I'm in early Pig with delivery of the first phase of my manuscript for the Cookery Book in a couple of weeks' time. Suddenly all my notes look like jigsaw pieces from the wrong puzzle and I rapidly need to find some edges. A good place to beef up the framework seemed to be the Ginger Pig shop in Moxon Street so I thought I would trot along, meet some of the staff and pick their bones...
I fear there's going to be a lot of meat puns.
And also, apparently, an awful lot of men.
I've done a great many evening classes in my time: Italian, Salsa, Life Drawing, Cooking, Etching, Wine Tasting; Psychology - the whole gamut middle class pursuits and I can tell you from experience that adult education is a great place to meet men if you like women.
Men I have met at evening classes:
Italian? One pervert looking for a reserve mistress to the mistress and a widow called Brian.
Life Drawing? Naked man on a plinth with piercings you don't want to think about and one sexually ambiguous painter.
Cooking, Etching, Wine Tasting? Sexually ambiguous painter (carried forward from above) and many, many bores..
Salsa? Short, very short or gay men, bridegrooms (of which the last two categories have the advantage in that they use deodorant). Phil from Brentford who does ballroom on Mondays, and my friend Andrew, who I took with me, so doesn't really count. Thing in common: they all sweat.
Psychology: come one...do you really need to ask?
Women I have met at evening classes: Concert violinist, Turkish journalist, Slow food campaigner, Ceramicist, Graphic Designer, Human Rights Lawyer, Divorce Lawyer (very, very useful), Weapon Designer (ditto), Conference Organiser, Banker, Caroline Waldegrave and Pru Leith (we're not friends but we still met), Australian Dentist, Architect, many brides (they do the salsa so they can dance at their weddings) and one sexually ambiguous painter (I'm not sure quite which category s/he comes into).
So that brings me back to the Ginger Pig. It turns out a butcher's shop is a great place to meet men.
Who would have thought it?
Nevertheless, in the evening, the shop is full of them. Tall men. Young men. Silver foxes. Some even have hair. All are wearing white coats and interested expressions which makes them look a little like the guys on toothpaste ads who are trying to convince you they are scientists, or as though they might be about to sell you cosmetics on the Clinique counter in Selfridges. But no - they are here to learn the gentle art of butchery on the course run by the two Ginger Pig butchers, three times a week.
Just what you want - a man who knows how to handle a hacksaw and a cleaver and can cut you up into freezer joints before you've even been properly introduced. Not a category I've seen on Match.com.
Yet.
Though surely only a matter of time? Especially when you see how many of them come from City Banks... Just what you do after a hard day's credit crunching... cut up a carcass.
I look around the room for wedding rings as Perry (from the Marylebone shop) deftly cuts up a lamb, addressing the assembled throng with the confidence of a chat show host, to the soft lulling hum of bones being sawn, and Borat (from the branch in Hackney, and known locally, so I'm told by members of the staff, as the Slovenian Sex God) shows me his own, totally ring-free hands.
'But you're too young,' I say as he twirls his filleting knife and slots it back into his holster (okay, I made that up, but it wouldn't have surprised me.'
'Oh 'e likes 'em really really pretty and gorgeous and slim,' said one of the female members of staff (who until that moment I was beginning to think of as a friend) and possibly, she seemed to be implying, not old enough to be his mother.
A man would need to have a cleaver in his hands to chop his way into my house through my three, ever-present, non-sleeping, disapproving teenagers, so it's academic that he's only 12 and I'm 76. Instead, I have to content myself with a glass of wine (red of course) and quiet contemplation of the scarred butcher's block on which a sheep is slowly becoming legs, breast and best end.
'So what do we call this,' Perry asks the assembled (creepily concentrated and silent) group of men standing around him in their lab coats paying rapt attention to the saw going through the spine then snapping off. He slams down an indeterminate hunk of bones with a resounding thump.
'Scrag end,' says someone, helpfully.
Yep.
Precisely.
