfinished novel, and it was all I could do not to laugh there and then. A novel! I bet it’s shit.

When people tell you things non-stop, you get tired of them very quickly. I wonder if people realise that. That’s why I like taking the Tube to work – you don’t often see the same people on there twice. Meeting people once is usually more than enough for me. The only thing that gets me through my commute is knowing that the faces change every day – and even that doesn’t help as much as it should, because the stories are always the same. The guy in the corner tells me that he fancies the blonde standing by the doors, one hand holding the rail, the other gripping a paperback. She doesn’t register the guy in the corner at all; I’m not sure how she could be less interested in him. Instead, she tells me she’s bored with the book. It’s not one I plan to read, she has carefully selected it to improve herself and look intellectual on public transport, and I doubt she’ll get past the hundredth page. Anyway, I don’t read much. I can’t manage that level of concentration. She doesn’t tell me any more about the book, instead she goes on about how worried she is about her mum. She goes in for her operation on Friday.

Does she ever bore herself, the way she’s boring me? I doubt the guy in the corner would fancy her much longer, if she told him half of what I’ve heard.

And then there’s the stocky man in tracksuit trousers and a paint-spattered t-shirt pretending to read the Metro (does anyone do anything but pretend to read it?) Oh my god, he comes out with such racist, racist hate. He rants away and nobody looks except me. In the early days I used to give a hard stare to guys like him: Look at yourself, it was meant to say, do you have any idea what you sound like? It didn’t last long though – they’re not mind readers, after all – so nowadays I just look embarrassed, peering at the names at intervals on the red stripe of the Central Line and acting like he isn’t there. I wish everybody on this train would just shut up.

At the other end, when I get to my stop, walking past the beggar is the worst thing about my morning. There are about half a dozen different ways to get from the Tube station to the office – past branches of Prêt and Eat full of hungry, disgruntled workers talking to someone for the first time that day, asking for a coffee the way I asked for mine an hour ago, or along side streets swathed in shadows, past the backs of buildings and the entrances nobody uses – but they all end up going past her and I can’t stand it.

Her face is creased, her body almost skeletal and her clothes worn and tatty. She smells terrible, and she could be thirty or fifty and I wouldn’t know. She just says “Spare any change?” to everyone, I know that, and yet every time I walk past her she stares up into my eyes, though I try to look away, and tells me the rest. She tells me about how her husband hit her, how he lost his job and how one day he just left. She tells me where she slept last night – or where she didn’t – and she tells me that she never knows where she will sleep tonight, or whether it will be the last night. She tells that every time she goes to sleep she doesn’t expect to wake up. The thing I really hate, the thing that makes me feel uncomfortable inside, is when she tells me that she’s cold; she’s been telling me that for months. I hear it all, every single word, and I wonder why I even bother wearing these headphones.

Things are better when I get to the revolving doors of the office. The woman on reception is worried that I’ve looked ill these last few days, but I swipe my pass at the turnstile, take the lift to the fourth floor and try to make my way to my desk without speaking to anyone. It’s been hard work finding a job I could stomach, and this one is close enough to ticking the boxes that I’ll tolerate the café and the Tube and the woman shivering outside, close to the front doors. I still don’t know why the police haven’t moved her on. I get to do nearly everything by email. Phone calls are few and far between, face to face meetings are almost non-existent and my boss is based in another office, so I don’t have to see her. My one-to-ones don’t happen and my performance reviews, once every six months, are a cursory chat over a second-rate video conference link. Mentally, I’m hardly there, but neither is she so it doesn’t matter (I met her once. She told me she didn’t much care if it never happened again.)

From my seat I can see out of the window into mid-air. Unless the window-cleaners are working on the office across the street, I can’t see anything at all, which is perfect. I sometimes see them up there and envy them their job, but that kind of job is always thick with camaraderie, and I don’t do camaraderie. I’m lucky – my office is cut off from the main area by a pair of double doors, and they’re like a lifeline for me. Nobody wants to work in my area. They call it “the library”, and they find me strange. I’ve learned not to take anything personally and I never say anything about it. What’s the point? People are all too busy telling you things to try listening anyway.

The funny thing is that if I wanted to, I could be so good at so many things. When people tell you as much as they tell me, you can do whatever you want. I could lead hostage negotiations, close deals, counsel couples. I could interview celebrities, or help with murder investigations. I’m sure there are other jobs. But I don’t want any of them, because I wish it wasn’t this way. You have absolutely no idea, I know that for a fact because this would never occur to any of you. If you knew, you’d call me the luckiest man in the world - but you’d be dead wrong like you’re wrong about everything else. That’s why people give me a headache. That’s why I don’t want anything to do with the lot of you.

If you want to imagine what it’s like to be me, follow me through the double doors into the main section of the office. Dozens and dozens of desks, all in an orderly formation, each with an occupant tapping away on their keyboard sending their futile mails, each moving their pointless mouse. Some of the people have a photo up, just to prove how human they are, how different. Some of them might have a cartoon stuck to their monitor, to show everyone that they have a sense of humour. Some of them swear, just so everyone knows they’re not like the others - irreverent, not corporate. They might be the ones I dislike the most. No, dislike’s the wrong word; they bore me. It’s all so boring.

Come with me, stand right in the middle. Next, I want you to imagine that you can read every single Instant Messenger conversation being sent by every single one. Can you do that? Imagine. Every single piece of gossip, every single complaint, every single suggestion that it’s time for a coffee, every single time a hot girl walks by. Every single piece of flirting, successful and unsuccessful, every single complaint about every single half-arsed piece of work someone gets asked to do. Every crappy escalation, every stroppy customer, every single piece of surfing people do because they don’t like the shit on their to do list. Is your brain up to imagining that? The noise? The fun, the gloom, the frustration. Thank fuck it’s nearly the weekend. Look at her tits today. This conference call is doing my head in. Don’t make me go and talk to the geek in The Library. Have you seen that email? What a loser. Every ROFL, every LOL, every fucking winking smiley. How long would you last, in that room?

Now I want you to go one step further (this is the bit that will blow your mind). Imagine all the Instant Messenger conversations these people are only having with themselves. All the things they don’t tell anyone, the things they daren’t. Imagine reading all those things too, and tell me how that might feel. You can’t even begin to. You get better at shutting it off, at turning down the volume, but it never goes away and what you realise is how banal everybody is. How predictable, stupid and vain. Everyone has a book in them, they say – well, I’ve read everybody’s and the answer is they don’t. Or if they do, nobody should be made to turn the pages. Have a look at the first twenty and then stop bothering, because there’s nothing worthwhile in the rest.

You still don’t believe me? Look around you. Darren tells me he fancies Kirsty, who I happen to know has the hots for Steve. Steve’s married – married and bored. He tells me, and himself, that he’s happy but there was the night with the prostitute on the stag weekend in Tallinn that he’s trying to forget. For someone who’s trying to forget about it he doesn’t seem to stop going on about it. His wife was pregnant, and they weren’t getting on, and he was abroad, and it was five years ago, and so it really doesn’t matter, or so I’m told. Paul is looking for a new job, but he’s worried that eventually he’ll have to mention his prescription for antidepressants on an application form. Tony is waiting for the result of some tests, and he’s terrified. Penny is worried that nobody in the office notices her since she came back from maternity leave – which is reasonable, because nobody does (they didn’t before she went away on maternity leave, either; there was a general sense of surprise that she had a man at all. Darren thought she might be a lesbian). She works in HR, she has no people skills and she’s decided that the company made a big mistake taking me on. No, I never hear a thing about Penny - with the exception of Adam, who had a wet dream about her a week ago which horrified him. Yesterday he told me that he’d thought about it that morning while wanking in the shower. I didn’t want to know that – not about him, not about her.

