Trophy 11 - Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you'll never see him again.

“The words of a man who hasn't had a girlfriend for... how long?”

I overdo it on the wasabi to hide that my cheeks are turning a bright shade of lobster. “Oh, I don't know.”

Gary stares at me with big blank eyes that remind me off... well, you get the gist. This is the moment that he'll learn more about me than he has done over the past fourteen years. We've been inseparable like fish and chips since we were twelve, up to the point that teachers wouldn't know for sure which one of us was Terry and which was Gary. He used to do most of the talking, though. I'm an expert when it comes to his flings. I know everything about them, from the way they shave their seaweed to the crazy things they moan during intercourse. Sometimes I think I know more about his love life than he does. In fact, he seems to have the memory of a gold fish when it comes to women. One time, when we were in Fabric and there was this girl – off her face on fuck knows what – that kept following him around, until he told me “I think she fancies me, whaddaya think?” and I had to remind him he'd been there already – she was the one that put her fingers up his bum when she was about to come. "Are you sure?" he asked. "Sounds rank. Did I like it?"

This is the moment that my best friend will finally dive into the deep, intimate details my life, instead of wading through superficialities of employment and housing.

“You're not a virgin, are you?”

Lobster or The Meaning of Life

She knew only one way to fence off male attention, a daunting method indeed, and she was not a fan of bringing it into practice. But over the past forty-five years, Donna McLaren had not lost her feminine charm, and members of the other sex still persisted in courting her.

Like most other women, Donna was unaware of the secret of her magnetic power. Like many of her peers had pointed out, she wasn’t particularly beautiful. Her chin was too plump for her thin neck, and her blonde hair was fizzy on the top. Her chest was relatively flat and her arms were remarkably long. But her admirers didn’t notice any of this, because there is something irresistibly ladylike about having something more important on your mind than men.

All Donna wanted was some time to write down her musings on the meaning of life. Not because she thought she had an answer or even a precise question – she knew better than anyone that she was nowhere near catching a glimpse of what she was looking for. But she felt that, while writing, her thoughts became more concentrated, and her writings were like a map back to where she had left off when she had to attend another date.
Because declining offers politely, Donna had found, was a time consuming business. More often than not, she reluctantly agreed to listen to their small talk and compliments over free dinner in a restaurant where she’d been with over seventy different men before. When she was younger, older gentlemen used to take her here, and they felt like they were showing her something new in the world. Soon, her own generation started fancying French cuisine. By now, she was asked out by boys who could have been her own son, if she wouldn’t have rejected her first dates.

The waiting staff made a show of informing her on the specialties of the house and which wines to chose, though they knew she’d invariably choose for lobster. Not because she liked it – it was an acquired taste – but because she was allowed to eat it with her hands. Throughout the meal, Donna would take off veil after veil of elegance, wiping her hands on the table cloth and drinking the expensive wine as if it were ale in a pub, Pepsi from a bottle, water from a through.

Most men wouldn’t even buy her dessert after this performance, but they usually tipped the waiter generously so that he wouldn’t spread the gossip. They’d pay for her taxi, but walk home themselves. Donna didn’t mind all this. She just wondered why they’d bothered in the first place. It was the same old question that kept popping up and pestering her, as soon as her writings seemed to get her anywhere.