31. Man A: Buy full-fat milk

 

When I were a child, penny-farthings and dinosaurs roamed the village, youngsters chased hoops with sticks across cobbled streets and milk came in bottles, delivered by a cheery, racist milkman. The milk would have a gold foil cap and contain large lumps of creamy fat, possibly cut out of the side of a pig.

Oh, how times have changed. When was the last time anyone purchase full-fat milk? I haven’t bought it in years. The shops still stock it, but I never see anyone buying it. You may as well go into a supermarket and ask for a value-pack of cholesterol and a big bowl of cancer.

But how bad can full-fat milk (sorry, apparently it’s now called “whole milk”) be for you? I don’t remember my parents drinking it and then keeling over, vomiting up chunks of cream, screaming for an ambulance? Surely it’s can’t be that terrible? Are most deaths in Britain whole-milk-related? I think not.

I vow that one day I shall buy full-fat milk. And I shall live to tell the tale.

30. Woman B: Cut someone out of your life

This tip comes from experience: I’ve cut three people out so far, and I can thoroughly recommend it. Of course you won’t feel great about it at the time, but trust me and be vigilant – you’ll feel relieved, eventually. There was a time when shunning friends and acquaintances was practically de rigeur, a practice particularly acceptable – even encouraged – within families. Mother-in-laws bore the brunt of it but engaged in a fair share of blanking, themselves. These days it’s almost impossible to shut folk out completely, but it’s our duty to try. Email addresses must be blocked; unallocated numbers flashing up on mobile phones must be treated as suspicious. Persevere through it all. Some people are worth it.

Many years ago I dumped a friend with a very honest, unguarded letter. She’d been getting increasingly frustrated with me and I with her, and she was, I can only assume was so guilted by my outburst she didn’t write back. I like to think of her reading it, nodding, sobbing quietly. Perhaps gently beating herself with a rock. Of course I ran into her at her new job years later, we had a terse conversation. Another former friend was axed for refusing to support me in one of the most exciting chapters of my life. A third I just got bored with (I don’t feel good about that one.) With hindsight, I think the first two were mentally challenged, borderline autistic, perhaps. But even if they were the ones with the inability to imagine themselves into the positions of others, I was the one who cut them out in the end. And maybe that makes me evil, because I am not empathetically-challenged; I knew exactly what I was doing. If anyone’s ever cut you out of their life you’ll know it was horrible, but I assure you the pain is considerably eased by doing the same thing to someone else. Get dumping, get a new phone, change the locks, buy a big television, choose life. But go easy on your mother-in-law, she has enough problems.

29. Man A: Take a shower at work

There are two types of things in my life:

a) Things I do

and

b) Things I don’t do

As you would imagine, the second category is significantly fuller than the first. Of the things that I don’t do, there are things that I’m scared of doing, or things that repulse me, or things I would refrain from doing for fear of filial reproach or public scorn. But there are lots of things that I never do because I am simply not that kind of person. For example, taking a shower a work. I have never taken a shower at work and probably never will. If someone asked me why not, I would simply have to shrug and explain that I am not the kind of person who takes showers at work, in the same way that I will never wear pedal-pushers, hire a dinghy, cycle to work, take a salsa class or go to my local swimming pool for an afternoon dip. You may as well ask a rhino to fly a kite or ask a boulder why it doesn’t sing opera. It’s not it their nature, is it?

Besides, offices are places where you work. Oh, you might have a water-cooler moment with a metrosexual colleague, or share a crafty cigarette with your line manager on your lunch break, but work is no place for taking off your clothes. In my office, people regularly go jogging during lunch and then pop into the bathroom for a shower. It boggles my mind. Just metres from the photocopier a naked man or woman is washing themselves. Obviously I can’t see it, but it’s still happening. And it’s not right. Or at least, it’s not right for me. I would rather stink of sweat all day than take a shower knowing that a forceful kick of the bathroom door would find me naked, soaping my bum as everyone corrected excel spreadsheets and sent emails. Of course, I’m secretly envious of the people who take showers at work, but then I’m secretly envious of almost everyone.

