33. Man A: Visit the cockpit

 

In airplane films of the 70s and 80s there’s almost inevitably a small, diseased child on a plane who is invited the visit the cockpit. The pilots tell him how brave he is and playfully tussle his hair. He asks if one day he’ll fly a plane and the pilots shoot each other a glance before telling him that if he works hard, he can do anything.

Well, I may be 33 and not suffering from a terminal disease (to my knowledge) but I’d like to be invited into the cockpit. I know that in these post-9/11 days, it’s highly unlikely that a bearded man would get invited up into the cockpit to gawp at a mystifying array of knobs and dials (“which one makes the plane crash?”) but I live in hope.

The thing is, if I ever did get invited into the cockpit, I don’t think I’d be able to maintain my facade of adulthood. I’d want to hold the pilot’s hand, maybe sit on his lap and demand a lollipop. I’d stare into his eyes, in a shameless attempt to bond with a father-figure, and I’d ask him whether I’d been a good boy. And then the whole thing would descend into horrible gay porn.

32. Woman B: Lie to score with someone

There’s something hugely appealing about the idea of sidling up to someone in a bar and introducing yourself with an extravagant series of lies, allowing them to issue freely from the tip of your tongue like the most wonderful fountain of invisible evil. Perhaps today you’ll be Yvette, a successful Parisian graphic designer with an exuberant charm no man can resist. You could do a lot of exasperated eye-rolling and make whistle noises with your pouty mouth as you downed shot after shot of neat bourbon and regaled your barfly prey with all kinds of delicious made-up crap about your imaginary life and boat trips on the Rhone. Or maybe you’re Rocco the Italian photographer (obviously some of these have an accent talent prerequisite). Perhaps you’re just yourself, but better – the version of you who got all the breaks.

The thing is, you can be whoever you like – your quarry will not know. In fact, if you play it right, they will never know. And even if they do rumble you as Plain Jane from Reading, you might find yourself forgiven. Everyone exaggerates aspects of themselves to appear more attractive; I think what we’re talking about here is part of the same continuum and I suspect most people – even those who’ve been fooled by a Rocco or an Yvette in the past – will understand that. Look at Shirley Valentine. Even she could laugh at the end, and she has a face like Paul McCartney so what does that tell you.

I haven’t yet had the privilege (as far as I know, of course) of meeting a real, top drawer cad who was prepared to lie himself into another personality entirely to get into my pants. But I have come across a few exaggerators over the years, those who say they’re ‘band managers’ when what they do is follow their friends around because they can’t play an instrument. Those who say they’re writers when they’re very much unemployed. Those who seemed self-sufficient and successful, but later turned out to be living at home, still taking hand-outs from mummy and daddy. And I have been known to withhold the truth on occasion myself. A handsome circuit comedian I met in a bar once tossed me the old “Do I know you from somewhere? Are you an actress?” so I parried with “No, I’m a model.” In another bar, another year, I told a journalist from FHM I worked for an art magazine when I was, in fact, the work experience kid. Which raises the obvious question of whether he really was who he said he was, too. I’ll never know. The fact is, no one finds out, and no one cares. Life’s path is so much more vivid and thrilling when we paint it with an amazing rainbow of lies.

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.