F Words by Sue Fenton
talking nonsense
Toast and what to put on it – the truth about what men talk about
What started out as only an averagely tedious conversation about toast, prompted by Rory admitting he’d achieved nothing all day – apart from painting a bit of the ceiling and watching it dry – other than get up and eat breakfast, plumbed new depths of banality after about 20 minutes when more of the boys arrived in the steam room.
Rory, Nick and I had already pretty much exhausted the possibilities of a conversation involving the relative merits of Marmite, peanut butter and mozzarella cheese as toast toppings, and there seemed a chance of the topic dying a natural death. Then Tim and Nigel arrived and gave the subject fresh impetus by proposing, respectively, porridge and teacakes as viable breakfast alternatives. We debated this for a while but like any controversial subject there was never going to be consensus and we had to agree to differ.
Then we got onto more radical issues with Honey As A Toast Topping: is Manuka Better Or Is It All a Bit of a Con. Tim, our resident bee-keeping expert, said this was a moot point among apiarists but in any event you should opt for a locally-grown honey rather than the sugar-laden muck they import from China.
There was one other female present for a while, when the discussion in the spa pool veered off onto the difference between cous cous, semolina and polenta, but she left after a while, perhaps for fear of falling asleep in the water. I still don’t know the difference – Rory and Nick said it didn’t matter ‘cause they wouldn’t eat it anyway as you can’t get it in Iceland and it sounded too much like hard work in the kitchen when you can just bung a ready meal in the microwave.
The departure of Semolina Lady left me alone with the boys, who steered the subject back to Toast – The Perils of Burning Thereof and the little-known fact that Americans brown only one side of their bread (Is this true? Ed.)
Nigel confided to me that he’d once been in the sauna with a female who said she couldn’t believe the conversation attained such peaks of banality. She’d been under the impression that, given the chance, men like to talk about football and cars. Hearing our lot must have been quite an education for her, bless ‘em.
Binge-drinking, curried goat and see-through trunks
The big issues of the day up the health club the past couple of nights have been Fancy Cakes, Binge Drinking, Crap Customer Service, The Difficulties of Obtaining Goat (as a cookery ingredient) in Surrey, The Dangers of Buying Used Cars, and The Importance of Buying New Swimming Trunks Before They Go All See-Through and People Can See Your Bum.
Why can’t the health club bar sell those nice flaky creamy French patisserie-style pastries, they were complaining in the steam room. I’d been reliably informed that the club’s own hotel employs a pastry chef, which got us to wondering why the only cake options are those nasty mass-produced muffins wrapped in plastic like those you get in train buffet cars.
Over in the sauna, the talk was of irresponsible consumption of alcohol. People of the Finnish persuasion, one chap who’d been there informed us, chuck vodka down their necks for breakfast and then run outside and fling themselves into the snow, idiots. Rugby players were worse, he said – explaining how as a lad he’d been made to suck a piece of lime, sniff a pinch of salt and then pour a shot glass of tequila into his own eye, in a practice apparently known as “extreme tequila”.
Meanwhile, another of the boys was complaining about being unable to get decent customer service anywhere. He was particularly irked at having been jocularly called “buddy” by the club receptionist. He was not the receptionist’s buddy, and even if he had been, the British “mate” would have been far less offensively familiar than the American version.
Goat came up in the spa pool during a discussion on what we were all having for our tea. I told how I’d made a lovely goat curry the other night and they all wanted to know where I got it – was such an exotic ingredient available in these parts? I lavished praise on the local Asian shop in Redhill, where such things can be got, and we moved on to Rory’s new used car (broke down before he’d gone 50 miles) and Lee’s new trunks (a wise move since the old ones were getting a bit threadbare, apparently).
If you sat in the steam room long enough, you’d amass a huge fund of knowledge on all kinds of trivia – you might get a bit wrinkly though, and sooner or later you’d all run out of things to talk about and they’d start talking about you.
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