69 for 1 by Alan Coren Read Free Book Online Page B

you will therefore know that I am a little uneasy about all this, not least (pretend I care) on Nestlé’s behalf. The exchange of chocolates for women may
have an ancient provenance, but I surely cannot be alone in finding it somewhat iffy. It can so easily backfire. In the romantic lang syne, when it was a truth universally acknowledged that a
single man in possession of a box of Black Magic must be in want of a wife, I fell in love with great regularity. In consequence, even in my teens, I was frequently to be found sliding five bob
across the Woollies’ confectionery counter in the hope of securing, later that same day, the first Mrs Coren. I was not after anything else: picture me as that sad jerk in a black jumpsuit
who used to parachute onto the north face of the Eiger, abseil down through a thunderstorm, swim across the icy lake at the bottom, break and enter a lakeside house via the bedroom window, leave a
little carton on a bedside table, and then, in major italics, clear off again, without even looking in the bed to see if he could learn something to his advantage. All because the lady loved Milk
Tray. And, subtextually, all because she was a lady. Leaving us to assume that, after he had delivered the requisite number of chocolates and had a word with her father, she married him.
    I did a lot of that, in my search for romance, not so much in the Alps as in the Southgate Odeon – a spot no less hazardous if, for example, all you could afford that week was Maltesers,
which, lovingly placed in the lap beside you, could easily, if its new owner was startled, say, by a hand suddenly clamping her far shoulder, fly off and send its contents rolling down to the
front. You got blamed for that. You often walked home alone. Worse yet, I fell deeply in love with a number of future Mrs Corens in tooth-braces, several of whom got bits of hazelnut cluster lodged
in their canines, to the terminal detriment of advanced kissing. More than once, too, I would reach out romantically for a hand that already had half an unwanted coffee-creme in it. From which you
will understand when I say that bartering chocolates for wives, even in those pre-feminist days, wasn’t all that the advertisers cracked it up to be. (Just as, a little later, I was to
discover what a scam candle-lit dinners were: fine at the start, when the candles were tall, but as they burned down to below chin height, the person opposite you turned into an uplit ghost train
ghoul. Also, your nostrils had to be spotless.)
    So then, what happens after May 1, when Nestlé will be offering not romance for chocs, but sex? If men are led to believe that there are dames out there eager to flash their underwear for
just one Rolo, what will they expect from those prepared to take on the whole first eleven? Will it, as it so often did under the old regime, all end it tears? Maybe not: these are, after all,
different times. Love is only a Rolo in the hay.

Green Thoughts
    I THINK I have contracted compulsive–obsessive disorder, if it is called that. It may be called obsessive–
compulsive disorder, or, indeed, something else entirely, but in order to pin down what it is, I should have to get up from the computer on which I am tapping this and go across to the bookshelves
and try to look up whatever it is that it is, and that would mean putting the light on, because it is midnight as I write, and I can’t put the light on because of what I have contracted. I am
tapping only by the light of the screen.
    I know how I contracted it, mind. I caught it off my carbon footprint. Or, rather, my carbon shadow, because it is not just under my shoe, it is stuck to me at all points. Like you, I never
thought about it until very recently, but now I cannot think about anything else, which also means that I cannot do anything without thinking about it.
    This morning, I couldn’t think how to shave, because I have both a safety and an electric razor. Which is worse for the