Deal breakers

Monday afternoon couldn’t have been more perfect. I had finished work the week before and was meeting my fantastic friend Laura at one of my favourite restaurants, Forbury's, for a long leisurely lunch to mark the end of work and the beginning of the festive season. (Incidentally, one of my big aims for next year is to get Forburys to sponsor my blog. I eat there often enough for crying out loud.) The snow was falling as the wine was poured and our starters arrived, and the square outside looked like it had been liberally dusted in icing sugar. It was that startling bright pristine white that snow has in the wondrous but all too brief moment before it gets ruined by people, much like my laptop screen before I start typing.

Laura is one of my very best friends and was witness at my wedding. We’ve known each other for nineteen years, have never rowed or fallen out. I might have to get a gold watch when we hit the big 2-0, because god knows she has put up with enough, including having to endure dating several of my friends. Not only has our friendship survived that, but it even emerged intact from us going on holiday together this year (sadly, some don’t).

Best of all though we never seem to run out of things to talk about, and Monday was no exception because we got onto the topic of deal breakers. The context was that a little while back Laura met a young man and felt a certain frisson of attraction. They got chatting, got flirting, and took part in that exciting verbal dance where you trade information about yourself, deciding what to reveal and what to conceal. And then, inevitably, he asked the question Laura always dreads:

“What sort of music do you like?”

Laura doesn’t really have strong opinions about music. She ought to develop some I feel, as this is a stock question that all men ask in the early stages of a relationship because music is, well, important to us. Laura, having nothing to say, fell back on the standard response women have been using for at least a couple of decades now.

“Oh, you know. A bit of everything. What do you like?”

And then came the deal breaker.

“I find the only stuff that really moves me is death metal and some dance music.”

That, as they say, was that. The word that stood out from that sentence, to me at least, was “some”. What dance music? Dance music that sounds ever so slightly like death metal, by any chance? Is there a crossover? If there is, we may finally have found some music I like less than Mika.

I was having exactly this conversation with Gemma a few weeks back about deal breakers. Everybody has them: whether it be bad breath, unibrows, vegetarianism or an unnatural obsession with quoting the scripts of Red Dwarf in their entirety, there are all manner of tics and tells people have that are the dating equivalent of a giant neon sign saying Abandon hope all ye who enter here. But the one Gemma, Laura and I all agreed on was definitely music - for some reason this, more than anything, is an easy way of summing up whether somebody could ever be your kind of person. It makes us tribal in a way that very little else does.

When I was at university, I got off with a girl called Sharon. I made my move in the tacky surroundings of Downtown Manhattan, a grotty nightclub in Oxford. The bar there was a room about as conducive to good loving as Josef Fritzl’s basement, so when Sharon invited me back to her student accommodation I accepted without hesitation. There wasn’t even any pretence that I was going to get coffee, except possibly the next morning. I was on a promise, and back in those days that was something I saw only slightly more frequently than Halley’s Comet.

“Would you like to put some music on? Help yourself, the cassettes are down there under the kettle.” she said as we got back to her place.

I perused them. First up was a record by largely unsung Eighties solo artist Hazel O’Connor. Have you heard of her? If you have, you understand what I was going through. If you haven't, pretend I never said anything and whatever you do, don't download any tracks. Never mind, I thought, what’s next? To my growing horror, it was another record by Hazel O’Connor. And another. And another. I had stumbled on the bedroom of Hazel O’Connor’s number one fan. That wasn’t all though, there was also some Dire Straits for a bit of variety, if your idea of variety is choosing between equally shit recording artists. In the end, the best of a bad bunch was Iron Maiden. So I got off with her on her single bed with Iron Maiden playing in the background. Most of my experiences with women back then were more than faintly ridiculous, but turning up the raunch factor with Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter playing in the background took the cake even by my standards.

It was the deal breaker.

A couple of days later Sharon’s friend Ami caught up with me.

“Sharon didn’t understand why you left so suddenly. It’s a shame - she told me that if you’d stayed a bit longer you would have got at least a hand job.”

I have many regrets in my life, but I can safely say this is not one of them. Can you imagine being wanked off to Iron Maiden? It‘s the sort mind-boggling prospect that makes me wonder if “flaccidate“ is a real word (if it‘s not, it should be). You’d almost certainly end the experience with a foreskin that looked like it had been fed into a shredder. I imagine it would be right up there with frotting a cheese grater.

There were no deal breakers with Kelly. I’ve been very lucky, all things considered. Even before we moved into together, we consolidated our CDs at her place. “I’m so glad you like music too, it’s very important to me.” she said. Although when we combined our CD collection the overlap was about three records and two of them I didn’t even like. Now, many years later I’m so glad you like music has morphed into If you play that Dent May record one more time I am going to jam it where it can only be removed using keyhole surgery but we muddle along all right. Well, we do since she threw out her Mis-Teeq CDs and the Dido record had that tragic "accident", anyway.

Later on, the last of the dessert wine has been drained and I walk Laura to the train station so she can head to London and do her final festive chores. We say our goodbyes and I stand out the front of the station trying to decide where to go and what to do next. The snow is coming down really thickly now and the smokers are huddled under the shelter, clanging away and working out their next move. Not for the first time recently, I find myself thanking my lucky stars that I quit all those years ago. The summer is for smokers: when the sun is blazing and the pavement cafes are packed it’s easy to carry it off, but in conditions like this you can’t help but look a little desperate.

Walking back into town I am struck by how surreal Reading looks in the snow. There is so much of it that the scene is almost Dickensian - although the garish glare of the Burger King does its best to be a party pooper. Reading has a chilling four branches of Burger King, for reasons I’ll never quite understand - surely if you’re going to eat there you could spare the calories for a slightly longer walk.

Walking, it turns out, is a challenge beyond all of us. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Reading in this much snow, I’m not sure anyone else here has either. I look around me and everywhere people are gingerly stepping through the streets, sliding and stumbling, united by their ungainliness. If you took a video camera, staged a flash mob where everyone had to moonwalk, and then played the whole thing backwards it would look an awful lot like this.

Later on, the full impact of the snowpocalypse that hit Reading will come to light. People stranded in traffic for hours. Colleagues and friends of mine taking five hours to get home on a drive that would normally take twenty minutes. Kelly, stuck shivering at a station platform for ages after two abortive attempts to drive home to me. Cars abandoned in streets and on motorways. Buses with no passengers, stationary on the hill, manned by angry drivers with nowhere to go. Eerie scenes of walking through a deserted town that looks like something out of a disaster movie. And people banging tediously on about a shortage of gritters.

But in this moment, frozen in more ways than one, it’s just plain beautiful. My little town almost seems grumpy, as if it resents being made gorgeous against its will. The stern Victorian brickwork has been forced into a makeover it never wanted. Not for the first time this year, but possibly for the last, I smile at the quirks of this place that has ended up being my home. How could you not love living here? And that’s the point when I realise: that may be my biggest deal breaker of all.