all orchids are always hopelessly Thai Airways and that flowers mixed with vegetables are very passé and that tight balls of trimmed blooms in carefully complementary hues are so over. And never, ever send dried flowers or lilies with the stamens cut out or almost anything out of season. But contrarily, things that look like funeral decorations are bizarrely rather chic. And ideally cut flowers should look like they came from your garden and that your garden needs a tractor to drive round it and has a greenhouse the size of a tennis court. And never hand over flowers. They must be delivered, but not by a flower shop. They should come instantly after the event you’re being grateful or apologising for. That is, within eight hours, including weekends and bank holidays. I could tell you all that. But I’m not going to. Put it out of your mind. Cast it into the Pit of Forgotten. Because you’re right. We don’t have to be told this. We do know it genetically. And you will always get something wrong. The wrong card. The wrong ink. The wrong words. The wrong sign-off. There is no end to this stuff. It’s like nuclear physics. You think you’ve found the smallest possible particle of snobbery but there’s always something more negligibly, minutely irrational. And you’re also right to say it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you’re not quite successful enough. Give it a couple of years, propelled by your obvious Lawrentian resentment, you’ll do better than all of them. And then when all of your friends are posh employees, you can give them what you like. Paper flowers, bags of gypsophilia seeds. They will love and respect you from the bottom of their prune-like hearts. And I promise you still won’t feel any less uncomfortable and they won’t feel a scintilla less entitled.
Dear Sir,
Matching his and hers tattoos: ever acceptable?
Winston, Manchester
Only if you’re Danish bacon.
AA,
My fiancé’s from Glasgow. He’s insisting on getting married in a kilt. I’m from Utah. My family are very conservative and religious. They’re not going to understand. How can I get him into trousers without hurting his ethnic feelings?
Mary-Beth, by email
Ethnic feelings? He’s from fucking Glasgow, for Christ’s sake. The kilt is the least of your worries. Even when they find out what he’s not got on underneath, and they surely will, wait till your parents get a load of the in-laws and his childhood mates. The reception is going to be fabulous. Are you writing this up as a film treatment? If not, do you mind if I have it? PS, do you seat your mothers by height or age?
Dear Sir,
When, if ever, is it permissible for a man to sign off a text with “love” or “x”? And don’t say “best” is best, because it isn’t. Nor “yours” nor “faithfully” nor “peace”.
Love Derek x
Darling, sweetheart, cupcake. It’s permissible, as you sweetly put it, to sign texts any damn way you like. You’re all so bloody fond of the internet and you bang on and on about messaging and techno and plugged-in stuff, and you say it’s all about freedom and honesty, and the day after you get a Twitter account you’re all constipated about the raised-pinkie etiquette of how to say “cheerio”, and all the rest of the manners business and the after-you niceties. You sound like my grandparents. Why do you care? Why do you want to start making up rules and laws and a smirking snobbery about something you say is pristine, anarchic and lawless, and naked? If it’s any help, Alexander Graham Bell suggested that you answered his implement with a firm and clear, “Ahoy”. So why not start with that? And why don’t you finish with . . .
Dear AA Gill,
My wife and I went on holiday with her family. Her younger sister came down to the pool wearing a tiny bikini. “Ooh,” I said, “that’s one for the wank bank.” I wasn’t really sure if I said it out loud. The wife went tonto. “Did you just say you wanted to masturbate over my sister?” I tried to explain the harmless concept of the wank bank, that all men have one. But she won’t let it go. She has to know who else is in it, and if she’s there. And every time we go to a restaurant or a pub she says, “I suppose she’s a deposit in your savings account.” And now she’s asking her friends if their husbands have them, and the guys are complaining to me. But the worst bit is, I’m experiencing difficulties taking Captain Picard to warp speed. Where there should be Angelina Jolie in leather or Halle Berry in sweat, I can only see the wife, wagging her finger and shouting, “I hope that’s not my sister in there with you!”
Phil, by email
There is a wank-banking crisis. We all speculated and spent, in the biblical sense – borrowed from one ball to pay to the other – on fantasies of body parts we can’t sustain, or pay the interest. The 21st-century wank bank is full of arses and tits we don’t need, and we’ll never use. It looks like your iTunes library but without the sense of rhythm or a Genius button. And does it make us happy, all this ejaculatory aspiration? No, it doesn’t. Tell the wife she’s right. In these straitened times you can’t afford a big, fuck-off-I’m-busy wank bank. So you’re laying them all off except for a couple of tasteful classical statues and that memory of her with the sunburn and the drunken Brazilian on honeymoon, and that from now on you’re placing yourself in her hands or outsourcing to the internet.
Mr Gill,
I’m frightened.
Anonymous, by email
And so you should be. Frightened is the natural state for all men. There is much to be frightened about and of. What’s more frightening is you don’t know the half of it. The measure of a man’s life is how he copes with the terrible wall of fear. The traditional manly remedies are: rigorous self-delusion (an absolute refusal to face anything remotely akin to reality or even open an envelope); drink; and mood-altering masturbation. And for this you need a really comprehensive wank bank.
Sir,
My husband said he had something important to tell me. I could see from the fear it was serious. I’d suspected for some time that he might have been wearing my clothes, so I was prepared for a bout of tearful trannie guilt. Which, frankly, I’d be OK with. We’re about the same size and I didn’t marry him for his dress sense, so I might as well stay married to him for mine. But then he blurted out that he was a nudist. I must say I was surprised. Calmly, I said I thought I might have noticed if he’d been playing volleyball in the garden starkers. He said he didn’t want to be a collective nudist – he was a singular, secret one. And he would like me to be a secret nudist with him. What, just round the house? No, he said. Outside, together. Well I wasn’t overcome with excitement, but compromise is everything in a relationship, and after 20 years of marriage I was amazed that there was anything new to discover about him. I’m going to draw a veil over our sojourn in Hampstead Heath. If only I’d had a veil about me at the time. Never again. He said the deeply humiliating cascade of events was my fault for not being quick enough. He is still sulking. And he says he doesn’t know if we can go on if I can’t join him on his journey. At the moment I don’t know if I can go on if I do. It does seem a very stupid reason to break up what is essentially a happy though dull life with a nice home, a successful business and a secure family.