Life on the Other Side

“Do you remember going to buy prawns last night?” my male friend V. says to his best friend S.

We are all at breakfast, V eating chocolate biscuits, S eating pork pies, and me eating nothing because I am that hung over.

Apparently towards the end of a heavy drinking session the night before (I wasn’t with them; had been swilling champagne and eating artichoke foam – yes, really, or maybe it was avocado foam? -- at a music industry event), S suddenly decided it would be a fantastic idea to walk across the road to the Tesco to buy provisions.

Suddenly I was a lot more interested in the conversation. S is a normal eater – a guy for whom food is just food. I knew he and V. had already had dinner at Nando’s – I love to tease them about their fondness for spicy birds – and apparently he’d loudly and publicly announced his intent to go across the road and buy more food and eat it. In public. And apparently this was also totally OK and totally not a big deal with either V or the third friend they were with.

“Why prawns?” I asked.

“He said he was going over the road and should he bring anything back,” V said. “So I asked for prawns.”

Apparently S also bought a Twirl bar. I was curious to know if he’d bought anything else, but feared seeming creepily over-keen on the subject. This is my usual way of navigating food discussions with regular people who do not Know My Issues, which is to say I navigate gingerly, as if skirting around land mines.

“What’s a Twirl bar?” I asked.

“It’s like a Flake except it’s crumbly on the inside instead of the outside,” S explained.

“You were very generous with it – you gave me half and split your half with A,” V told S. (I couldn’t help doubting I’d be that generous. What would I have done in that situation? Bought a bar for everyone? Crammed a couple of bars in my mouth at the supermarket as insurance in case the one bar a normal person would eat in public weren’t enough?)

I could have asked a hundred questions about this episode. But like any normal people -- with the prawns and the Twirls long since finished – V and S quickly lost interest and moved on to something else.