Can you imagine being me? I have a headache by noon. I spend my lunch break at my desk, headphones on, playing Minesweeper. Something repetitive, something distracting. By four pm, all the painkillers in the world can’t help and five thirty can’t come quickly enough. That second sentiment is the only thing I have in common with everybody else in the building. The only one who’s different is Sinead. She started two weeks ago, straight out of university, tall, awkward-looking, short dark hair. Her suits are a bit too smart, like she bought them expecting a better job than this, before she knew what kind of a place it was. She doesn’t seem to have made a lot of friends yet, though the three guys in corporate finance already have a bet on which one of them she’ll sleep with first (the answer, I get the feeling, is none of them). When she looks at me I don’t know whether I like the expression that dances round her green eyes. I know there’s something different about you, she tells me, Perhaps I’ll find out what it is.

Believe me, I’d like to see her try.

There’s no way I can cope with the clamour of the rush hour home, so instead I wander through as many side streets as it takes, at right angles to the rest of the world, until I find a quiet unfashionable pub where I can sit on my own. I’m looking for the sort of place without hordes of smiling drinkers out on the pavement, smoking their cigarettes and consoling each other about the days they’ve had, the sort of crowd scene which any other passer-by would see as the perfect advert for London life. I am after a pub where the only people in there are disappointed, silent old men who have been there since noon, where the sun fails to shed light on anything inside, literal or figurative. The sort of pub where the barman sighs as he takes your order – just like this one does, as he tells me how bored he is that his life has come to this.

I ought to be doing something else – going out and getting laid, perhaps, but getting laid is too easy. I know – too easy, you wouldn’t believe it. I never understood what people said about the thrill of the chase until I realised that it was an experience I’ll never know. There’s no fun in foregone conclusions, good or bad, and all the times I’ve been out with women are exactly that. It’s a shame about your teeth. I don’t want to hear about your job. You talk about your family too much. Why do you never talk about your family? Kiss me. Not like that. I’d like you to stop now. I’ve been told every combination you could come up with, sometimes all in one night, but the worst thing is how much it ruins it all to know how things are going to end. When it goes badly, I can console myself that there’s nothing I could have done, when it goes well it doesn’t feel like an achievement. Or maybe it does, but it feels like something unearned. Everybody else gets the delight of working these things out as they go along, never realising that what they say or do is a blunder or a stroke of genius until many months later when they are having the final, sad conversation or popping the question, moving in together or drifting apart.

But I get a running commentary, and nobody wants a running commentary on this kind of thing.

Would Sinead be different? I don’t know. When I talk to her, it’s almost like there is something she isn’t telling me, and that’s never happened before. But I know how these things end, and I know it’s pointless. I watch the couples sometimes, in busier pubs than this, and I know they are breaking up or getting together long before they do, long before they know it themselves. In some cases it’s obvious to everyone in the room, often it’s only obvious to me. They could save themselves so much time if they told each other what they’re telling me – but of course saving time isn’t what this is about. It’s about fun, the fun that they’re having and I’m not. I go up and get another pint, because the first one has gone down pretty fast, and that’s when my housemate Alex comes in.

Alex is my pub buddy – he works a little way across town, he’s easy to lure out for a drink after work and although he hates this kind of pub and isn’t sure what to make of me, he nearly always comes out these days. I like Alex, he’s the kind of guy most people would describe this way: you know where you are with him. Of course, that’s a cliché for me – I know where I am with everybody. But for me, it’s more about where you are than knowing where you are, and we’re in the pub, safe from the crowds outside shouting their hopes, their dreams, their commonplace preferences for soap operas and supermarkets and reality show contestants.

We normally sit at a table in the corner, a pint of cider for him, a pint of bitter for me, and a packet of crisps opened out in front of us. Alex reaches in with a hand like a claw, like one of those machines in amusement arcades that grabs for underwhelming prizes. Alex’s specialist subjects - which he talks about a lot - are West Ham United, his crappy job as a graphic designer, how Steph gets on his nerves with her holier than thou notes on the phone table and the Post-It note on her skimmed milk (which nobody would drink anyway), the gigs he wants to go to and his plans to get wasted at the weekend. He gave up asking me along months ago, though touchingly he’s still a bit disappointed.

Alex stopped coming out a few months back because of Chris, some girl he met at work. We didn’t see him around the house for ages, he was always staying at hers (somewhere more upmarket – Maida Vale or Swiss Cottage, I can’t remember where) and our paths never crossed. I met Chris once. She told me how filthy the living room was and that she planned never to visit the house again. Steph stopped writing the notes and didn’t feel the need to label her milk any more, and things were quieter for a while. And I would almost say I missed Alex, even if I didn’t miss hearing his masturbatory fantasies through the adjoining wall late at night (honestly, I’d sooner have heard him actually having sex), but then he came back and now he comes to the pub most days.

Alex’s specialist subjects are still West Ham United, his crappy job and Steph. But now when we sit down he spends all night telling me about Chris. About how she didn’t want to commit. About how they would go clubbing with her mates and he would want to go and she would want to stay. Go on then, go back to the flat, I’ll see you when I see you. He tells me about how they argued, and how she told him that enough was enough. I’m only twenty-three. I’m not old enough to be having this kind of conversation. It’s like you’re an old man these days. He tells me every word of their final, sad conversation and how they had sex for the last time. He tells me how he walked back into town, soaked from rain and wet from crying, and how now he’s just a failure in a shared house full of failures – with Steph the self-righteous virgin and me, and I’m just a freak and Steph’s just a freak and he’s no better. Last of all, he tells me all about how he finds himself taking the Tube to Warwick Avenue (it’s Warwick Avenue, I remember now) at weekends, sitting in a café, wishing he would bump into her again, walking slowly past her flat. All the time Alex tells me this he is talking about West Ham, his crappy job and Steph.

I don’t know why I do the next thing I do. I wish I knew someone like me, so they could tell me.

“You miss her, don’t you?”

It’s the oddest thing, sitting there listening to Alex – haltingly at first, and then more and more fluently – telling me things I already know. As he does, it strikes me that people have two voices; there’s the one they use, that everybody hears, and the one they don’t use, that only I can hear. And they always say different things. “Have a good day.” says the man in the café with the first, and Thank god you’re leaving with the second. “The coffee here is shit.” says Sinead with the first as we stand at the machine, and Why are you looking at me like that? What do you want? with the second. But both Alex’s voices are saying the same thing, and I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced that before. And the harmony – well, I’m not good at words for this sort of thing, but it’s beautiful. It’s the saddest melody, but the most beautiful sound. And we talk all evening like that, and get a kebab on the way home, and then there’s an awkward hug in the lounge when we say goodnight. He calls me “mate”.

