– What do you do?

Imagine opening with that. We have just sat down. I’ve conceded on location and gone into this stinking Carluccio’s. My preferred McDonald’s is staring jealously from across the street, and she pulls that one out. It speaks of a corruption in your soul to choose Carluccio’s over McDonald’s. On judgement day, Carluccio will have a lot more to answer for than McDonald, whose only crime as far as I can tell is exploitation of poor workers. A far lesser evil than balsamic vinegar at £8.99.

– Oh, you know, bedroom comedian, writer, thinker, philosopher… I lead a rich inner life.

– Seriously, what do you do?

– I work part time at an offlicense. Fuck sake. What do you do?

I might have a massive knob for all she knows. I am getting irritated. There is actually nothing wrong with my knob. It’s fine. Good even; I wouldn’t swap it for the world. I would swap it for the world. I’m not stupid.

– I’m a lawyer.

Yeah, that fits. I maintain that I might have a massive knob for all she knows.None of this bothers me because I’m a feminist. I would happily have sexual relations with a woman who could partially fund my lifestyle. She looks at my steak, visibly regretting her salad.

– I only ordered this fucking thing cos you decided to play it Cosmopolitan.

This is reference to her mulling over the menu in a way that revealed she was going to order in a self concious manner thinking I both noticed or cared. I’d rather be eating three double cheeseburgers, three chickon mayos and three medium fries, but you don’t see me forlornly staring across the street.

As if the situation wasn’t bad enough it becomes increasingly apparent that she is going to put out. It is a general principle if mine that I won’t have sex with any woman who would stoop so low as me. So on top of the contempt I now feel sorry for her. Just as I’m thinking of all the ways I might change her mind, including such wild possibilities as frequently using the word knob. I see her hand bag move slightly to reveal Dawkin’s The God Delusion. That is a step too far. It’s not the atheism that bothers me but the sheer basic level of it. I can just imagine her nodding innanely at phrases like ‘the wonder of the universe’, ‘the beauty of the universe’, or even ‘the wondrous beauty and mystery of this most complex universe’. That final one is too much to think about and I let out an audible “eurgh”. I’ll save you the embarassment of the rest of the evening, especially from the gross Dessert Ordering Fiasco. It is plenty to say that we did make… not so much love or hate as an affront to nature. I’m not going to bother with the comic tropes of impotence and bathos. They aren’t the worst of it. The whole shag was just the biggest lie I ever told. To add to the depravity she actually managed to climax. To further add to it she used the frankly hackeneyed ‘yes’, with about six ss, and more exclamation marks. Finally, to cement this occassion as winner of Most Vulgar Sex Act, she lay back in faux contentedness and said… brace yourself for embarrassment… ‘yummy!’ All this inspite of the depressing nature of instigating it in my Hemel Hempstead bedsit in front of The Terminator looking on from my adolescent poster. I think the anthropologists need to revise their theories because I have uncovered new evidence that Hemel Hempstead was built on a native American burial ground.

Her great tragedy is to have the mind of an fifteen year old trapped in the body of a thirty four year old. Returning to her orgasm (with apologies): she came with excessive vocality as if she was proud of her pastiche of pornography; the parody of love¹. Her ability to climax efficiently only revealed to me that she masturbates excessively, mind probably still glowing from some banal fact about a spider. I call this Her Grand Lie.

She did at least have the dignity to sneak out at 5am and block me on e-harmony.com.

– e-anharmony more like.

I say to a friend in an email.

Glasses raised to Sam Harrigan, attorney at law.

Love from,

¹ Martin Amis said this sometime.