Tell me more

My son has a new girlfriend and it looks kinda serious. They've already done that Facebook "In a relationship with ..." thing, which pretty much amounts to plighting your troth these days. 

I must admit I'm worried. I don't want him to make the same mistake I did. But it's quite likely because of the way boys pick partners. 

Here's my own set of criteria nowadays: 1) nice tits 2) makes me laugh.

Now I know what you're thinking. 'How crude and unsophisticated'. And you're right of course. But it's a huge advance on what I used when I was younger: 1) nice tits 2) makes me cry. 

We guys are slow learners. It takes a lifetime to make a little progress and we hardly ever use sensible standards like pleasing personality, compatible attitudes and lots of compassion. So what we get, very often, is five minutes of dynamite sex followed by a hundred years chained to a rock while an eagle eats our liver.

I don't want that for my son. Neither would you. But there's not a lot I can do about it. Boys don't talk about their relationships or seek mum and dad's approval, the way girls do. Nor do they take advice well, especially if they're fit, intelligent and good-looking. Why should they?

Here's the entire conversation he and I have had about his new friend.

"I'm going to see somebody in Carlisle at the weekend."

"She nice?"

"We get on well."

"What's she do?"

"Musician."

"Tell me more."

"Naw."

"Awright then."

Susan and her daughter talk more about relationships in one day, every day, than my son and I have shared our whole lives. 

I guess I should have started when he was younger, so that he would take my advice now. But we were too busy talking about art, science and music, and making each other laugh. You can't do everything. And who says my advice would help him anyway?  

So I await developments with interest. I expect I'll get an email in a few years saying their eldest daughter is graduating from Harvard with a degree in modern art and musicology, and I'll wander along and introduce myself.

In the meantime, since I was told recently that my weekly musings - which I see as profound perspectives on the human condition - were "useless drivel", here's some useful advice on mate selection from my friend Iain, who has studied psychology and knows a thing or two. 

Dating agencies use a range of indicators, he tells me, over a pint of Landlord in the Old White Horse Inn. "But if you're a guy looking for a good relationship, you need to focus on three in particular."

"Say on, wise one," I tell him, sipping my hoppy bitter with satisfaction. They know how to make good beer in Yorkshire. Been doing it millions of years.

"Kids," he says. "Does she want them? Do you? Can you agree on discipline and behaviour? Differing attitudes to kids is what causes most fights in a marriage."

"Makes sense," I say, writing it down in the little reporter's notebook I carry at all times.

"Then there's ambition and careers," he says. "If she's a high-flyer and you're just looking for an easy life, it's probably not going to work."

He leans back in the old wooden armchair, takes a long pull of his beer and sets the half-empty glass on the table. 

"That's only two," I tell him, my pencil poised. "What's the third?"

"Nice tits," he tells me.

Concepts of cool

"You can't make me!" I cry several hours later, when Molly has gone to bed and Iain and I have been relaxing for half an hour to blues and rock from his eclectic collection.

"Just a couple of tunes," he'd told me at the start. "I got to be up at six to get to work. No more all-night sessions for us, I'm afraid."

So first he'd played the Abbey Road cover by Booker T. "Not a band I ever listened to," I say, as they're swinging it on Come Together. "But they're good."

"Steve Cropper on guitar," he says. 

"Remind me," I say. 

"Booker T and the M.G.'s, Derek and the Dominos, Blues Brothers," he says. "Voted greatest living guitar player in 1996 by Mojo magazine."

Next we get Black Cat Bone by the Nimmo Brothers from Glasgow, followed by Seasick Steve and John Paul Jones, first with Dan Magnusson on drums and then Dave Grohl. 

Then he springs it on me. "You got to hear this," he says innocently. 

"What?" I say.

"While My Guitar Gently Weeps on the ukulele."

"No!" I cry. "I don't want George Formby in the same part of my brain as one of my favourite Beatles numbers."

It's not George Formby," he says. "It's Jake Shimabukuro."

"I don't care if it's Jake and Elwood Blues," I say. "I don't want to hear a ukulele. I'd rather listen to a sex-crazed cat playing the kazoo."

"You can be very opinionated," he says. "Shut up and listen."