I don’t know when I last hugged anyone, before that.

My favourite bit of the day is the last part, under the covers, 6 Music on my bedside radio. There are no people any more, just chatter and records that I can tune out any time I want to. I don’t know, based on the day I’ve had, if I’m changing. I don’t know why I said what I said to Alex; I’m not a people person, I’d rather not get involved. And I don’t understand what I felt on the way home, or in the lounge, and I don’t know whether tomorrow will be the same or different, or why I don’t have a headache now. I never remember my dreams anyway, and I know the moment I turn out the light I’ll fall asleep. I might as well do that now. It’s been such a long time since I was alone with my thoughts, just mine, only me, without all the other voices, that I wonder if I’d even recognise them anymore.

Evil

Even though I have been thinking about doing it all day, I wait until the clock is close to midnight and my wife is yawning on the sofa. This is my way; if a job’s worth doing it’s worth doing far too late, a habit that has stayed with me for years, retained long after the need for last minute revision, deadlines and essay crises has passed. My wife slopes down the hall to the bedroom and I gather everything I need and make my way to the bathroom. By the time she sees me again, I will be somebody else.

The bathroom in my flat is a curious room – big but sterile, cold, uncomfortable and rarely used. It has a bath I must have been in a handful of times in the six years we’ve lived here, plain magnolia walls, a heated towel rail which is nearly never on and a shelf containing all the ornamental Christmas presents which are not attractive enough to put on display. It’s mainly used by guests (which makes it even sadder, given how inhospitable it is) or by me when the en suite is occupied. Once a year, I use it to do what I am about to do.

I look in the mirror, properly look instead of catching a glimpse of myself in the window of a train, or a shopfront as I walk by. When you have a beard, your face looks different – a different shape, a different silhouette, a different character altogether. Your mannerisms change; you scratch and stroke, actions which seem so much more purposeful than mere fidgeting. It’s a year since I did this last, but back then Kelly was standing over my shoulder and I’m not sure I even gave it much thought. This time, I’m alone with my reflection and I feel a year older, maybe even more than that. 2012. The future. I’m nearly forty. My moustache seems to have more grey hairs in it this time than before.

Nothing I see changes my mind, but it still feels like saying goodbye.

The beard trimmer hums and buzzes as it comes to life in my hand. The first stage is to attack my neck, the space under my chin. I never cease to be surprised by how easy it is to take off what takes so long to grow, even though I shouldn’t be; meals cooked in hours are demolished in minutes, buildings which took months to build drop to the ground in a single blast, relationships that lasted for years can be destroyed by a single word, a gesture or mistake. This is much the same - the things we do with care are undermined by carelessness or abandoned because we get bored. I have always been fickle; I grew a beard because I wanted to look different, I got used to it and now I am getting rid of it because I want to look different again. It’s just another kind of furniture to rearrange.

Underneath, I see my skin for the first time in some time, small stubbly hairs clinging to it, doomed like all the others.

The sink fills with clippings as I tackle one side of my face, then the other. It didn’t seem like anywhere near so much hair when it was attached to me as it does looking down on it, and there is still a lot more to come. I stop, attack the clippers with a brush to stop them clogging up, and continue. Both cheeks too now are covered in the ragged remnants of the beard, more gone than there, and somehow my face looks naked and vulnerable. I notice, too, that I seemed to have a stronger chin before I grew this beard than I do now that it’s on its way out – Christmas, no doubt, is responsible for that – and I understand why men grow beards that hug their jawline, lending definition where the years have conspired to take it away.

I stop at the top lip. I have been joking for the past few days about shaving it into a Hitler moustache for a day and wandering round town, just to see how people react. The feedback from my friends has varied. Some said they thought it would be in extremely poor taste. Some said that they would find it funny, but they suspected most others wouldn’t. One expressed concern for my personal safety. The thing is, I know that I’m a man who enjoys giving offence – my collection of t-shirts alone or my idea of acceptable behaviour on the internet are testimony to that – but also, I am curious. Would people stare? Would they verbally abuse me? Attack me? Is it right that one man has changed the way we look at this single superficial thing forever? I sort of wanted to find out the answers to that.

Using the clippers I remove the margins of my moustache, leaving the thick stripe down the middle, and I look at myself again. My face is stubbly, many scrapes of the razor from smooth, but the moustache looks enough like a calculated, cultivated choice that I can see what it would look like. I don’t look evil, at least I don’t think I do. I pull some comedy faces into the mirror, waggle my eyebrows, wonder if he ever did those things. No, I decide I look clownish rather than evil, though that might be because that is what I want to be. And yes, I know there’s Chaplin too, but somehow whatever people tell you his is not the name that springs to mind when you look at someone with a moustache like this.

How did it happen that nobody can ever have this facial hair because of one man? How many children get named Adolf now? Did all the Hitlers in the world change their surnames from shame, or did they just die out? Are these the right things to be thinking about well past midnight, my wife reading her Kindle in the other room, when I thought I’d only done this for a laugh? I look at myself again; I look uncomfortable but I don’t look evil, although I know that I am more than capable of cruelty. For a moment, I think about shaving the rest of my face with a razor, applying the cream, using the hot flannel and making the choice to look like this for a little while longer. When I started the process of shaving off my beard, I honestly thought I might do that, but here, confronted with the reality, it just isn’t possible. And yet I want someone to see this.

I walk down the hall. The bedroom light is on.

“Kelly, would you like to see me with a Hitler moustache?”

There is a pause.

“I don’t know! Hold on… no, come on. Come in.”

Originally, I had said that she would fall asleep and when she woke up I would be clean-shaven, the man she met again, but the curiosity proves too great. It’s not every day that someone offers to model a Hitler moustache for you. I go in. She is tucked up in the duvet, her favourite place in the world, warmly lit by a solitary bedside lamp. I know that she is minutes from sleep, if that, and that if I had taken slightly longer to get this far or begun a few minutes later she would never have seen this bizarre moment that almost never was. I move close enough so she can see me, and she laughs.

“What do you think?”

“It’s funny! Not threatening at all. Go on, say I’ll get you Butler.”

I oblige, shaking my fist and doing my best to impersonate a character from a sitcom I’ve never really watched. Odd, it was made in the early Seventies and was probably one of the last toothbrush moustaches anyone has ever seen – that and Mugabe, who is a role model for no one. I wonder if comedy is the only way we can reclaim that moustache. It sprung from comedy – Oliver Hardy, Chaplin of course – lurched into horror and tragedy and then lapsed into infamy and obscurity. And I know, even from wearing it for five short minutes, that the world isn’t ready for it again.

“Do you want me to take a photo of you?”

“No. It just wouldn’t feel right.”

Some things, I reflect as I stand back in the bathroom again, just aren’t funny and probably never will be. Trying to make jokes about them is a mistake. Perhaps I am growing up after all, perhaps that realisation is even more of a sign of age than the grey hairs in the sink, because I know perfectly well that a couple of years ago I would have kept that moustache for a day and enjoyed people’s glares, just as I enjoyed the looks I got from the American servicemen, proud in their regalia, at the Henley Regatta. I can remember that day, hot and busy on the riverbank, and I remember my t-shirt, a deeply offensive one about 9/11, and I remember their looks, because they looked as if they wanted to kill me. Yes, I must be changing – not too fast, not too drastically, but changing none the less - because I think back on that boiling afternoon and cringe. Just for a moment, I feel weary of shocking, criticising and conflict, although I know that the world (and I) will seem different tomorrow.

