“So, tell me about yourself...”
I trotted out my careful little story. My name was Richard. I’d just split up with a long-term girlfriend and was ‘finding myself’ in the country. Luckily, the whole idea sounded so ludicrous to her that she started barking her own opinions at me immediately. “The only thing you’ll find here is a lot of Edwardian bigotry. Even the plumbing’s inbred.” She slumped forward, helping herself to another glass of wine. “God, I hate it here. Hate it. I turned up at the shop the other day and they wouldn’t serve me.”
“Oh, why not?”
“They were closed,” Jackie screwed up her face. “Seriously. Like at five o’clock on the dot. They stay open later in Wales.” She drank some more of the expensive Norwegian sparkling water she’d put on the table and then slugged back another glass of wine. “I was banging on the door demanding they let me in. ‘I am not one of your nineteen-fifties housewives!’ I screamed at them, but they wouldn’t let me in. I could see them inside, tutting at me. So now I get everything delivered by a van. And they all
hate
me for it. I don’t know what I’ve done wrong.”
“Perhaps...” I began, but noticed her eyes had thinned warningly.
“Do go on,” she said, her voice flat. I noticed the cat which had been rubbing against my leg beating a hasty retreat.
“Well,” I pressed on. “The country isn’t like London. It’s not even like Primrose Hill. They’re different here. You know, perhaps if you don’t treat everyone like they’re a Starbucks barista, it might work better.”
“I see,” she said. She clearly didn’t. “It’s like being surrounded by a load of stupid interns you can’t fire. At least when I worked on a magazine they’d burst into tears when I was frightful, but they don’t do that here. They’re so hard to read. And they’re so placidly friendly. What’s all that ridiculous nodding about? You know, you can’t walk past one in the street without a nod. If I did that in Piccadilly I’d be locked up. There’s a column in that, I’m sure of it.”
“Oh,” I said. Clearly she’d never read a self-help book. “Have you ever read Desmond Morris?”
“
Catwatching
.”
“Ah. Well, it’s a bit like... well, you know how cats show other cats that they are not a threat when they meet them? I think that’s what the Country Hello is. We simply meet strangers and nod to them to reassure them that we’re not a threat and we don’t view them as a threat. It’s an empty road and there could be highwaymen about. And we don’t do it in town because the streets are always full. Unless it’s three am and you’re on an empty road in which case you may well nod at people to show that you’re friendly. If you’re not running the other way.”
There was silence, apart from a distant purring. I braced myself for an outburst. As far as I could tell, she had drunk nearly two bottles of wine on a stomach lined only with rocket. She seemed fine, but could turn at any moment.
“That... is... fascinating...” she said eventually. “Brilliant. I am so doing a column on that. Tomorrow. I am going to walk the shitty little lanes nodding at people and see what happens. Wonderful.” She stood up with a scrape of chair. “And now I’m going to make you pudding.”
“You’re having some?”
She narrowed her eyes. “No, of course not, and it’s rude of you to even ask.”
She doled out the desert, cutting me a huge slice of cheesecake out of a box, a full quarter-of-an-hour, and then giving herself the smallest tick. She took half of it on a teaspoon and pronounced it delicious. Personally, I found it hard going. To her it was delicious because it was forbidden food. To me it just tasted like over-sugared supermarket cheesecake. But we both stared at each other, smiling and pretending that this was a perfect dessert.
“Do you ever eat?” I asked her.
“Of course I eat. I just don’t
eat
eat.” Her voice was bored. “Years ago, I decided that food bored me. I was eating most of my meals wrong—a bowl of porridge while drying my hair in the morning, queuing for frozen sushi from outside the office and then cramming a sandwich into my mouth while running to get to the theatre in the rain. And I just thought to myself,
Why do you do this? Why do you spend all of your time memorising the calorie content of these things, none of which have any flavour? It’s no fun, so why not just stop eating?
So I did.”
Actually, this seemed straightforward enough to me. Like giving up jogging or Mandarin classes. Only...
“Well, of course, I still have to eat something, but I know when I absolutely have to. I love everything about food but the eating of it. And it means that here I am in my late forties and I have a better figure than when I was half my age. It’s what”—her eyes glinted with triumph—“makes those biddies in the village resent me so much. There they are in their big floral print behinds and Matalan gilets, and here I am, a size ten head-to-toe in McQueen. Even the wellies. It works for me, and who are you to judge?”
