Food for thought

 An oily bird

This evening I was sitting at the dinner table with Jack, I was in my pyjamas being ill, and our friend Dillon was over eating our beef stew. Dillon's going through a few difficulties at the moment and so I thought I'd make him feel better by talking about mine.

'It's not about you,' he screeched. 'It's about me.'

His worries are severe health problems, mine are minor social inconveniences.

'What you don't realise,' I said, 'is that I turn 34 this year, and the last time I had a boyfriend I was 31. That's just...'

'Well, that's not exactly true is it?' said Dillon, raising his eyebrows at me.

'It sort of is,' I said. 'I was at that event last week...'

(It was an award ceremony in Sweden. I have a new job that propels me into a completely different world to the one I inhabit. I ate pheasant, sipped just a tiny bit of Chablis – as I'm living sans alcohol – and watched the King and Queen of Sweden loaf down the stairs, twenty minutes late for dinner.)

'...and I was sitting next to two really old men, and even they weren't interested in me. And there I was thinking: widen the scope: young, old, half-animal-half-human, anything will do.'

'Your problem,' said Dillon. 'Is that you've stopped drinking.'

'So you'd date a minotaur?' asked Jack.

'I suppose so,' I replied.

'Or an upside down merman with a tail for a head, and a head for feet?'

'Yes, I don't see why not. Anyway,' I continued, looking at Dillon. 'It turns out even the coffin dodgers aren't interested in me because there was this 50-year-old woman across the way and they wanted her.'

'My friend's granddad is getting married to a 30-year-old,' said Jack. 'And he's 74.'

'Why didn't you introduce me to him?'

'Even she's younger than you,' he said. 'Look Mum, you've got to think of it like the BP oil crisis. Once BP had loads of money and loads of oil, and people were offering them more on the table, and they were like "no, we have loads of money and oil" and then all the oil poured into the sea, disappeared and they had none, and now no one will give them more oil or money – or it's like when apple's stocks and shares plummeted in the 80s... well, that's what you're going through now.'

'So, I'm like an oil slick?'

'Yes, you're like BP. You had loads of offers, and now they've disappeared into the sea.'