I have work left to do, so I run the tap and fill the sink with hot water. The time has come to finish what I started; rub in the shaving cream, wet the razor and complete the transformation from straggly to sleek. In the morning I will wake up; a new person, the old me and an older me all in one complicated combination. My wife will kiss me for the first time, oblivious to that, reckless where for months she has been tentative, and say “You’re back!” and everything will be as it was. And maybe I will be the only one who understands that ever so briefly, just for five minutes, I looked like the most evil man in the world.

Le Petit Marché

9, rue de Bearn.

- Sesame seared tuna with sesame and sweet chilli dipping sauce
- Fillet of lamb with basil cream, mashed potato and mange tout
- Chocolate fondant with praline creme anglaise

The moment when you know you’ve arrived somewhere new is different for everyone. For some people, it’s when the train pulls up at the platform or the point where wheels hit the runway. For some people it’s when you first see signs in another language, or buy something in an alien currency. It can be when you take a sip of that first crisp, cold beer (as it is when I go to Prague) or the point when your mobile lights up with a text telling you how exorbitant everything is going to be for the duration of your stay. I think, for me, the moment I know I’ve arrived in Paris might well be when I take my seat in Le Petit Marché and look at the menu.

It wasn’t always like this. The first time I went to Paris with my wife, on honeymoon, we stayed in Saint Germain des Pres on the left bank. Our hotel room – sleek and minimalist, muted lime green bedding and clean-lined dark wood furniture – was more expensive than any we’ve ever stayed in, before or since. A short walk round the corner were the famous writers’ haunts of the Twenties and Thirties, Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, now mainly full of Japanese tourists. Next to the latter, a Louis Vuitton store looked out across the square at an ancient church, the new religion juxtaposed against the old. The market on rue de Buci bustled with florists and grocers and the steam from my chocolat chaud smudged into the cold air. It was hard to imagine a more perfect part of the city, and back then the Marais was just an area on a map and an item waiting to be ticked off on a checklist.

Going there, towards the end of our honeymoon, was a revelation. We got lost in the narrow maze of streets, cool boutiques and tiny restaurants scattered everywhere, and couldn’t help but feel like we had stayed in the wrong part of the city. Everywhere we looked, we could see people we wanted to watch and views we wanted to exhaust. It was like the set for the film we wanted our lives to be. We sat under the elegant vaults of the Place des Vosges, sipping a sneaky glass of Moulin-à-Vent and planning our return. When we did, we knew we would stay in the Marais and we knew we would come here again.

When we did, a few years later, we did exactly that and Le Petit Marché was one of the restaurants we visited on that trip. I remember that I ordered badly – I always order badly – and I sat there in the atmospheric lighting trying, with limited success, to dissect a chicken that seemed to be more bones than flesh while Kelly looked on, ate her fillet steak and tried not to be smug, also with limited success. Despite that, I loved the place; cool without being intimidating, smart without being fussy and casual without being shabby. The menu was full of Asian influences without screaming anything so obvious or naff as fusion and the lighting, if not quite up to aiding a post mortem on poultry, was the kind that made people you knew look attractive and people you didn’t know look interesting. It was close to my ideal restaurant, and I wanted to pick it up and take it back home with me, even though deep down I knew that it wouldn’t have flourished in captivity.

Since then, any trip to Paris has involved a visit to Le Petit Marché on the first night and my most recent trip was no exception. As a precursor, we sat at the pavement tables outside Au Petit Fer A Cheval and polished off a couple of carafes of red wine while watching the evening begin and the streets fill with characters. We fell into a conversation with David at the table next to us, a perma-stoned American expat with little hair left, wire-rimmed spectacles and a strange multi-accented voice that always sounded on the verge of breaking like a teenager - or a muppet, perhaps. He had a keen interest in the opposite sex (which largely seemed to entail turning to Kelly and saying “will you be my wingman?”, despite my protestations that I was far better qualified for the role than she was) and a complicated personal life which doubtless would have made even less sense if I had had less to drink. It seemed to involve, as far as I could tell, an Iranian wife who lived in Morocco and saw David for a couple of nights every couple of months.

I could well imagine that an arrangement like this might well constitute David’s best shot at some kind of lasting happiness. I also imagined that David’s hangovers probably lasted longer than his happiness ever did, and when I realised this I felt a sort of tender protectiveness towards him, while simultaneously not wanting to spend much longer in his company. I also understood – too late, I’m afraid - why Kelly and had I got such a sympathetic look from the pair of pretty girls who had given up the table next to him as we’d pounced to grab their still warm wicker chairs.

David was very vague about what he did for a living. In fact, after a couple of carafes of white wine David was pretty vague in general, and his pretty vague pronunciation and diction hardly helped matters. The impression was that he was too rich to have to work, although he still did, and that at one stage he had jacked it all in to spend the best part of a year sailing around the Mediterranean. I really didn’t know whether that last bit was true. There were also stories about living in the same apartment block as Dominique Strauss-Kahn and being told to keep the noise down, but I couldn’t be sure if these were true. By that point I wasn’t even sure whether the wife in Morocco was true. David leaned over to me. “This is the best bar in the whole damn world.” he said. I knew that was true.

“We have to go I’m afraid. We have a dinner reservation at Le Petit Marché.” I said. That was true too.

We walked through the Place des Vosges, still as grand and gorgeous as ever, and passed under the archway onto rue de Bearn. It was odd to think that only the night before, walking through Reading, I had called the restaurant on my mobile and just about managed to make a reservation in my stumbling best attempts at French. Going through the door, it looked exactly the same as I expected from all my other first night memories. The tables were dimly lit and crowded with the handsome and the pretty, the expressive and the expansive, and we took our place in a room humming with the noise of conversations we couldn’t understand. It felt as much like home as a public place in a foreign country could be.

They sat us next to the table of Americans, something I suspect was deliberate on their part. I'm almost certain that, as some venues used to have smoking and non-smoking tables, the French like to have special zones for foreigners so that they are only polluting their own kind with any emissions. Many is the time in Paris that I have been right next to a table of Americans only to hear all the French speakers at the end of the evening as I make my way to the exit. But it was fine because they were nice enough; reasonably cultured, well enough travelled, not too loud and in no way obnoxious. Besides, we were making an effort to order in French and I was hoping that would set us apart.

Nights like our first nights in Le Petit Marché aren’t really about the food but I’m going to tell you about it anyway, because it was delicious. The starter has been on the menu for all the time we’ve been going there and I always order it: cubes of raw tuna, studded with sesame seeds and served simply with tiny ramekins of sauce – sweet chilli in one, soy and sesame in the other – and a handful of leaves, also dressed with sesame oil. You slice the tuna as thin as your knife will let you, dip the slices into the sauce for just as long as it takes to coat them, and enjoy. It’s the perfect dish in all ways but one; it’s over far too quickly. But I find the best starters are always like that. The main was just as good – thick, pink-middled discs of lamb served with a light, creamy sauce with a tinge of basil, with a generous helping of the best mashed potato I’ve ever tasted. Even the mange tout – a vegetable I’ve never liked – was so fresh and so terrific that I wasn’t sure whether mange tout was a name or an instruction.

