On cheese, curry, tourists and film

I let my Twitter followers dictate my next few blog topics. First up, tackling @Nickehbee's many questions:

What's your favourite type of cheese?

This question is vague - does type refer to style of a cheese (i.e. soft, blue, mature, etc) or a specific named brand (Cheddar, Gruyere, etc)? It is also hard to answer - asking me to choose between cheeses is like asking a mother to choose between her children.

Stylistically, my preferences lay with soft cheeses with garlic and/or herbs. Le Roulle, Boursin, anything you can eat on a toasted bagel (although realistically, I will end up eating it with my fingers, directly out of the tub). However if choosing a specific cheese, it would be between Mozzarella and Halloumi. Mozzarella reminds me of Bologna (and Spain, oddly enough) and the Italian (the first Italian, not the second) and is delicious whether fried (I only recently discovered fried cheese. I can't believe my arteries have remained unfurred for so long) or fresh. Halloumi is not so delicious when not grilled or fried, but is so very versatile, and my Halloumi and Chorizo wrap lunch from the Greek place at Glasto made me feel worldly and sophisticated.

Where's the best place to get curry?

Curry mile in Birmingham, obviously. I went to the first one on the row, closest to the entrance to uni once (come on, there is NO point after the first three. Students don't walk a mile in search of curry when they could walk 5 feet). It was the weirdest thing ever. My chicken Korma was almost pure sugar. I wasn't keen at the time, but I had the left over sauce, cold, with naan bread for breakfast the next morning and it was like coconut ice cream. AWESOME.

Most irritating tourist you've encountered so far?

Oh, easy, although it was a group of tourists rather than one. This has happened quite a lot, but one group were stand out. Four stops into the red tour is the stop for the blue tour, with recorded commentary in a variety of languages. So you get a few people per tour on the bus for the first four stops who clearly neither know what you're saying, nor care. This is fine. What they should do is sit quietly downstairs for four stops, but they don't, they sit on the top deck, usually right at the front, and talk loudly. You know, at the same time as me. The absolute WORST lot was a massive group of Spanish people last week, who colonised the entire front of the bus and talked loudly through all my initial commentary. When I started shouting - partially to make a point, partially because people at the back were motioning that they couldn't hear - they seemed to view this as a challenge to their authority and started shouting over me. And sighing and shooting me glances that would imply they felt *I* was rude for interrupting their conversation. Fucking unbelievable.

Also got a group of teenage girls who stayed on for ten stops and spent the entire time on their mobiles. They were the only people on the bus. It's so frustrating when there's literally no point in you speaking, but you have to carry on. I'll never get people who seem to use the tour bus just as a method of transport, with no regard for the commentary. It costs €27! A taxi would be cheaper!

Also group of French tourists at a stop, wanting to buy tickets. Quite apart from the fact that I'm not sales staff and it wasn't my problem anyway, they were getting REALLY angry at me for not being able to speak French. WTF?! When I work in France and don't bother to learn a few token words of the language, get pissed off with me, but are you seriously going to get arsey with me for not happening to be fluent in your particular language when you're in MY country?! Also got a family of German who thought I couldn't understand them slagging me off.

Really, I just fucking hate tourists.

Worst film you've ever seen and why?

I saw a film at the cinema once, and I can't remember what it was called, or what it was about. All I remember is that it starred George Clooney, and there was a scene where he wallked through his house in the twilight. That is literally it. There have been lots of films I have hated, but I think the fact I can remember a single thing about them implies they were a hell of a lot more interesting than whatever the fuck it was I saw that day. Although The Singing Detective remake was pretty fucking horrific.

First date feedback

1.) On a scale of one to ten, where one means "unsatisfactory" and ten means "very satisfactory", how satisfactory was our date?

2.) Will you be calling me?

Yes/No (Delete as appropriate)

3.) If "no", why?

You did/didn't put out and I only wanted sex/You're a horrible human being and the thought of speaking to you ever again makes me physically sick/Other (Delete as appropriate)

Where "other", please specify:

4.) What improvements could I make?

5.) Other comments:

Maybe I've just been rejected without any explanation too many times now, but I can't help thinking that getting the above questions printed up on comment cards to hand to any future dates is the singular greatest idea I've ever had.

I get asked out about once a year; in fact, last week's date may actually have fallen EXACTLY 12 months after the last one I had, in Berlin. That'd be freaky. And both times exactly the same thing - we had really long, deep conversations, we laughed a lot, we had tonnes in common, we seemed to get on really well. In the case of the latter, there was an amount of slightly inappropriate touching. And then he says he'll call, and he doesn't.

I'm just so sick of the disconnect between my perception of things and the reality. I can never stop being confused by thinking things went really well when the guy obviusly thinks I'm a douche. Couldn't we all just be more honest? God, if a man stood up midway through a date with me and said "You're not as pretty as I thought you were when I was drunk, and your left wing politics bore me, I'm off", I think I'd applaud.

I am not actually that insecure about my looks. I know I'm passably attractive in a weird, fashiony kind of way. I'd far rather be commercially, classically pretty like Victoria's Secret models or my friend Hanna; the kind of pretty no one can argue with, but I know I only scare maybe 60% of the horses. And my friends keep telling me I'm hot (although friends are liable to lie on this front), and scientific theory has long held that we're generally friends with people on the same scale of attractiveness as ourselves and my friends are all coupled up; so either I'm an anaomoly, or it's my horrible personality that's to blame.

Obviously there is something wrong with me, and if I knew what it was, maybe I could do something about it. And I know my friends are all going to say "there's nothing wrong with you, he's a twat", but it's a simple numbers game. Not every bloke I've ever been rejected by can have been a complete twat. It's like with email boy. I'm tortured by the dichotomy of the fact that I fell for him because he's so motherfucking nice, and the fact that I recognise he has treated me in a pretty horrible way. But if you asked his girlfriend of god knows how many years, of course she would say he was lovely, and not at all a twat. It was email boy who said once, not to me, but to one of the other models, that men treated her badly because she allowed them to. Obviously there is something about my character that is the equivilent of my having "doormat/disposable" or just "horrible person" tattoed on my forehead.

It sucks that it is not generally the done thing to ring men up ask them why they hate you. Because I need to know what is wrong with me, because I don't think I can face the idea of going through this again. I know most of you wont believe me when I say this, but I'm an eternal fucking optimist. Every time I meet a man I idiotically think he really likes me, and every time he just ditches me, and I end up getting crushed again. I genuinely don't think if anybody asked me out again I would say yes, no matter how I felt about them, because there's no point, I KNOW the same thing will happen again, it'll be one date, and I'll never hear from him again.

Nothing my friends can say can make me feel better. People tell me that I'm smart and talented, as though that somehow makes up for the fact that men find me about as attractive as a recently exhumed corpse. Men don't give a shit that I got all A*s in my GCSEs, or that my Popdash article was the most read for one whole week. I'd far rather be thick and happy than clever enough to realise I'm miserable.

I don't mean to sound like I don't appreciate my friends and their tireless efforts to bolster my self-esteem. I'd probably be in the nuthouse without them. That I probably belong in the nuthouse anyway being beside the point. I just really, really want to know what's so fundamentally unloveable about me. I feel totally worthless at the minute; I've been bursting into tears all day. I feel supremely lucky to have my job, because after so many menial office jobs, this is the first job I've had where I literally do not have the time to get sad, and that's probably what's keeping me from being more depressed than I already am.

So yes, I think this is a splendid idea.