28. Woman B: Run away from home

I wouldn’t really trust anyone who has never, in whatever half-arsed childish way, attempted to run away from home. Dick Whittington-ish fugitation is a rite of passage, occurring when frustrations crystalise to rehearse and symbolically portend the genuine disdain of domesticity which characterises young adulthood. If we’re to be complete, as animals, then a bit of running away has to be done.

I don’t just mean the kind that results in your face appearing on milk cartons and CCTV and the police walking in a line across urban wastelands with sticks. I’m also talking about the running away that results in your mum discovering you hiding behind the shed at the end of the garden with a tear-soaked teddy and your schoolbag filled with random ‘essentials’ like pyjamas, nail clippers, a multipack of teacakes (and maybe – for self-defence – a pen knife). I’m talking about the kind of urgent, wretched running away in which emotion overcomes intellect and causes you to omit to take anything useful like money.

My suggestion that everyone should run away from home implies that I think these ‘runners’ (as they call them on Logan’s Run) grow into more worthwhile people. I do believe it. I think fleeing the nest before time takes a bold spirit and a prodigious sense of justice as well as a fearsome understanding of what will upset your parents.

And if this is true of children, what about when we’re adults? How much strength must it take to dispatch ourselves from our own problems and cut our shape – a new, unknown shape – free from the webs we’ve spent a lifetime spinning around ourselves? But it’s not just about courage, is it? Running away brings a lesson in humility, too. We thought we’d put the fear up our parents; we ended up just upsetting ourselves and being laughed at.

Things might not be so different after all these years. Sure, it’s never too late to run away from home. Just don’t be surprised if no one notices you’ve gone.

27. Man A: Punch a shark

They always say “If faced by a shark, don’t panic, just punch it on the nose”. And I’d like to punch a shark in the face, I really would. But I don’t have any intention of getting into shark-infested waters, so I will have to hang around Australian beaches, waiting until a shark washes up on the shore, and then, whilst everyone else is screaming and calling for the Air Sea Rescue corps, I’ll give it a sneaky uppercut.

26. Woman B: Wear whatever you like

Perhaps you think you dress for yourself, but I doubt you have as much control over your choices as you think. We all indulge our urges, I hope, behind closed doors from time to time but in truth, even those who seem to defy convention and fashion are under the spell of external forces. The old dress to defy the cold; the young dress to defy the old. We dress for work, for the opposite sex, for our parents, for our partners, for the strangers we walk past and will never talk to, to surprise, to delight, to arouse, to make an impression. But we almost never dress to really please ourselves. So before we die, we should all have a go at wearing precisely what we like for a while.

As a child I dressed up as animals, constantly. Pretty much the only games I ever remember playing were ones where I got to be a cat or a dog. At least half of the childhood photos of me I’m lifting a ‘paw’ to the camera apparently caught in the middle of some game where it was extremely important I got to ‘be’ the ill-defined animal. I was always a cat at Hallowe’en. I thought animals were completely captivating, and actually I still do. I wrote to Jim’ll Fix It to ask if he could fix it for me to become a dog (and some unkind people might say that he did.)

I’d like to dress up as an animal again sometimes without caring whether anyone thought it was strange. I’d like to arrange to meet friends, and show up as a make-shift horse, or dressed as a Princess or Elvis or Liza Minelli in Cabaret. Yes, I’m quite jealous of goths and anyone whose aesthetic preferences have a well-established sub-culture to embrace them. Goths, drag artists, Pearly Kings and Queens are never alone, but those of us who want – need – to wear only chainmail or tutus, we’re forced into hiding. Be like Frankenstein, the self-named charge of Adam Sandler in the anarchic urine-obsessed pop com Big Daddy. Wear whatever you like.

25. Man A: Visit a prostitute

 

First of all, I should make things clear: when I say “visit a prostitute”, I don’t mean dropping in at her flat with a bottle of wine and some cheese to say hello. I mean “pay her for sex”.

I don’t know anyone who has admitted to having sex with a prostitute. I’m sure there are laddish circles where it’s the done thing; blokes on stag weekends in Prague, surrounded by Albanian hookers or middle-aged men who go away on business trips and end up paying a young Nigerian woman for anal sex. But no-one I know admits to doing anything like that.