Best of all, it was all washed down with a carafe of red. Everywhere you go in Paris you can get wine by the pichet or carafe - something which seems symptomatic of a culture where it’s acceptable to drink just enough, as opposed to back home where the only options seem to be not enough and too much, with an implicit predisposition towards the latter (“Are you sure you only want a small glass of wine?” someone had said to me at Kelly’s work leaving do, only the weekend before. It seemed somehow a very British thing to say.) I wish carafes would catch on at home, although I think I’m fighting a losing battle on persuading anyone of the benefits of that.

Dessert was disappointing. I made the mistake of ordering the chocolate fondant, even though I know I’ve never much liked chocolate desserts warmer than room temperature. And yet I wasn’t quite sure what it was from the menu, only that it contained chocolate, and I felt I’d been doing so well distancing myself from the Americans through my attempts to order in French that I didn’t dare ask. It didn’t matter though, partly because the praline crème anglaise - so far from the congealed English custards I’ve always hated so much – was so delicate and gorgeous that I half wanted to ask if I could take some away with me, or at least order a separate carafe full of the stuff.

That wasn’t the main reason why my underwhelming dessert was not important, though. The main reason was that I knew, as I watched the Americans gamely struggling with understanding the bill to my left and enjoyed the sight of the gangly French hipsters on my right talking about English film actors, a jumble of incomprehensible words and exaggerated gestures punctuated by the occasional incongruous famous name (an Alec Guinness here, an Albert Finney there) that I had arrived. I was in Paris, my favourite city, in my favourite Parisian restaurant, with a week of wandering and watching and meals ahead of me. I knew that when we left this place we could wander down to the Seine and take in the lights and the boats and the bridges. Best of all, I also knew that I might have better meals than this on my holiday, but I wouldn’t have one with greater significance.

Columnist

I'm very pleased (and more than a little baffled) to announce that I have a monthly food column in my local paper, the Reading Post. It's called RG1 EAT and is mainly going to centre around eating out and restaurants. I like to think those are subjects I know a little bit about, as an enthusiastic amateur anyway. Don't worry, it isn't going to talk about cooking as that's a subject I know precious little about. In fact, I know people think that if you like eating out you must also enjoy cooking but I've never bought into that myself - after all, I love music but I have no desire whatsoever to pick up a guitar. I think I'll leave it to people who know what they're up to; those who can, do, those who can't make dinner reservations.

I'm not sure whether it's going to appear online (if it does, I promise I'll post a link) but in case it doesn't, here's the text of my first column which was published last Wednesday. I don't know how much interest it will have for people who don't live in Reading, or don't like restaurants, but I suppose we'll see. Let me know in the comments. I'm thinking of writing about food a bit more in the weeks ahead (a week on holiday in Paris will do that to you) so let me have your thoughts on that too.

* * *

When I tell people I’m from Reading they say one of two things. The uninitiated say “Oh, the festival” – as if my hometown only exists for five days every year. I can’t blame them; it’s a view shared by much of the country and most of the media (they obviously don’t know about the brass band concerts in the Forbury).

The more initiated say is “Reading’s very good for shops, isn’t it?” I always want to reply by saying: I suppose, if you view shops like stickers in a Panini album and your idea of a good town is one that has all the same shops as everybody else, only more of them. In that case, Reading’s brilliant. We have four branches of Burger King. We have three branches of Boots. We have four Starbucks. Nobody can deny that we have more shops than nearly anywhere else. Go Reading! (I don’t, though. You get funny looks.)

The thing I want to tell them and never do is this: “Reading’s okay for shops, but it’s magnificent for lunch.” I should, because I believe it; it’s a terrific place to have lunch, and there’s much more to it than grabbing a toasted sandwich at Caffé Nero.

Take Picnic, one of my favourite places in Reading. Their lunchtime salad’s one of the best things you can buy for under a fiver. It’s a plate of dressed leaves, couscous and fun stuff: tiny mushrooms; olives; capers; peppers; the occasional surprise flake of salt. But that’s not all, because Picnic understands that salad’s only enjoyable if you put something tasty on top of it which only pretends to be healthy - something, fundamentally, which is not salad.

Depending when you go, you might get Parma ham, creamy mozzarella and soft sweet wedges of peach, or you might be treated to roast chicken – miles from the dubious cubes in supermarket salads - with lashings of pesto. If it’s warm enough you can sit outside with your lunch and watch the world go by, on their way to all those shops everybody says are so fantastic. It’s perfect.

Don’t fancy a salad? The alternatives are endless. You could go to the Mission and have their carnitas tacos – soft tortillas full of slow-cooked shredded pork, lettuce, sour cream and red chipotle salsa which are indecently delicious and miles away from anything you could whip up at home with a tired kit from Old El Paso.

If you fancy going upmarket, head down the riverside to LSQ2 and try their cracking set lunch. I’ve had chicken liver parfait, top notch Thai fishcakes, moules marinière and one of the tastiest burgers in Reading (not all at once) – and it’s a tenner for two courses. God knows how they turn a profit, but I’m not complaining.

If you feel more adventurous, head to China Palace for dim sum. They leave the menu on the table, you tick what you want and hand it to the waiter. It’s like food bingo, and appropriately enough the menu is a gamble too; you have to wade through the tripe and chicken feet (not literally) but if you choose well – the roast pork buns and Japanese octopus, for instance – it’s lunch unlike anything else you’ll find in town.

The best thing, though, is that the list keeps growing. I need to try Pau Brasil and the sushi place by the Hexagon, and I hear Chan Cham’s not bad. So next time someone mentions Reading, I’ll tell them it’s great for lunch. Now I just need to find somewhere that does a decent breakfast.

Letting go

“Jesus, I can’t believe it.” I said. “That shirt must be twelve years old.”

There was a pause and we looked at it there on the bed, on top of a heap of clothes, crumpled and sad.

It was my own fault for pushing my wife. A terrible hoarder, she keeps things long after the reason to keep them has gone, after the memory of what that reason was has long since disappeared. At the bottom of cupboards, in carrier bags hidden behind doors, in piles, on piles and under piles are things we do not need but never throw away. Our wardrobe still contains the suit jacket she wore on our wedding day, a beautiful pale blue herringbone, marred by a blob of jus from our first dinner as a married couple. We never got rid of the stain and she never got rid of the jacket, and after a few years I gave up asking her to. Recently I decided to lead by example and that’s how I ended up, late on a Sunday night (I always do these things late at night, when right-minded people are going to bed) looking at clothes I no longer wear and deciding what could go to the charity shop.

The early stages of the process were painless – work shirts that had never seemed like a good idea, not even at the time, Seventies patterns which were dated from the moment I got them home and soft, floppy collars that were more relaxed than I wanted to be in the office. Some were mistakes I didn’t realise until later – shirts that look respectable in the packaging but hate the iron more than I do, where after five minutes sitting on a bus you look as if you’ve slept in them. And then of course there were the t-shirts of yesteryear - some that had got a little too unforgiving, some that had got far too forgiving and some that just had slogans I couldn’t mean any more.

