Alexis Hall

You need to go back to being the sort of harmless sodomite that Waitrose shoppers can feel good about introducing to their left-wing friends

and I believe Bridget said you work with dung beetles.”
“I work for dung beetles.” Okay, that didn’t sound much better.

Leaving me to scrape the bottom of the barrel of my GCSE French, for which I’d received a D. “Um…um… Je voudrais aller au cinema avec mes amis? Ou est la salle de bain?”

“Yeah, I’m thinking about moving to America and running for public office.”

“Hi,” I said, trying not to dig a hole in the grass and wriggle into it like an endangered dung beetle.

“You’re trying to be emotionally supportive,” she said. “I’m trying to be useful.”

“Emotional support is useful, you Technicolour reprobate.”

Oliver was much as I remembered him: a cool, clean, modern-art piece of a man entitled Disapproval in Pinstripes. And handsome enough to annoy me. My own face looked as if Picasso had created it on a bad day—bits of my mum and my dad thrown together without rhyme or reason. But Oliver had the sort of perfect symmetry that eighteenth-century philosophers would have taken as evidence for the existence of God.

. I stared at the crisp, white tablecloth, wanting to die.

“Okay,” I said, once I’d inhaled it. “I was too hasty. That was so good I could pretty much marry you now.”

“I’ve got to say, you play one hell of a hard-core game of footsie.”