I wondered if she realised how ironic that motto was.
WHY DO POSH RESTAURANTS HATE THIN PEOPLE?
Jackie Aspley is victimized on an evening out.
D
ON’T BE A
mum with a pram in a coffee shop, and don’t be a thin person in a nice restaurant. The one place where not being obese is obscene is in our modern halls of fine dining, where a lack of appetite is treated as a personal affront.
I had gone out to have a nice evening. I went on an actual date (his name’s Richard and he’s very nice for a bumpkin). While I would have been perfectly happy with a glass of wine in the local pub (well, not the most local pub, as they water their wine down), Richard insisted on taking me to a local fine dining experience. You know the place—a thatched old inn with swans by the riverbank outside and a vacuum of bare walls and bare tables inside. I signed up for the degustation menu, figuring it would be a bit like sitting down at a party with canapes, but no such luck. They just kept bringing me food. And I kept on sending it back. I ate a little of all of it, but not since I saw the photos of my ex-husband’s stag-do in Blackpool have I seen such excess. All the food was lovely, don’t get me wrong, but it just didn’t stop.
I had come to this restaurant to get to know Richard, but there just wasn’t a chance with all the food and the puffs of vanilla kidney air, and all the questions about whether Madam was enjoying her food, perhaps Madam would like another slice of bread, would Madam like a little more water, let me light a bacon incense stick, was Madam really finished, and on and on it went. The idea of an intimate dinner for two had seemed perfect, but we may as well have been kissing in a crowded lift.
If I wished to have my every social move quietly judged by strangers, I would have gone round for tea at his relatives. Instead just endless judging from cheap foreign labour, and a quiet little sneer every time a course was picked up and taken away, simply because I hadn’t cleared my plate.
Society expects women to be thin, and then gives us a hard time when we try our best to do it. Meanwhile, all Richard was doing was filling his face, with no regard for how little or how much I was eating. Instead he kept on asking me questions. Good job I wasn’t eating much—I was singing for my supper!
Whenever I tried to ask him something, naturally, he was filling his face. Could I love a man who would probably be clinically obese fairly soon? I began to hate him (just a little). And this is no use, of course, as I know you’ll want to hear everything about him.
For a start, not another foreigner. Not even a Belgian. Richard just seems to be normal. He doesn’t have a job (but isn’t claiming benefits), but he has a degree. When I ask him what’s the worst thing his last girlfriend could have said about him he shrugs and mutters that he was perhaps a bit confining. I’d love that. Frankly, I’m in it for Mr Clingy. I wonder if I can get her number out of him? For enquiries over a girly chat. But he seems a bit shy of all that (FYI readers, I asked if he could be photographed on our date for this piece and he demurred). But don’t worry, I’m sure he’s an axe-wielding monster and I’ll be filing pieces even as he’s chopping off my limbs.
The thing is I was finding it very hard to get to know him with all the waiting that was going on in the restaurant. I felt like a zoo exhibit being stared at by polite penguins. I finally put my foot down and asked, pleasantly but firmly, for them to leave us alone. When I’d finished, they beat a retreat, but all had not gone down well with Richard. “Jackie, you really can’t treat everyone like a Starbucks’ barista,” he said and left.
Thanks Restaurant. You owe me a boyfriend.
Jackie Aspley, The Daily Post
J
ACKIE PHONED TO
apologise. Well, she phoned a lot over the next few days. Sometimes to apologise, sometimes to harangue me, and then to tell me she was leaving me alone, before immediately ringing me again. There were a lot of texts too, but autocorrect and wine got in the way of them making any sense.
The phone lurked on a table in the cottage. I’d turned it onto silent, but the cat would watch it buzz and jiggle periodically.
Interesting, I was in hiding from my quarry. You could argue I was being clever and playing the long game. But if so, what game was I playing? If I threw away the sim and abandoned the match, then I’d wasted money. I could, I supposed, just hang around here until the rent on the cottage was up, but then I’d be bound to bump into Jackie in the village shop. And then she’d start hunting me down and that would go terribly wrong.
