Milk, milk, lemonade

As anyone who’s ever been unattached in the month of February will know, Valentine’s Day is unequalled among all of the card industry’s enforced holidays in its outright horror, especially if, and let there be no mistake about the facts here, you’ve simply chosen to remain single that year, of your own free will.

The best place to fully appreciate the enormity of the situation is to take public transport home after work. Even if you’d spent the whole day oblivious to the fact due to your active drive towards celibacy, you can tell it’s Valentine’s Day because you can’t move on the tube for commuters thrusting their ostentatiously brandished, prickly stemmed, parasite-baiting, mass-marketed, hurriedly chosen floral manifestations of vague affection into your nostrils like twelve scarlet, pollen-y reasons why they’re better than you, wearing the kind of slap-invitingly smug rictus worn only by people who apparently need these overpriced, lacy ribboned reassurances that their unfortunate partner isn’t going to start some squalid, crack-induced affair with the first sexually available cretin who has the ill-judged inclination to try and lure them away from their desperate clinging. “Get your rapidly-wilting icon of couplehood out of my face!” you might be surprised to hear yourself say, for instance, out loud on a crowded tube carriage.

Some might say that’s a tad bitter, of course, but I say to them, “Remember that romance is nothing but a bourgeois construct.” After all, if you can’t get laid, at least it looks slightly better if it’s because you’re opposing ideological conditioning.

It’s very difficult to be around them when everyone in the world seems happily paired off, but I’m lucky enough to know several perfectly pleasant couples. One such pair took me in and made me dinner one Valentine’s Day. They seemed to be under the impression that I would be otherwise spending the evening spilling lonely salt tears into my uni-serving of cold gruel and waiting for sweet, sweet death. They didn’t know anything, of course. I had a pizza in the freezer.

My whinings about being single are usually kept to a perfunctory minimum at all times, but if pressed, the floodgates can open, and such was the case that night. A couple of bottles of wine into the proceedings, and I started to make an impassioned address bemoaning my plight, the social amoebas and borderline sociopaths that the girls I liked seemed to gravitate towards, and how difficult it was to meet new people that you got on with, let alone wanted to, say, dress in a frogman suit and smear with Branston sandwich pickle.

“Well…” said the female half of the couple, as she sipped her wine thoughtfully. The word hung in the air as she paused. I sensed she was formulating some gloriously sympathetic insight, borne from the caring, maternal instincts deep within her female psyche. I readied myself for the answer to all my problems. “…you could always start taking it up the jacksie.”

It was certainly a pragmatic suggestion, but my eyes must have betrayed a need for alternative strategies.

“Why ARE you still single?” she asked. I couldn’t help but notice that she hadn’t asked this question in a “I can’t believe someone like you isn’t being propositioned left right and centre” kind of way; but more of a “you must have some really weird sexual habits that put people right off” kind of way.

I hadn’t really thought about there being a readily definable reason for it. It just seemed to be one of my life’s consistencies.

“Um, I can’t find anyone into Branston pickle the same way I am?”

This facetiousness provoked an unwanted session of delving into my recent dating history, an activity much like fishing around in murky water when you’re washing the dishes and coming across some unpleasantly unidentifiable foodstuff.

“What about that psycho girl that was in love with you last year?”

“Well, I think you just answered your own question.”

“But you can’t be too picky. You’ll end up on your own.”

“I think there’s a difference between being picky and choosing not to date psychotics.”

“She had really nice hair.”

“Yes, I’m sure that’s what the guys in forensics would say as they picked them off my butchered corpse.”

“You see? Saying stuff like that doesn’t impress girls. Don’t you ever want to have kids?”

“Not as much as I want the last thirty seconds of my life back.”

A few days later, the matter was still playing more heavily on my mind than usual. I was sat on the bus on my way to work, and next to me a mother was taking her young son to school. They were engaging in the kind of relaxed chat that I could never envisage having with a small child. The prospect of a conversation with anyone less than fourteen is scarier than electroshock therapy or having the secret police burst into your bedroom with torches in the middle of the night.

The mother was asking her son if he had a girlfriend. He was certainly having more luck than me in the romance stakes, reeling off the names of three girls that he regularly saw on a social basis around the playground.

“You’re very popular with the ladies,” his mother said.

“Yes,” he agreed, modestly. “I know what girls are like.”

“Oh, really?” Said his mum.

“Yeah…”

I had a sudden moment of clarity. I strained to listen to what the infant Romeo had to say, hoping that whatever that proverb was about the things coming out of the mouths of infants being really incisive and profound would prove to be true, that some simple childlike logic could cut through the confusion and change my outlook on things. The mother waited expectantly too, about to get a window into her young son’s burgeoning personality.

To our shared dismay, he simply said, accompanied by the appropriate hand actions, pointing to breast, breast, front bottom and backside: “Milk, milk, lemonade - round the corner, chocolate’s made.”

A couple of weeks later, and in a strategic rethink, I’d practically decided to give up gleaning advice from the partially overheard conversations of random infants on buses. I’d resigned myself to spending the weekends of the next couple of decades catching up on my TV viewing, when my friend Diane called with an invitation to a party. I readily accepted, even though she suddenly got cagey when I pressed her for details of who would be there, how much free alcohol there might be, if I should bother having a shave, etc.

“I’d better explain…it’s a singles party.”

