Thursday 9 May
Just a quick update –
At the Inevitable Curry before the big band gig at Ronnie’s last Sunday, there was much amused comment from the chaps about my theory put forward in the last blog that there is a tendency when dining out with your Significant Other that her meal will go wrong. Just to recap, while you are piling into your Steak/Chicken Phall/Seafood Ho Fun/Saveloy and Chips it is often likely that you notice that she’s gone all slow and quiet and is diligently examining something on the end of her fork. This signifies that her food, whilst everything over on your side is hunky-dory, has Gone Wrong.
I must be explicitly clear here. She’s not being fussy or difficult, there’s something technically at odds with what she ordered. Her Thai Fishcakes/Caesar Salad/Lemon Chicken/Vegetable Pasta Bake suffers from one or more of the following-
It is still frozen in the middle
It is burnt
It is a different dish to the one she ordered, and she is allergic to it
It has a hair in it (Funnily enough, this must be more common than we think, as most of the lads have a hair in the pizza story)
It is absent altogether
If it is a salad (likely), it may contain woodlice.
This could of course all be karmic. As chaps, when we take Her Indoors out for a slap-up, it has a primeval echo of the old hunter gatherer proudly returning from the kill, and garnering favour with the allocated female of the breeding group with a delicious array of gnu components. Similarly, these days, we want the Meal Out to reflect well on us. We want to provide and ensure pleasure for the mate via the medium of restaurant selection, and appear generous, sensitive and able to provide. One finger mark in the crème brulee can scupper all this, so maybe it is our fault for throwing all that expectation out there.
It may also be that all restaurant food is awash in stray hairs, fingerprints and other miscellaneous detritus. It is widely known that the Female optical set-up is way way more accurate than the Male when it comes to close-up work, which is why a lot of electrical component manufacturers employ only women on the factory floor, so I guess it’s quite possible that us chaps have been happily munching away on all kinds of chef’s “specials” for decades.
Alongside the ongoing work on the Seaplanes Of The Axis Powers Diorama, I will be conducting ongoing research into this phenomenon. I need to fid out if this works the other way around-perhaps it is possible for a chap’s tea to malfunction if it is a lady taking him out.This could add weight to those who maintain that this is a karmic rather than a gender-based issue. Marks will be given for the following-
Disaster Magnitude (amount of hairs in pizza, size of woodlouse etc)
Differential disaster magnitude (Applies if your meal was amazing, and partners’ behaved as we’ve come to expect)
Novelty
Content relating to humiliation
Food still alive
Other miscellaneous
After our team of human relations experts has sifted through the mounds of information, I will publish the findings.
Off to the garage now, to pay for the Volvo’s wing mirror which got sheared off by a passing van, the driver of which thoughtfully didn’t leave a number. 470 smackers! Ouch! Infernal Mumchancer!