Will Harris is a very good friend

My friend H is going on a date. This is now so infrequent an occurrence that, when she slips it into conversation during one of our regular phone-marathons, I can’t help but react as if I’m witnessing my child take its first tottering steps off the furniture. “OMG!” I say. “This is amazing news. Tell me everything!”

“Well, I don’t know much about her. Only that she’s 26. And she’s half-caste.”

“Wait,” I say. “She’s what? OK, do not use that word on your date.”

“What, ha-?”

“DON’T say it again! It’s very offensive. You’re supposed to say ‘mixed-race’, or ‘of mixed heritage’… or is that only Native Americans?”

H snorts down the phone: “You worry too much. What do you think I’m going to say? ‘How’s that being half-caste working out for you?’”

“You’re trawling the Argos website for a turkey baster as we speak”

Before you say anything, do not judge my friend too harshly; she has spent all her life in a former mining town in the West Midlands, and both her parents read The Daily Mail. This unfortunate combination has not made her racist, not by a long shot, but it has imbued her conversation with a lexicon of phrases more suited to the urinals of a working men’s club than a candlelit dinner a deux.

H’s larger problem, though, is that she is still wildly in love with one of her friends, the bassist from a 1980s girl group responsible for one hit song and a thousand disastrous haircuts. We still don’t know quite how it happened, but somewhere in the round of nights in, meals out, and slumber parties that came to characterise their friendship, H has fallen victim to a ‘feeling’. One that is, to the best of our knowledge, unreciprocated.

Obviously as H’s best friend, part of my job for the last 12 months has been to try and purge said ‘feeling’ from her system. I have done this in a variety of ways: molly-coddling, tough love, drunkenly urging her to confess everything, and finally – taking inspiration from an episode of Candy Bar Girls – forcing her to get a buzz-cut and throwing her at a woman who breeds rats. No need to thank me. That’s what friends are for.

The next morning, H calls me. “Alright?” she mutters.

“From the tone of your voice,” I reply, “I’m surmising you had a fabulous time on your date, got on like a house on fire, and are trawling the Argos website for a turkey baster as we speak. They’re in ‘Kitchen & Laundry’,” I add, unhelpfully.

“It’s no good,” H tells me. “I mean, she was great and everything, and really good in bed, but she wasn’t her.”

“Give it time,” I sigh. “It might be a grower. Maybe over time you can even forge a ‘feeling’.”
“But that’s the problem,” she replies sadly. “I don’t want a forgery.”