Sure enough as soon as I hear the sound this Jake's getting from his uke, I'm sold. "That's cool," I say. "Wouldn't it be nice to be that good? You played something when we were young. What was it?"

"Truant," he says.

"Something else," I say as a distant memory niggles. "I got it. You played the cello."

"I did not," he says.

"You did. I saw you at a school service once, sawing away like a pre-pubescent Pablo Casals."

"Bugger me, you're right," he says, as his own delinquent neurons connect. "My mum sent me to cello lessons for a year. I gave it up because it wasn't cool."

"And joined the chess club, I remember. You had no clear concept of cool then, did you?"

"See nobody taught you stuff like that," he says. "It should have been obvious that playing guitar got you girls. Hell, even the drummer pulls, once in a while."

"Mostly weird women though, with blue hair and snake tattoos, who only want you for meaningless sex."

"I can see that would be tough for a man of your moral rectitude," he says. "Point is they shouldn't have been teaching us maths and Latin in secondary school. They should have been teaching us how women work."

"First-year could have been chat, dating and foreplay instead of algebra, geometry and trig," I say. "Art would have been life drawing. In geography we'd have learned where to find the G-spot."

"Women didn't have one then," he tells me. "Well they did but nobody called it that. They gave it that name a few years later, after a German doctor called Gräfenberg." 

"Cunning linguists," I say. 

"That would have been second-year," he says.

A wonderfully fluffy pussy

Having recently celebrated her ruby wedding, Molly is reflecting on her enduring marriage to my oldest friend Iain. 

"We are very different people," she tells me, as the two of us are sat in the front room of the house in Bradford that I've visited for not far short of their forty years together and now feels like a second home to me.

"I noticed," I say. "He's a bit of a prat for a start."

"He is," she says. "Which is why the two of you get on."

"He and I have a lot in common."

"But he and I don't," she says, giving the cat that's just wandered into the elegantly decorated room a tickle, and getting a rumbling purr in return. "That's my point."

On my last visit, when this hairy moggy had wafted into the room, his tail held high, a friend of Iain's had blurted out, "What a wonderfully fluffy pussy." 

I'd spluttered drink and sprayed the feline with an aromatic mist of fine Ardbeg. He liked it and has rubbed against my leg with greater ardour ever since. It's a memory that makes me smile but a dangerous distraction from Molly's conversation.

"Sorry?" I say.

"I said take cooking dinner," she repeats with a tinge of asperity. "With me it's fast and functional. I make the meal and clean up as I go. Iain is different. He turns it into a major production. First he puts on that terrible, wailing blues he listens to, like Arabs burying their dead. Then he dives into the kitchen.

"Five hours later he surfaces with something that smells and tastes incredible and is laid out like a gorgeous work of art. But behind him he's left a scene of terrible devastation, like a Scotch invasion of the football pitch at Wembley."

"Bottles of whisky have never invaded Wembley," I say and instantly regret it. But it's too late to back off so I chunter brainlessly on. "The word you're groping for I suspect is 'Scottish'."

"The word you're groping for I suspect is a clip round the ear," she says, reminding me she is not a woman to be taken lightly, something Iain learned long ago and one reason, no doubt, that their relationship lasted.

There are others. Complementary qualities seems to work in a marriage. Molly is a kind, chatty, no-nonsense homemaker and former career woman in a man's world. Iain is philosophical and funny, with bulging brains but a tenuous grip on everyday detail. 

He once drove all the way to Scotland to scatter his mum's ashes, but forgot the ashes. I could just picture her, back on his living-room mantelpiece, shaking her head in long-suffering resignation.

"You're not listening any more, are you?" Molly says. 

"I'm getting nostalgic," I say. "I like it here and I'm a bit strapped for cash right now. How about I move in with you until I get back on my feet again?"

"What?" she says, her complexion, always pale, going several shades paler. 

"Iain and I are very alike, as you said, so you wouldn't even notice there were two of us. When one came into a room the other would leave. That way you'd only ever get one prat at a time."

"I need a whisky," she says, standing up and clutching her forehead.

"You don't drink," I say.

"Only in emergencies," she says and totters theatrically out of the door.