I must confess that I’m fascinated by prostitutes. What happens to a woman that makes her decide that her best source of income is having sex with strangers for money? Do they feel that they have crossed a line that can never be uncrossed? Or is it an easy decision? Do they see themselves as career prostitutes, or just as women who happen to have fallen into circumstances beyond their control? Do they ever enjoy the sex, or is it strictly business? Whenever hookers appear in the popular press (normally because they’ve been murdered) I’m always struck by how normal and banal they look. There’s no photos of them in basques or suspenders, just grainy CCTV photos of women in donkey jackets and jeans. It’s a far cry from Billie Piper.

It’s hard not to be curious as to what really happens when you visit a prostitute. Is it like the movies? Do they have a “no-kissing” rule? Is there smalltalk? Do you talk about the weather or the traffic? What about foreplay? Or do you just take off your clothes and start fucking? I don’t think I could just jump into bed with a girl I didn’t know. I’d want to say hello, ask her how she was, smile at her. Rather pathetically, I think I’d want her to like me and find me attractive. The rules of seduction are so deeply ingrained I don’t think I’d be able to abandon them, even when the arrangement bypasses them so completely.

I can’t imagine enjoying the sex very much, although I think the sordid nature of the arrangement would be more sexually exciting than the act itself. Most of all, I’m curious to know how deflated and guilty I’d feel after it was all over. Would I feel disgusted with myself, or would I merely file it away in the compartment in my brain called “dirty secrets” and forget about it?

24. Woman B: See something serious at the cinema while on drugs

I’m not one of those people who’s going to say ‘drugs are cool’, but the fact is that most things are funnier when you’ve had a puff on a special cigarette. ‘Friends’ is particularly enjoyable when you’re high for some reason, MTV is a masterpiece of mirth, and any films that feature characters who take drugs (I’m thinking of Detroit Rock City in particular) have their humour factor boosted by a good 500% if you’re toking at the same time.

Yes, you could stay at home and watch the curtains and still enjoy it, but you’d be missing out. Trust me on this: the most interesting things to watch when you’re wasted, by a pretty long chalk, are those po-faced blockbusters that aren’t very good, but that take themselves far too seriously. I went to see The Phantom Menace in Amsterdam and it was hilarious. A wonderful theatre of the absurd, bold, colourful, appallingly acted and audacious. It made no sense at all, but even that was wonderfully funny. And as you might imagine, I wasn’t the only cinema-goer that day finding it all so amusing. All of us who decided it’d be a good idea to go the pictures in the middle of the afternoon and watch the latest installment of a film franchise we have no interest in, dubbed into a language we don’t speak, we were all rolling in the aisles like babies watching Tellytubbies. So next time you decide to go and see a new Batman film, or Clone Wars, or the new Star Trek, here’s a tip: before you go, inhale.

23. Man A: Do stuff

 

I am someone, who, left to his own devices, does nothing. Well, that’s not strictly true: in fact, I simply do very little. I surf the internet, I wank, I drink coffee and I smoke cigarettes. On a good day I may wander down the local shops or eat something. My world has shrunk to the size of my flat and a 500 metre radius surrounding it.

In recent years I’ve often wondered what went wrong with my life; at what point the outside world, and anything involving effort, became so alarming. I was always shy, but I wasn’t always this bad. As a child, I was prone to staying in and playing on my ZX Spectrum instead of going out. I was reluctant to play with other kids, and whereas my classmates were keen on after-school bouts of football or cricket, I hurried home before the sky fell on my head. But I remember becoming more adventurous in my late teens. Booze and girls came into the equation, and I’d go clubbing in town in in indie bars and struggle home pissed and elated. At university I wasn’t particularly imaginative, but the lure of sex and drugs took me out of the house and out of myself. But somehow, over the last ten years I’ve retreated back into myself and now anything except the most banal routine sets me into spasms of panic.

The internet has made things worse. I can now keep myself entertained, do my shopping and socialise without leaving my flat. I’ve given up on drugs and stray sexual urges are satisfied by an unlimited stream of free porn. Who needs actual friends when you have facebook and myspace? I look at my contemporaries and see them off on holiday in France or Morocco, out clubbing or working and I feel a twinge of jealousy. I don’t know exactly when the outside world became so alien and threatening, but I can feel my lifeblood thickening and congealing as I sit here, paralysed by fear and anxiety. I do try to do things, to leave the house and leave my mind, but even when I’m wandering around a gallery or sitting in a coffee shop, I can feel the siren-song of my bedroom calling me back. I remember confessing to an analyst that I was scared that if I left the house for too long I wouldn’t be able to find my way home. I’m easily lost.

