09 July 2015
The Munchies
By Chin Chin
I am sure that I didn’t drink very much last night; still, I was at the pub with some friends and know what people will say if I complain about my headache. “He should have learned when to stop,” one will remark, shaking his head with a smug regret. “Really, at his age,” another will reply with that pained expression of disapproval so carefully perfected by people who live in Highgate and Hampstead. And beneath this current of obloquy there will lurk another, an unspoken undertow of darker thoughts which can only be uttered on a confidential basis – ie when they will not be traced back to the speaker: “What a frightful dipso that bloke is,” “I suppose you’d have to drink if your life was as boring as his,” “ I expect he needs a stiff one before looking at himself in the mirror”. No, I’d rather escape from all that so I’ll play the man-flu card.
“I have been feeling ill for a week or so,” I will say, when anyone asks me why I am so pale. It won’t be true of course, and they’d realise that if they thought about it rationally but everyone is so keen to brand men as hypochondriacs that they will run with the lesser charge, a bit like magistrates accepting that you were only careless when you ran over the neighbour’s dog and ignoring the evidence that it had been digging up your garden for weeks.
Actually, I’m not at all sure about this man-flu business. It is possible that men take their illnesses more seriously than women do – “above the waist it’s heart and below the waist it’s cancer” is the mantra of self-diagnosis applied by members of the male sex afflicted by minor aches or pains – but perhaps illness really does affect us more or perhaps we suffer it rather more often.
“You are what you eat,” the dietary experts are fond of saying, and if that is right one would expect men to be less healthy than women because our diet tends to be a little more, well, eclectic. That isn’t because we’re greedy, good gracious no, but rather because the male of the species has a particular inclination towards tidiness. Suppose it is mid-afternoon and that you are a man who has been watching two hours of football on the television. You will be tired and stressed-out from roaring valuable guidance to your team and to the referee. If only television was a two-way affair, how much better the game would be. Anyway, you’re hungry and there is a well-stocked fridge in the kitchen. It is time for a restorative snack.
Now this is where men and women differ. A woman would look at the ingredients available and cook a nice little repast. The male is more of a browser, cruising the fridge, trying a bit of everything in turn: a mouthful of cheese here; a bit of citron tart there; a small slice off yesterday’s roast; a few strawberries; a pickled onion; a little more of that beef. Taken together and cooked into a composite whole by the likes of Gordon Ramsay, it would no doubt make an excellent and nourishing meal. Chucked down in cold discordant bits it is a recipe for heartburn. But then, of course, things get worse. There are only three pickled onions left in the jar and the male instinct for tidiness takes over. You eat the onions. Then there is a third of a jar of pate a little beyond its sell by date. That goes too. Then what about that little jar of blue liquid? It tastes foul and you remember that your teenage child is doing ‘cooling liquids’ as part of chemistry GCSE. Actually it was rather astringent, come to think about it. Never mind! A biscuit will probably soak it up. By the end the munchies have gone but you probably do not feel better for your meal.
If you watch a lot of television you will know that the ace male detectives – that is, the ones who solve the crimes, not the high-ranking stupid ones with whom they are inevitably at odds – never have anything edible in their fridges. That may be because they have parted with their wives, monogamy being apparently fatal to detective skills, or it may be because they use the fridge to store human tissue associated with their work and are anxious not to get things muddled up. However it may be, when one of them gets home of an evening, perhaps after some disastrous date, and forages in the fridge before the mandatory session of late night depression, he will find nothing consumable apart from the odd can of beer. I had always thought that this was a dramatic device to stress the contrast between human frailty and deductive brilliance. Now I know better. If the detective opened a fridge full of food and ate like the rest of the male sex, he would risk having to stay in bed with man flu next day and if he did that all the villains would escape.