Then I got to the twelve year old shirt and, for the first time, I stopped.

“I remember buying this. I was living in Nottingham, and I went to a very cool clothes shop called Ark – I think it’s still there – with Dave. ‘Are you sure, mate?’ he said to me. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you usually wear.’ And I was so proud of it! It was forty pounds, I’d never spent that much on a shirt before, and it was by Mambo, and they were quite cool back in those days. This was the Nineties, remember.”

“It’s hard to believe, looking at it now.” said Kelly, and I had to admit she had a point. The rough check pattern had once been crisp and the dark blues used to sing, but now the colours had faded and the fabric seemed worn and waffly. Scrunched up in a ball it seemed like so much less than the shirt I’d worn on so many fantastic evenings in the old days, when I’d been someone else. Of course, back then I had dressed like someone who was far bigger than me and the shirt hung off me far too much, but back then I didn’t know anyone who would tell me that kind of thing. On the most recent times I’d worn the shirt it had felt a little tight and I know I wasn’t imagining it, because I have someone who tells me that kind of thing now.

I have a picture in the photo album where I’m wearing that shirt. It’s the summer of 1999 and I’m sitting in the back garden of my girlfriend’s dad’s house with my mother. It was somebody’s birthday party. I look so thin, shaven-headed, in this huge check shirt, only just turned twenty-five with no idea what the next twelve years have in store. They had put up a marquee and a DJ was in there, and he played Every Morning by Sugar Ray and You Get What You Give by the New Radicals, because it was the summer of 1999 and Mambo was a fashionable brand and I lived on another planet.

I looked at the shirt again. I knew that it was just an object, and that my memories were my memories, and that they would survive whether I put the shirt in the plastic bag or burned it out the back or buried it in the centre of the earth. So why did I feel sad about giving it away?

“It’s not in bad nick, you know. Don’t you think it has another couple of years in it?”

My wife smiled at me, because she knows as well as anybody that this sort of thing is difficult.

“No, let it go. Look at it, it’s not even all the same colour any more.”

“Look, only there’s only one shirt left. Do you remember how we bought this one?”

“How could I forget? We went to the shop and it was on a dummy perched above the escalator, and it was the only one in the whole store. You wanted to give up and leave it but I insisted on asking, so they got the dummy down and took the shirt off and it was exactly your size.”

“And you said it was an omen.”

“It was!”

I look at it, a light blue short-sleeved shirt with a combination of flowers and stripes. Some of my friends had never liked it, which because I’m stubborn had only made me like it more. I’d bought it before we went away on holiday to Canada in our first year of marriage, and it had fitted me perfectly. Being married, for me at least, means that I buy clothes that fit.

“This is the shirt I left in the wardrobe of that bed and breakfast in Montreal, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s the one. And you were convinced that all was lost and you’d never see it again. You didn’t stop going on about it. So I just mailed the couple that ran the B&B and they sent it by airmail, and they never even charged us.”

“And it’s the shirt I was wearing when I had that accident in Cal Pep, isn’t it?”

“The very same.”

Cal Pep is a magnificent restaurant in Barcelona where you sit at the bar and they don’t take orders, they just keep cooking in front of you and bringing plate after plate of seafood until you’re full. I was wearing the light blue floral shirt and wrestling, with no small degree of ineptitude, with some kind of clam when it opened and sprayed tomato sauce all over me. The surface area which that tiny clam managed to cover had to be seen to be believed.

“That was dreadful. I had to go back to the hotel room smelling of seafood.”

“You looked like you’d been shot! It was so funny.”

We soaked the shirt in cold water overnight, and I complained that everything was ruined and the stain would never come out. She told me not to be so stupid and that there was nothing that could go wrong that we couldn’t fix together. And that shirt and that story are emblematic of a conversation I expect we will continue to have, in one shape or another, for the rest of our lives.

“That was a lovely holiday, wasn’t it?”

“It was.”

I remember how we went to the rooftop terrace of the hotel, and she relaxed in the jacuzzi while I sat on a sunbed, reading an autobiography and smoking a cigar. I remember the smoke disappearing into the Barcelona skyline, and the traffic glinting in the sun on the roads below. I remember the shirt, soaking in cold water in the bath, waiting to prove me wrong. And there it was on the bed five years later, the last garment in the pile, rescued from Montreal, miraculously free of stains, ready to be disposed of. I thought to myself that the nicest thing about inanimate objects is the stories they accidentally become receptacles for.

And then I thought that I’m wrong, because it’s always been me. I’ve always been the receptacle for all those stories. Even so, I couldn’t help myself.

“Can’t I just keep this one?”

“Of course you can. I think you should.”

Barry

Iain and I have sat next to each other at work for over three years now, and I realised the other day that it’s one of the longest relationships I’ve ever had. Much like a marriage, there’s something comfortable about knowing his foibles and routines – his propensity for having clementines after lunch every afternoon for instance, or the way he guffaws at the Reading Post website while he eats them.

I particularly like the way he perks up whenever an attractive woman walks past his desk. Once, several months back, a rather fetching lady crossed his field of vision and I caught him – and he’s usually so subtle – gawping at her, much in the style of Kenneth Connor in the Carry On Films. There was a pause for a moment, and then my instant messenger flashed with a message from him (we always chat on IM, even though we sit next to each other). I’d break her back was all it said. From that, I deduced that Iain must have been without for a few weeks, and I briefly considered taking him to the vet and getting him seen to; maybe it’s not like a marriage after all.

Iain does like a good rant. He swears at his computer all the time – either it’s going too slow or too fast, or it isn’t doing what he wants it to. None of our computers work as fast as our brains, to the extent where we’ve started to suspect that they are built to accommodate the idiots we find ourselves surrounded by. But none of it’s for show, it’s just what he’s like; one time I came in early to find Iain at his desk, the only person in our area, in the middle of a tirade directed at his recalcitrant mouse. Iain bangs his mouse on the desk a lot - I think it might be the only thing that stops him from banging his fist on the desk a lot.

Yet whenever I have a problem with my computer I call Iain over for help and advice, he stands over me and everything works without any problems. I think he missed his vocation in life; he should have worked in IT. Everything seems to magically function better with Iain around – even me. He’s one of life’s eternal dads: patient, capable, yet always on the brink of exasperation. When he says “bloody” he sounds like Prince Philip, and you can imagine him as a very posh old man, instead of the very posh younger man he is. But at the same time he’s every bit as childish and puerile as me, and I’m very lucky that through a series of coincidences we’ve shared a workspace for so long.

We have much the same conversations every week, but that’s fine. They punctuate the five days we spend together and help to give them structure. We find we need that, too, in light of the changes. Phil is leaving soon, for a new job in our bigger, uglier building down the road. We talk about clubbing together and buying him a Fleshlight as a leaving present, and he knows me well enough to laugh but not well enough to realise that I’m not really joking. I move some things in my calendar so I can make his leaving do, because I already know I’ll miss him.