My immediate reaction was, of course, I’d rather be throttled to death with my own small intestine, but vague curiosity and a stunning lack of alternative plans saw me swallowing my ego, along with several large vodka tonics, and showing up.

It was to be held at the flat of one of Diane’s friends, but we met in a nearby pub for some last minute Dutch courage. What was it with the Dutch? They seemed to have a virtual monopoly on courage, not to mention elm disease. And still their insidious nationalistic rebranding of everyone paying for their own meals continues to go unchallenged.

In any case, Diane explained that most of the people attending were from an internet dating website that she’d been loitering on for several months without any noticeable success. I wondered about the wisdom of meeting people in the flesh that you hadn’t even fancied online, where they could easily lie about their height and dental hygiene.

We arrived, and were greeted at the door by the organiser. Cath was what my Grandma would have called “no stranger to the dessert trolley”, but she was apparently worth her weight in, well, money, as her enormous flat made my own look like the hovel it coincidentally was. In a flagrant display of disposable income, she had even hired a little cockney serving girl to take coats, pour drinks, be mistaken for a guest, and so forth. The waitress had already been approached by about three of the less aspirational males by the time we got there, and Cath warned me off trying to fraternise with her.

I disobeyed these orders almost immediately on an early search for ice. The girl, who looked like a street urchin that Cath had just found on the street and commandeered to carry around canapés, came into the kitchen with some bottles of wine, wondering which were red and which were white. I told her that it was probably best to keep the darker bottles out of the fridge. “I just don’t know my wine,” she protested, though apparently abstract concepts of colour differentiation looked as though they were quite a strain, too.

About 25 people had arrived and it took me just as many seconds to form snap judgements and rule every single one of them out of my long term future. It didn’t take much with me – a slightly annoying laugh or badly chosen watch and that was pretty much it. You’d think I was fending people off with a pointy stick, but my selection criteria are simply a cruel twist of nature that I’ve learned to live with. Admittedly, there was one really cute girl, though you’d apparently had to camp outside her the night before in order to get a turn at being rejected, so I resigned myself to taking my chances with the remainder, Diane having quickly abandoned me to flirt with a hairy accountant.

I perched nonchalantly on the arm of the sofa, only knocking a few twiglets onto the girl sat there, who turned out to be so posh that she was completely bewildered by anything not said in an accent associated with minor aristocrats.

Even though it’s my least favourite question in the world, I asked her what she did for a living.

She frowned and said “I live in Chelsea.”

“Nice work if you can get it,” I offered.

Her face contorted, searching for something, anything that could connect our two universes, and in the silence that followed, empires rose and fell, and several species of fish evolved into tree-habiting mammals.

I was about to repeat the question, just to see if she’d misheard me the first time, when the serving urchin lurched past with a tray of prawns in her hand and a lit cigarette in her mouth, creating a sufficient diversion for me to spend some quality time in the kitchen with some gin.

I was annoyingly disturbed by two Irish guys who, by the end of a five second conversation had marked me out as someone not operating in a professional capacity of any kind in the financial services industry. They suggested that a career in investment banking could be the answer to my problems. I didn’t remember telling them I HAD any problems, though it was probably just physically apparent by that point. Then began a lengthy discussion which involved them telling me what was wrong with every female they’d ever been out with. At one point, one of them was trying to convince me that the boundaries of what could be considered ‘unfaithful’ behaviour were “actually pretty tenuous, Paul”, and that given the right context, even receiving oral sex could be considered not much more than enthusiastic flirting.

The smoking servant appeared in my peripheral vision with two packets of frozen pizza squares and a quizzical look on her face, so I hastily excused myself and ducked back into the fray. I thought my luck had changed as the inaccessible cute girl brushed past and started to make smalltalk, but sadly she was quickly grabbed by a pasty looking software engineer who to be fair HAD been waiting in line, and he seemingly had an uncontrollable urge to explain his job to her in microscopic detail.

I concentrated on looking vaguely lost for a while, until the hostess noticed that she’d better try and occupy me before I tried to ask the waitress out or gnawed off one of my own limbs in frustration, and told me to find some music. The hi-fi was so expensive as to be indecipherable. I jabbed a few random buttons, and handily found a radio station playing early Nirvana. This didn’t go down as well as you might have thought, even though disaffected nihilism seemed like a fairly appropriate anthemic choice for the evening. The hostess grabbed back the remote, and I spent the rest of the evening feeling jaded and experimenting with various substitutes for tonic.

As the singles filtered away, I remember thinking that the long journey home was not an attractive prospect and promising to wash all the glasses in exchange for a night on hostess’ sofa, only breaking about two of them before she stopped me. She helpfully pointed me in the direction of the last tube, Diane having long gone off with the accountant, whose personality obviously compensated for the disturbing amount of body hair that was visible even without him disrobing.

I think the moral of the story is: Never ever agree to ever go to any parties ever. As an unnecessary reinforcement to this theory, I spent the journey back wedged between two elderly gents who were in an even worse state than I was, and who definitely didn’t work as financial services professionals, let alone reside in Chelsea for a living. As one fell asleep dribbling on my shoulder and the other started an aggressive verbal fight with his bottle of cider, I could only focus on the poster opposite.

It was for a dating agency. It read: YOUR IDEAL PARTNER COULD BE SITTING RIGHT NEXT TO YOU.

(Back to Live Wrong and Prosper)