This isn’t a revolutionary idea exactly but it is a good one: have you tried going to dinner with your friends? It’s really good, and I can thoroughly endorse it. Get four of you, ideally (two is fine in a pinch), book a table a few weeks ahead of time, block the night out in your calendar, accommodate for a hangover the next day, and really over-order on starters. There. That’s your next couple of Thursdays sorted. You’re welcome.
There’s some weird magic to Mates Dinner™ that elevates it above the usual facing-your-partner-and-splitting-a-bottle-of-natural-wine routine, and though I can’t figure out exactly what it is, I can describe the symptoms. First, no matter how much you order, no matter what huge and abundant tour of the menu you all take, the exact right amount of food always comes out. This is inexplicable but it also means you don’t just have to have one plate: you can have a little bit of the butternut squash, you can have a flap of salami from the charcuterie board, you can have a forkful of charred aubergine you didn’t want but is actually your favourite thing, etc etc, (it is hard to split an oyster, which is London restaurants’ current starter du jour, but that’s fine with me because they are disgusting).
Block the night out in your calendar, accommodate for a hangover the next day and really over-order on starters
Secondly, some magic also comes out at the time for the bill: despite the fact that three bottles of wine and a couple of shareable desserts come out, once you split it all four ways it somehow comes out as less than you were expecting. Why is this? I can, again, only really attribute it to ancient magick, woven over the city by a long-dead wizard with a taste for lambrusco. There is no other reason that a huge meal I’d been calculating in my head as being in the mid-hundreds has come out at £75 each, all sorted over Monzo.
Third, and most importantly, it’s a great way of circumnavigating the city. I have a list on my phone of restaurants I want to hit up — deeply private, don’t enquire — and a group of boys who block out the first Friday of every month to wear shirts and go for nice dinner. We’ve been yanked out of our usual east London comfortable haunts and made to wobble back via new and exciting pub routes to get home.
The weird thing about living in the city is you have to try very hard to go out and experience that city, and so going to (from my note, don’t know why the exclamation mark is there) “rambutan!” and winding back via the two good pubs in London Bridge and a couple of the many terrible ones is a great way of seeing the old place with fresh new eyes. Plus, you’ve just had the best part of a steak you’d never have the nuts to order on your own and heard some really good gossip about someone’s workplace. Some of you might already be doing this, but based on the number of four-tops I’ve seen out and about, laughing up the place and being slightly too loud and taking blurry photos of menus scrawled on blackboards (not enough), too few of you are. Get the WhatsApp group booted up and see who’s got a list ready. I’ll see you all in Rambutan.
Cowell’s Listerine plea is weirdly normal
Simon Cowell went viral this week for one of those strange celebrity videos, the one where all the edifices and masks momentarily drop and we see a glimpse of the naked, mortal creature that lives inside them: “OK, I’ve run out of Listerine,” he says, with a seasoned strangler’s eerie calm, in front of a blank unadorned mirror. “This is the original, you don’t sell it anymore in the UK [...] could you please, please bring it back? I’m begging you.”
This, to me, is the most normal thing any celebrity has done for years: we do get incredibly attached to our bathroom products (Neutrogena recently reformulated my moisturiser, as in made it worse, and sadly I do not have the clout to affect change here), and choices over their reformulation or discontinuation can permanently alter lives.
Celebrities have a lot of power and very few know correctly how to wield it. Cowell begging for Listerine is fame, for once, done right.