Gemma is long gone, though even months after she left I still find I look up when I see a figure heading towards her desk or think of something to send her in an IM before I realise she’s no longer here. We swap occasional mails and talk about meeting up, but her diary’s very full - I’m told a date has been fixed for January, though I half expect her to cancel about a week ahead of time. I heard second-hand about Gemma’s engagement in Edinburgh, saw people congratulating her on Facebook and thought A few months ago we would have been among the first to know. We would have seen the ring. This would have occupied us at lunchtimes for weeks. Now it is often just Iain and me at lunch. He has a round of sandwiches, a cereal bar and a packet of Frazzles every day, and every day I envy his Frazzles even though nothing is stopping me from buying some myself.

One conversation which is a good barometer of how the week is going starts like this: “What are you up to this weekend?” On a good week, when the work comes in quickly and isn’t too unpleasant and you’re out and about in meetings it can be Friday afternoon before you realise that you’ll soon be at home and free of the ring of the phone and the bold print of an incoming email. On a bad week your mind turns to the subject of two days off very soon. I think our personal record is Monday afternoon, and it wasn’t that long ago.

It’s funny; Iain and I are the same age, with roughly the same views on a lot of things. We both have the same view of what constitutes “working hard enough”. We both like toilet humour and terrible puns. We share an interest in indoor ornithology. And yet our weekends couldn’t be more different; his, planned for him by his wife, seem to involve trips to petting zoos or farms, days out and fun excursions, occasional forays into the centre of town (always described as if it is a dangerous, crowded place). Iain does not control his diary and seems no less happy for that – and I suspect many married men are like this, delegating the logistics to their other half and going wherever the calendar tells them to go. I on the other hand just do what I like, slouch into town if I want, loaf around the flat all day, eat out all the time. On Monday mornings when we have the conversation we always have, the one that starts “How was your weekend?” I often wonder what it must be like to have a life like Iain’s.

It was one of Iain’s more unconventional weekends that got me in trouble a while ago.

“You’re on leave in a couple of weekends’ time, doing anything nice?”

“We’re all off to Scotland.” he said. Another endearing thing about Iain is that he believes himself to be Scottish in the absence of any proof – birthplace, accent, cautious financial outlook – to the contrary. “We’re going to visit my brother’s soon to be ex wife.”

“That’s a bit unusual, isn’t it?”

“Not at all.” said Iain, in a rather frosty and defensive way which suggested that he knew perfectly well that it was. “It wasn't an acrimonious split, and she said she’d like to stay friends.”

“Oh.” I said. One thing I love about the word “oh” is that if you say it right, it can mean or suggest all manner of things but that technically, you haven’t said any of them. On this occasion, I meant it to say My, aren’t you modern? I like to think the dubious look I got from Iain meant that I had succeeded.

“So she’s booked a cottage and invited loads of her friends to stay. We’re going up with the kids, and there will be other people there at the same time. I’m really looking forward to it.”

“Is your brother going to be there?”

Sometimes I think Iain should just adopt a continuous frown whenever he’s speaking to me, only stopping when I say something that cheers him up. I suspect it might save him time and effort.

“No, don’t be ridiculous.”

“Oh.” I said.

“It’s a lovely cottage, I’ve seen pictures on the internet – it’s got all mod cons. It’s got a games room and everything.”

“Is there a hot tub?” I said. Iain didn’t seem very impressed by this.

“Yes there’s a hot tub.”

“Oh.”

I meant that “Oh” to convey something like I imagine you’ll all end up in that hot tub like some kind of debauched swinging party, I know what you posh types are like, it’ll be “White Mischief” all over again, though I slightly blotted my copybook by then saying all that out loud.

“Anyway, she has a new boyfriend now and he’ll be there too.”

“A new man? How did she meet him?”

“Well, he’s known her for bloody ages.” said Iain. The bloody sounded remarkably like Prince Philip. “They were friends years and years ago, when she was first dating my brother, and we think he’s held a candle for her for years.”

We’ve all met men like this – the perpetual understudy, waiting for the situation to become vacant. Hoping against hope that the woman you want will go for coffee with you and complain about her useless, feckless boyfriend, daydreaming that one day she will realise what terrible life choices she has made. When I say “we’ve all met men like this” what I really mean is “we’ve all been men like this”. Or – more honestly – I mean “I’ve been a man like this”. I was secretly quite impressed by the persistence of Iain’s soon-to-be-ex-sister-in-law’s (someone really should think of a more elegant word for that) suitor. How many people’s lonely pursuit ends in success? And isn’t there always a risk that, like Gordon Brown, you’ll covet the top job for years only to discover that you’re rubbish at it?

“And he finally got the girl, did he? Hats off to him. What’s his name?”

“Barry.” said Iain, with a facial expression that seemed to say Go on, make something of it.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. His name’s Barry.” Iain’s expression was unreadable now, not one I had ever seen before. It could have been irritation, trepidation or amusement. It never occurred to me that if I could work that sort of thing out I would have far better people skills.

“You have got to be joking. Barry? You have a friend called Barry? But you’re posh! All your friends are posh! You have friends called Bunty and Biffy and Timmo! You know Tobys and Tarquins! How could anybody take a Barry seriously in those circumstances? I could imagine it if, maybe, he was called Barrington but Barry? You don’t get posh Barries. Name me one posh Barry, I challenge you. You can’t do it, can you? Because I’m thinking about it and all I can summon up is the fat car salesman from EastEnders.”

I’m afraid I may have carried on in this vein for several minutes more; once you start me off it’s very hard to stop me, especially when I’m on my soapbox and finding myself amusing. Iain just looked on, still impossible to figure out. He looked as if he both wanted me to stop and wanted me to carry on. Not that I was paying him that much attention by then, maybe if I had been it wouldn’t have been so disastrous.

“I happen to think Barry is a perfectly nice name.” said Iain.

The signs were all there, and they all said “TURN BACK”. Nevertheless, my conversational juggernaut crashed through the barrier and continued towards the abyss.

“And another thing. How could you possibly date a man called Barry? Just imagine saying I love you Barry. I love you so much You just couldn’t. There aren’t any pop songs about people called Barry. You wouldn’t call a romantic hero Barry. And that’s just romance, imagine when you get to the bedroom. Fuck me Barry. Do it to me Barry. Oh Barry, that feels so good. More, Barry, more. Oh Barry, I want you. Again. Again.”

By the time I had run out of things to say I had sort of lost track of time, but I did have a sneaking suspicion that my voice had got progressively louder as my monologue had gathered momentum. Iain just gave me another curious look and said “He’s a very nice chap. Now let’s get back to work.”

Back at my desk, my IM flashed with a message from Iain. Nothing unusual there, after all we talk all the time on IM even though we sit next to each other. It’s like a marriage, you see.

IAIN: Do you remember the guy in the audit department that sits next to me?

ME: Yes. Why?

What a stupid question. Of course I did, he was in every day. In his mid-forties, friendly, walks with a limp. Sometimes comes to the kitchen with us on our coffee breaks. Has a Brentford F.C. mug which never looks one hundred per cent clean. Has kids from a previous marriage and a new girlfriend. If I turned to my left and craned over Iain’s shoulder I could see him, tapping away at a complicated spreadsheet. How on earth could I forget him, had Iain taken leave of his senses?

Tap tap tap. Smirk smirk smirk. Then another flash.

IAIN: What’s his name again?

ME: Oh.