When I am invited to do something (a picnic, ice-skating, a party) that is even slightly outside my comfort zone, my first instinct is to work out how I can get out of it. I proffer excuses, first to myself and then to others.

Some people are content doing nothing. At peace with peace. I’m not. My adult life has been the story of someone who feels that life is throwing a massive party to which he’s not invited. I want the sex, drugs and rock’n'roll but in the presence of fear I settle for habit and routine. It drives me mad. I find myself trapped and hamstrung by routine, prone to frequent episodes of rage and self-loathing, pacing around my front room like a caged animal. The world’s delights glitter before me but I am too timid to acknowledge them.

Of course, the more I mire myself in habit and familarity, the worse things get. When I do leave the house I get increasingly paranoid. The world looks an alien, threatening place, full of hooded chavs and surly bus drivers. I feel naked and transparent, as though passers-by can look through me and see my guilt, my fear, my shame. So I burrow deeper within myself and hurry back home.

I know that with effort, I can overcome some of these fears. I know that the more I challenge myself – the more I leave the house, and do things spontaneously, the better I feel. I know if I meet a friend for a drink, some of the blind panic subsides and I begin to feel human again. But it is an effort, and I’m scared and lazy.

It would be nice to think of the day when the clouds lift from me and I am able to cut the ties that bind me to my fears. I dream of another me, unburdened by neuroses, who laughs with friends in the pub, who plays football and jumps on buses; who does things unthinkingly, who goes out and enjoys life.

22. Woman B: Not get married or have kids

I have no interest in marriage or children. People say to me “Why not? Why don’t you want to get married and have children?” and I say, “Well, why don’t you want a horse?” It’s such a strange idea to me. I feel at times like I’ve been transplanted into an alien culture with weird, ancient customs that aren’t to be questioned but which I know, fundamentally, aren’t for me. None of it makes any sense to me, and I’m made out to be the weird one? Why can’t the rest of the western world see that there’s nothing more bizarre than actually aspiring to embroil yourself in an religio-economic tradition whose religious and economic connotations now have no meaning at all? To put what is little more than a simulacra of a generic future before enjoying the present with someone you’re already delighted to be with?

So far as I can tell, people do it because it’s the done thing, whether they realise it or not. It’s what everyone else is doing, what society tells them they should be doing too. To be normal. Or adult. Or, God forbid, happy. It’s like a Stanley Milgram experiment. There’s nothing more frightening than seeing obedient people – people automatically doing what they’ve seen done before, what they’re told to do, unquestioningly. If I told you to stick your hand in the fire, would you do that? It is exactly the same.

So marriage seems to me as odd as deciding I’m doing to hop everywhere from now on. I don’t understand it and I find it genuinely baffling and frightening that everyone else accepts it so blindly. If I ever got married I’d feel like a failure, a cheat – it’d have no meaning for me at all. And I can’t talk to anyone about it. Weddings are supposed to be joyous occasions but whenever I find myself shooting the breeze over some complimentary champers at a wedding reception inside I’m Charlton Heston being carried off, hand frozen in a claw, screaming “It’s PEOPLE!!!”

Kids, meanwhile, are cute. But I can appreciate them without having to actually gestate one inside my body for the best part of a year. It makes me laugh when people say that women who don’t want children are selfish – reproduction is the most narcissistic act the human body is capable of. I’m self-centred, of course, just like you are… but my narcissism doesn’t manifest itself as the desperate need to find out what a tiny version of my own face looks like, to hell with the consequences. Everywhere around me couples are producing infant versions of themselves and attempting to rationalise it after the fact. But there is no rationale here: babies arise out of reproductive emotions and curiosity. Yes yes they are cute, and lovely and fun. But if you make one because you want to be loved unconditionally, you should never forget that you’ve created a monster. An individual person who works rationally as well as emotionally and actually honey, owes you nothing. The minute they’re born they become just another person in the world – and the world demands them to be explained. Parents, babies: justify yourselves!