I wasn’t very good with girls when I was at school. Attracting them wasn’t the problem; most schoolgirls, in my experience, would happily lock lips with any boy in possession of a driving license and a fake ID. The problem was, once I had them, I never really knew what to do with them.
When you spend your days almost exclusively with other boys, playing sports, Playstation, and sports on the Playstation, interspersed with the odd bit of illicit drinking in Regent’s Park, the prospect of being expected single-handedly to entertain an attractive female, possibly for whole hours at a time, is a faintly terrifying one.
Most of the time, I failed miserably. My first ever date was lunch at Pizza Hut (‘all you can eat lunchtime buffet, only £5.99!’) followed by ninety minutes in the back row of an otherwise entirely empty cinema, watching people being killed by a giant tidal wave.
The relationship didn’t last. Nor had I improved much a couple of years later, when I took a very pretty girl to a very expensive lunch at a very sophisticated Japanese restaurant, only to discover that we were the only patrons.
We spent the next two hours listening to our awkward small talk (‘sunny, today, isn’t it?’) echoing around the enormous room while a bored-looking waitress hovered twelve inches away, interrupting every two minutes to ask whether we wanted the bill yet. I’m not sure I ever saw that girl again, either.
I struck gold in my first year of sixth form. After spending six hours wandering around Oxford on an open day, I invited an acquaintance who lived nearby to have dinner with me at Chiang Mai Kitchen on the High Street. It was possibly the most romantic evening of my life: a beautiful medieval building; a quiet corner of a small, wood-panelled room filled with beautiful couples gazing devotedly into each other’s eyes; light, witty conversation over an exquisite prawn curry and a bottle of Riesling, followed by a night of passionate fumbling atop New College Mound.
I was in love – not with the girl, who soon faded away into ‘let’s still be friends’- but with the restaurant.
I was so enraptured by the memory of that happy evening that for almost three years afterwards I never went back, because it could never be quite as good as I remembered.
But this week I did. Chiang Mai is a Thai place hidden down an alleyway off the High Street opposite Nero’s, and you could easily go through your entire time in Oxford not even realising it existed. It’s in a rickety wooden building that used to be a Private Hall, with a wonderful giant wooden door that looks like it hasn’t been changed in five hundred years.
We went on a Monday lunch. This is generally the quietest time of the week for restaurants, but there were three other tables occupied, one by a large and rowdy group of tutors discussing the merits of nuclear energy versus renewables. Not quite the same atmosphere as last time, then.
The food was still good though. Steamed pork dumplings came wrapped in a wrinkly batter that made them look like testicles afflicted by a particularly nasty venereal disease, but they tasted great, as did vegetable spring rolls dipped in some kind of sugary sauce. Minced chicken with basil, chilis and an oyster sauce was fiery enough to justify the two chillis warning symbol on the menu.
The only slightly duff note was a dish of stir-fried squid with garlic and pepper: a steaming mound of white tentacles which wobbled on the plate, and had a disconcertingly slimy texture. This, I feel, is the wrong way to serve it; squid is just one of those foods that should always be deep-fried in batter, like Scottish Mars Bars.
There’s a cheap lunch menu, but the best time to go is undoubtedly dinner, when you can gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes and dream happily of the night to come.