Old boys

I am always late for everything. Dave, by contrast, is always early; early arriving for things and early leaving, early to bed, early to rise. When he comes to visit me he texts me at 10am saying “I’m here” while I lie in bed contemplating a shower, wondering how long it will take me to run the hoover round and make up the spare bed. The next day, he rises at seven (old habits die hard, and they can’t be broken just because it’s the weekend) and lets himself out. By the time I wake up he’s long gone and usually back home, with the solitary exception of the time he locked himself in my bathroom by accident.

So it’s no surprise when I make my way to the train station, all packed for the holiday, juggling a wheelie case in one hand and a polystyrene tray filled with coffee cups, sugar and stirrers in the other (a peace offering, to say Sorry I’m late, again) to find him already there, sitting in the departure lounge, bag all packed, tickets all bought, not quite out of patience but nearly there.

He looks thinner than I remember; diagnosed with high cholesterol like me, his doctor didn’t offer him a pharmaceutical easy way out the way mine did, and he’s been on a fun free diet for months. It shows. I think he’s thinner than he was when we were at university together. This rankles with me, because I am meant to be the one who’s lost weight. But there are consolations: early to bed, early to rise, no cheese – if that was my life I don’t know how I would cope. But then Dave loves his little boy, and I couldn’t cope with parenthood either.

Funny how we are so similar in so many ways, but the fundamentals of our lives are very different. I don’t know what the pair of feckless nineteen year olds we used to be would have said, if you had told them that almost twenty years later they would be going on holiday together, sharing a hotel room, drinking in the sunshine and talking about their respective ailments. Even back then I had ailments, I was a trendsetter in that respect. “Mate, it’s just a headache” he used to tell me. “You haven’t got cancer.”

Our holidays are often nearly scuppered by a last minute health scare. A few years back his son came down with chickenpox and we had a nerve-wracking run-up to our departure date, waiting to see if his wife would get it too leaving him stranded at home. This time the days leading up to our trip have been marred by Dave’s bout with explosive diarrhoea, something he tells me all about - in far more detail than I needed to know - as the coach trundles down the motorway. As he does so, the informative screen at the front tells me that we’re passing Windsor Castle, and that it’s the largest inhabited castle in Europe. I make a mental note never to tell anybody that fact at parties. I make a second mental note that there are very few people you can discuss your bowel movements with. Perhaps that’s what friendship is; it’s as good a definition as any.

“We’re going to be sharing a bedroom and bathroom for five days.” I tell him. “So I think we need to lay down some ground rules. No wanking. Not even in the bathroom. Not even in the shower.”

“Trust me, it’s going to be preferable to the stuff I’ve been producing in the bathroom over the past few days. Ebony or ivory – take your choice.”

This turn of phrase, I realise, is one of the reasons why I love him.

In the airport, we do all the things we always do before going on holiday. We hand over our cases and swear faithfully that we’ve packed them ourselves. I want to say “I packed it myself, but my wife printed off a checklist for me because she knows that without her I’m hopeless” but I don’t, because I want total strangers to retain a modicum of respect for me. We fold our coats into plastic tubs and watch them go through the x-ray machine, awkwardly putting on our belts when we get to the other side. That’s usually the point when I realise that it’s real and I’m going away, that soon we will be in the air and all this will just be a dot on a map, growing increasingly distant.

We look round the duty free and I spray my wrist with fragrances I have no intention of buying. We grab a bite in an Italian restaurant and talk about plans for our destination – where we’ll go, what we’ll eat, what we both want to see. What Dave doesn’t necessarily realise is that I’ve been on my own for half a week, the flat full of absences. Her books, unread on the bedside table. Her clothes, not yet taken down, hanging on the clothes horse. Her pile of CDs next to the sofa, never tidied away. Everything I see has reminded me of everything I can’t see, and the silence at night and in the morning is something I cannot make myself like. And so seeing Dave, and knowing that we will be like an old married couple for the next five days, makes me happier than he knows. If he wants to describe his toilet habits in detail, I for one am happy to let him.

“The worst thing is that I’m on Imodium” he tells me, fortunately after we’ve finished eating.

“Why is that bad exactly?”

“Because it’s feast or famine. Eventually I’ll go to the toilet and then it will play havoc with my haemorrhoids.”

Ah, the perennial topic of Dave’s piles. I remember the first time he told me about them - we were sitting outside the café in the sunshine, and I reassured him because I knew exactly what he was talking about. I never used to; piles were always a source of hilarity, something that happened to other people. I remember the time I went to visit my dad and found a shopping list written on the whiteboard in his study: Bread, milk, Anusol. I distinctly recall sniggering about it. I remember, too, that when I was much younger my friend Dan suffered with them and when we all took the piss out of him he turned to me once and said “What you don’t understand is that there are two kinds of people; people who’ve had piles, and people who will have piles one day.” If I was still in touch with Dan, I would probably tell him he was right.

The thing I could never get over about having piles is that moment when, after straining in agony on the porcelain, you look down into the toilet bowl. Based on the ordeal you’ve just gone through, you fully expect to see a bunch of rusty keys clanking in the water but instead, it just looks like the product of any normal visit to the lavatory. There aren’t even serrated edges. I remember telling Dave this when he first complained to me about having piles.

“I told my doctor that thing you’d said about the rusty keys.” says Dave as our minibus scuttles across the tarmac to our waiting plane.

“Really?”

“Yes. He laughed like a drain. ‘I’ll use that when I talk to patients’, he said.”

“Charming. Haven’t you brought any, you know…”

“…Arse bullets? Yes, of course I have. I just hope I don’t have to use them.”

I know that Dave’s bag contains suppositories and enough Gaviscon to fill a bath. I know that I have cholesterol pills, and pills for my acid reflux, and Gaviscon tablets, and painkillers, and Nytol in case I can’t sleep because my acid reflux gets bad and I worry that I’m going to die before I wake up. I know that we are the youngest looking old people on this or any minibus. I know I can tell him that I worry, because I know he will understand.

“I told Andrea that we’re going to be wandering round Lisbon like two old men, complaining about all our ailments. She was so sweet. ‘But you won’t look old’, she said to me.”

That’s very kind of her, and it may have something to do with the fact that I haven’t seen her in ages.

“You know what the worst thing about piles is?” I say.

“No, what’s that?”

“It’s the packaging for Preparation H. If you look on the tube, in big letters, it says Three way action. Honestly, it does. Look at me: I’m 37 years old and my only chance of three way action is sticking ointment up my arse.”

Dave laughs. Even after nearly twenty years, it still feels like an achievement when I get a laugh out of him. I know he feels exactly the same.

“Shit, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Just out of interest, how bad was your diarrhoea?”

“Put it this way.” he says as the minibus comes to a halt and the double doors crank open. “There was one point at the weekend when I could have jetwashed an entire patio.”

I get that feeling of revulsion and pride again. Dave will start getting jittery soon; he’s scared of flying, an irrational fear which has got worse as he’s got older. I in turn am working on an equally irrational fear of having a heart attack while the aircraft is in mid-air (it’s not enough to die in a screaming fireball along with all the other passengers, I have to be special). We haul our hand luggage and our neuroses up the steps – I don’t really know which weighs more - and prepare to board the plane.

I stop at the top, fish out my boarding pass and I think to myself My, what a wild week we’re going to have.