by James Goss
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.
DON’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
JACKIE 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
BEING 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.’
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IF YOU FOUND it hard making it through the article above, it really wasn’t any easier actually dating Jackie. For one thing, she left out a few things—the muttered swearing when it rained, the complaints about the blister she got, and the rude things she kept saying about the barman just loud enough for him to hear. But, overall, you know, it was quite a successful date.
I’d made a list of things I had to work on with her. I wanted to make people like her. I wanted the village she lived in to like her. I wanted her to feel happy. Then, just kind of, I figured she might start to understand people.
DUSTER: Jackie Aspley update please?
ME: Wait and see.
DUSTER: You have not, we notice, killed her.
ME: It’s all in hand. Trust me.
BEING HER BOYFRIEND was tricky. One thing was easy, though—we didn’t have sex. Having had sex with Romeo, I figured it would be easy enough, but for some reason I really didn’t much feel like it. Luckily, neither did Jackie. She just asked me to hold her and told me that was nice. One evening, when far too drunk, she told me that she’d never had proper sex. At uni, she’d kept on dating gay guys, then the people on the first newspaper she’d worked on were all awful, so she’d never done it until she’d met her husband, and he turned out to be so bad at it that it left her forever wretchedly disappointed.
“And,” as she said, “I like you so much, I’m not sure I could face finding out that you were crap in bed too. So I’d like to postpone it as long as possible. Hope that’s okay. You’re being so nice about it.”
I nodded, and added ‘Give Jackie Orgasm’ to my list. I looked at it and changed it to ‘Give Jackie Orgasm?’ Something she said nagged at me. Overall, though, it was quite cushy. I’d spend the nights hugging her, watching television, sleeping in the expensive bed with her, and then sneak home in the morning to feed the cat.
WHO ARE OUR ROMANIAN INVADERS?
Jackie Aspley befriends a Romanian Beggar
SUVENA USED TO be a dentist. Now she sits on a bench on Marble Arch in the rain. When it stops raining she ventures as near as she can to a 5 star hotel without getting arrested and begs for money.
“I tell my family back home I have got work at a dentist’s,” she tells me in flawless English. “They would be so sad if I told them the truth. They would order me home. But the problem is, I was promised work over here, and then the dental surgery who offered it me cancelled it after I arrived. They said the position was no longer available, but I think they didn’t want to get the bad publicity your paper gives people who employ Romanians. So I must beg until I can get the air fare home. It is very cold.”
I feel awful for her, and insist she takes my Hermes scarf. I assure her that she can eBay it for at least £200, but she tells me she does not even own a smartphone. She refuses to take my phone, partly because it seems to embarrass her, and partly because it seems to always be ringing with people wanting to shout at me. I have to take three calls during our interview.
“You make so many people so cross,” she says with a laugh. “What do you do to them?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her.
“I used to be a dentist. And yet people like you less than me.” She lays a hand on mine. “Poor you,” she says, and I get the taxi back to the station thinking that things must be pretty bad if a homeless Romanian dentist pities me.
Jackie Aspley, thedailypost.com
COMMENTS [most popular]:
WinSomeArmy: ‘These people are the vermin of Europe and you’re sending this cow to give them hugs? Get over it!’
SanityClause: ‘She’s different now she’s eating the happy sausage!!!
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HER NEXT ARTICLE went down even worse. The only thing you need to know about “Jackie Aspley’ Search For The Perfect Teabag” is the dreaded phrase at the bottom. “There are no comments on this article.”
JACKIE WAS IN a real mess. She sat in the village coffee shop and her hair looked matted together. She was wearing a designer dress that looked as though it had been slept in. She’d put on make-up, but it looked as though she’d turned her head to one side at the last moment. She kept smiling at me, and it took me a few seconds to realise she was trying not to cry.
I put my arm around her before I realised what I’d done.
It all came flooding out in words, so many words I didn’t know what to do with them. “My editor took me out to lunch, which is normally when she tells me that I’ve really upset someone. And I was wondering what I could possibly have done... and then she told me that I’d upset no-one. And that that was the problem. No one cares about me any more.”
She looked up, and before I’d even thought about it, I said, “But I care about you.”
“Don’t say that,” she said, squeezing my hand. “My editor says it’s all because of you. At first there was a proper spike in interest, but then when you turned out to be nice and normal and... and... good for me, then people started complaining.”
Wait. People complained that someone was less broken?
“She showed me print outs of horrible things they said about you on the site. It’s so lucky you refused to be in any pictures or let me use your last name, because you’d hate it all. You’d hate it all so much. And that’s not the worst of it. My editor said that my articles since I’ve met you have become less good. No one looks at them. No one wants to advertise next to them.”
The irony of all this floored me. I’d meant to make her a better person, but in doing so I’d made her less good. Although, thinking about this, I could have killed her, rather than her career. And that was worth it. She still had an amazing house and fields of animals. She had kept on telling me how much she hated being a journalist.
“This is good, isn’t it? You said you wanted out. This is the chance.”
“Yeah,” she said, and her voice was small. I talked on about her running a food business, of creating jobs in the community, and she kept on agreeing in a smaller and smaller voice which eventually faded away entirely.
“What’s wrong?”
She looked up, running fingertips around her eyes, drawing the make-up out in panda smudges.
“My editor has given me an ultimatum,” she said. “I’m either to dump you or I’ll be dumped from the paper.”
This was my out. Amazing. But it felt like a hollow victory.
“What did
you say?”
“I refused. She told me to think about it over the weekend. She’s spiked my piece on cupcake recipes.”
“Okay.” I gave her a hug.
“Okay?” she said, her voice picking up again. “I’ve committed columnist harakiri for you and you just say okay?”
“I’m stunned, that’s all I can say. The woman I first met would never...”
“Oh,” Jackie laughed. “She was just as bat shit crazy. But now she’s the same in a nicer way.”
We hugged for a bit. She wasn’t wearing perfume for the first time ever. She smelled really nice.
“We’ll always have cats,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, rallying as she raised her cup. “Here’s to cats.”
I WOKE IN the middle of the night to hear a noise that I thought was mice in the skirting board. My first thought was that the cats would be pleased. Then I worked out what it was.
I followed the tapping noise through to the living room. In front of the chilled embers of the fire, Jackie sat typing.
“I’ve come up with a third way,” she said. “I’ve told them to print this and, if they don’t like it, just to sack me. No redundo, nothing. Just get me out the door. But they won’t. This is personal dynamite.” She gave me a tiny little smile. “And, if it is a suicide note, then it’s a brilliantly honest one. It explains everything about me. And every word of it’s true.”