Another text, and the phone edged its way a little closer along the coffee table.
Or I could stick to my original plan. And make her happy.
FINE I GIVE IN. JUST C M AGAIN. WHAT R YR DEMANDS????
My demands? Just 2 –
Sanity and courtesy.
BEING NICE
Jackie Aspley goes to finishing school
B
EING NICE IS
easy, everyone. Well, pretending to be is, at any rate. I’ve learned a few things from Richard in return for him agreeing to go on another date with me. The first is that we won’t try a restaurant, we’ll just go for a long country walk. Since I live in the country and all my dating profiles ever have said I like long country walks, I figured I may as well go on one, and it might as well be with the man I am dating.
Truth to tell, it is cold and wet and when you do reach a view you’re so out of breath you’re kind of wishing it was a view of a packet of crisps and a sofa and not some dull old rolling hills. But there we are.
Richard is a proper gentleman of the old school. He’s very dapper and he knows what to wear. Or, at least, more than I do. I turned up for my walk and he said, “Oh, you can’t wear those.” I’ve spent my entire life refusing to be told what to wear by a man, but in this case he was right. You cannot wear crocs on a long country walk. Or even a short one. He’d packed some spare wellies in the back of his car (“Just in case”), and even if they were a bit big, I like to think the extra effort in wobbling was like those walk-yourself-thin-trainers that gave me bunions. Anyway, so armed, we set off to go and embrace the countryside. Or, at least, as much of it as we could manage. It’s strange to live in the countryside and go for a walk in it. Like a busman’s holiday, really.
A lot of my London friends talk a lot about Slow Food (which sounds like an excuse for forgetting to turn the oven on till your guests arrive) but let me tell you about Slow Walking. It’s about picking a spot in the countryside and heading towards it at a snail’s pace. At first you resent how stubbornly it refuses to get any closer and then you welcome any marginal drawing nearer it makes as a huge leap-forward. You go from thinking,
that’s a nice hill
to kind of hating it to developing a Stockholm Syndrome obsession with its beautiful curves in the hope that one day it’ll turn up and let you go. And then, just as you’ve decided you’ve made heroic efforts at mounting the hill, and are doing pretty well actually, some blasted hill runner will come skipping past you like a smug mountain goat. This is, BTW, pretty much the story of my life.
Anyway, we finally reach the top of the hill and I feel pretty much like I did when I got divorced (wrung out, wearing horrid shoes, and not wanting the man standing next to me to see me cry). And then Richard claps his hands together and says, “Shall we go for a bit of lunch?” And, as if by magic, a little fairytale pub appears.
It was all rather wonderful really—there was a roaring fire, a friendly dog, the smell of spilt bear, and a snug little table with a view down the hill. Richard pushed a ten-pound note into my hand. “Go up to the bar and order us a drink, would you?”
I knew right now that this was a test, and I viewed myself objectively. No table service. Fine. I could walk to the bar without tapping my coin on the counter, or waving the note around. I could do this.
“Hello,” I said, smiling sweetly. “Lovely day. What kind of red wines do you have?”
The Ancient Personage behind the bar smiled a Santa Claus smile. “Well, they’re all red,” he said.
I risked darting a nervous glance back at Richard, but he gave me a tiny, encouraging nod.
“Then that will be fine,” I told him. “And a beer.”
“What kind of beer?” said the barman. Typical! The kind of pub where they don’t care about wine but it’s all kinds of beer named after things in Hogwarts. I damped down the urge to say something and simply pointed to a beer tap, figuring that if I wasn’t allowed to complain, then neither was Richard. I handed over the money and (again since it wasn’t mine) let the barman keep the change. I took the drinks and we sat down to enjoy them while looking out over the hill. My wine, I’ll have you know, turned out to be a very lovely Italian Merlot.
MISSION ONE VERDICT: Success
Jackie Aspley, thedailypost.com
COMMENTS [most popular]:
Squidgee: ‘What has happened to Our Jackie? #NoFunAnymore.’
Benifite: ‘Why does no-one ever go to a Little Chef on a date? Too much real life!’
SanityClause: ‘She’ll screw it up. She always does.’