How To Be Tactful When Talking To Women, Part I: What Not To Say



It’s night time, and The Woman and myself are standing companionably around the stove, ready to cook our dinner. She lurches and staggers on the spot with a glass of gin in her hand, then leans forward to try to light the flame. She pumps the ignition sparking thing several times. When nothing happens she leans forward so her hair falls over her head, sticks her nose into the ring of the burner and swears profusely and imaginatively at length on the subject of stoves, their manufacturers, their ancestry into the sixth generation and what she’ll do to them when she gets her hands on them. In doing so she accidentally finally manages to get a spark from the sparking gadget, which crackles into the amassed cloud of unburned gas sitting on top of the stove and sets it alight. It goes

KAWOOBEE!!

A flash of blue flame lights up her face, narrowly avoiding incinerating her eyebrows and melting her hair. She stumbles back, catches herself, swears with feeling, grumbles, and, for good measure, has a fortifying swig of her gin. She smacks her lips a bit, then drains her glass in one hit, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and turns to the bench to fill it back up again. She’s a bit like a female version of Captain Haddock from the Tintin stories, but without the beard. At least when she shaves.

Meanwhile I give my full and undivided attention to our meal, bubbling away innocently and innocuously on the stove. Bubble bubble. When The Woman’s ancestors immigrated from Glasgow they brought along with them to The New Country that unique, unmistakable and indefinable Scottish sense for fine gastronomy and creative cooking that has for decades now been taking the world by storm, eliciting praise, wonder and glory in fine-dining restaurants in the most select quarters. Being by nature blessed with the gift for culinary imagination and innovation The Woman has achieved what not many would have thought possible, and has managed to improve on the original handed-down-the-generations recipe. As a result we are now having for our dinner a deep-fried marsbar-pie floater.

The house is quiet. Both of our children are still in the local hospital’s Intensive Care Unit on a drip, recovering from last night’s dinner of charcoaled haggis stuffed with dark chocolate, orange marmalade, tabasco, bicarb soda, sump oil and vegemite. The conversation turns to places where we could go to if ever we have a holiday.

“Some bloke at work today was saying you can surf near Rainbow Beach, but you’ve gotta drive down the beach a bit”, The Woman slurs between two gulps of gin. On her father’s side she is a distant relative of Shane McGowan’s. In a good light her teeth look a bit like his.

“That’s right, it’s called Double Island Point”, I reply, while gently, lovingly and tenderly stirring our dinner with a cricket bat.

“He was saying there’s some really good waves there.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that as well. But it’s also a shark breeding ground, apparently. Heaps of sharks there at the point.”

“Ah.” She looks thoughtfully down her glass. Then she brightens up and says:

“But that’s all right. If they’re breeding there they’ll be too busy fucking each other to be able to come over and eat us.”

The logic of the statement is inescapable and undeniable. I look down at our dinner, made up of 33 percent butter, 33 percent lard, 33 percent oil and 34 percent sugar. It’s turning green, and big clouds of black smoke are billowing from it. A greater picture looms in front of me, extrapolations to and fro between the sharks’ lives and our own appear on my mental horizon, and the cogs start ticking over like avalanches in a ski resort. An irrefutable conclusion floats before my mind’s eye, a lightglobe moment as inexorable as the trajectory of a crocodile swimming towards a dingo pup on a rope, and I turn to her and say:

“We could try that too if you want. We could just fuck all the time and not eat. You could lose some weight that way.”

Deafening, icy silence. Stony granite slab face. Million volt death glare. The temperature in the room drops perceptibly to sub-zero levels, and outside in the trees by the house various assorted birds wake up from their sleep with anguished shrieks, take flight, and, abandoning their nests, eggs and babies, disappear into the night, never to be seen in these parts again.

It occurs to me belatedly that this might, in the eternal ebb-and-flow of boy-girl relationships, be one of those things that could arguably be described as A Bad Move.

A Pretty Bad Move.

Probably not one you’d want to use on a first date at a restaurant.


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