I gather the rest of the world recoils in horror when they learn of the popularity of baked beans as a component of the Full English Breakfast. How refreshing, therefore, to hear this from Danielle from California:
One of my online friends from the UK recently introduced me to Beans and Toast which I heard was very popular in the UK, and I loved it.
Helen and Olly, answer me this have you ever been to the USA, and if you have what is your favorite food from America?
Pssst! Guys! I don’t want to be the one to tell her that it’s ‘beans on toast’; she seems so happy.
Danielle, if you trawl the AMT back catalogue, you will hear each of us rhapsodise about our numerous holidaysvacations in the USA, where between us we must have notched up over 15,000 road trip miles thus far.
We stuffed down many wonderful items along the way, including a few tonnes of peanut butter M&Ms, Cheetos, chowder, giant sandwiches, and some very impressive Vegas buffets. However, what we all love the best is the Mexican food that has successfully leapt the border fence into the States and flourished all over the nation, but has not thus far swum across the Atlantic to repeat the trick.
You may point out that there’s Wahaca and a few other decent representitives of the genre, but you can’t buy chimichangas with tomatillo salsa in every service station in Britain, so we’re still trailing behind.
As living arrangements have taken over from weddings as the AMT question topic of the season, let’s hear from Alistair:
I’ve recently been flat hunting in London. Due to the competitive nature of London dwellings at prices I can afford, I’ve found it to be much more like an interview or X Factor audition every time I see a room, rather than a viewing of the property.
So answer me this: should I play it cool and collected when I view a room, or should I go all out and let my full personality shine through in an overly enthusiastic horrible mess?
Try operating on a setting somewhere between those two extremes, Alistair, because most people don’t really want to share with either a sociopath or a chatterbox. Aim for engaging, but not too needy. You can unleash the real babbling lunatic Alistair when you’ve successfully signed the lease and it’s too late for them to get rid of you. Aaah-hahaha!
Readers, please visit the comments to give Alistair your own tips on how to wow his potential new cohabitants, because it has been many years since I had to audition a flatmate (Martin just moved in with me without even asking, and I DON’T EVEN GET MY OWN ROOM). But I would recommend that you don’t turn up late or use a false name. Both of those used to sour the start of the vetting process, and it rarely improved from there.
What we learn this week is that you people are not very good at sharing. Sharing milk. Sharing beds. Sharing in the joy of an imminent birth. But by all means share in the joy of Answer Me This! Episode 231:
We share thoughts upon such subjects as:
Julius Pringles vs. moustache champions
Thor’s hammer vs. dress codes
baby poo vs. Norwegian cheese Special K vs. Special K
drawers full of dead butterflies
baby showers of cunts
Dr Faustus in the SMS age
soy milk
and
Queen Victoria’s wedding.
Plus: Olly thinks that the biggest problem he’ll face if his loved ones die is having wasted money on their birthday presents; Helen accepts no responsibility for Prince Philip’s bladder trouble; and Martin the Sound Man offers the sophisticated insult to end all sophisticated insults.
This week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices and Android) follows the baby shower gift theme to its natural conclusion: death.
Meanwhile, keep AMT alive and well with your QUESTIONS: email answermethispodcast@googlemail.com and/or leave voicemails on the Question Line by calling 0208 123 5877. We’re relieved to tell you our Skype problem seems to be fixed so answermethis is the ID you need, but if you’ve used Skype to ask us a question in the last two months, we never got it, so please ask it again. If it was a good one.
Difficult cohabitation has been a theme at AMT lately, and like many of you, the communal living situation is stoking murderous rage in Amanda from Virginia:
I live in a big house with my fiancee and three other roommates. We’re all students in our late 20s. When my fiancee and I moved in here, we were too poor to afford anything else. I’ve got a well-paying full-time job now and go to school online.
I HATE LIVING HERE. My roommates are ridiculously messy. I’m no neat freak, but this house is fucking disgusting. I clean all the time only to find the house trashed again within hours. My roommates also go around all winter long leaving windows and doors open, saying the cold air will rev up their metabolisms and make them skinny.
The problem is our upcoming wedding. If we want a decent wedding and honeymoon in Mexico (which we REALLY want), we’re going to keep living here another year in order to afford it. We haven’t really set a date yet, so I suggested postponing the wedding so we could afford to both move out AND go to Mexico. My fiancee doesn’t want to postpone the wedding at all. I dread my own home. Answer me this: what should we do?
I don’t know how you can postpone something which has not yet been organised, but if another year of domestic dread is likely to damage your relationship so much you never make it as far as the wedding, MOVE. Meanwhile, I assume you’ve eliminated the following possibilities:
1. Evicting the roommates and drafting in super-neat new ones;
2. Finding somewhere else cheap to live;
3. Having a smaller budget for the wedding, because weddings – and particularly American ones – are NEEDLESSLY EXPENSIVE.
Anyway, Amanda, your living arrangements are now in our readers’ hands, as I invite them to vote:
Whatever you do, don’t move out into a commune. Something tells me it wouldn’t suit you.
Not since ‘Friday‘ has there been such spiritual turmoil about the choice of car seats as there is in this question from Fraser from Erskine
When getting in a taxi alone, should one sit beside the driver or in the back seat? I don’t want the driver to think that A) I want to have a conversation or B) that I’m an antisocial weirdo.
Don’t worry about part B, Fraser – Taxi Driver set the ‘antisocial weirdo’ bar really high.
Anyway, I don’t think the average taxi driver wants you to sit in the front seat; that is where they keep their sandwiches, plus they might worry that anybody who automatically gets into the front is about to stick a gun into their ribs and order them to DRIVE.
As for part A, the driver knows that you required a taxi because you needed to get somewhere, not because you wanted to make a new friend. Nevertheless, EVERYbody knows that it is not up to you whether you’ll be having a conversation, so you might as well suck it up and prepare some gambits about The Football, something about Britain that is not as good as it used to be, and Princess Diana.
In America every child must have an annual, updated school picture in case the child is kidnapped. That way there’s a recent and well-lit photo to put on the “MISSING” poster.
Are American schoolchildren really that likely to be kidnapped? Because this seems like a very expensive and labour-intensive method of ensuring there’s something to put on the sides of the milk cartons.
It’s odd that in his ode ‘To Autumn‘, Keats never mentioned amongst the swelling gourds and clammy cells that it is also the time of year where the images of schoolchildren are harvested for posterity in the annual school photos. See above, then while your eyes recover, hear Answer Me This! Episode 230:
In which we speak of:
sharing a bedroom
Dorian Gray Liz Jones
the Meg Ryan Game
glamping Olly’s friend Chay in a Britney video
sleeping arrangements
dehumidifiers
the Titanic Memorial Cruise
grey water vs. black water
big baggy clothes vs. Joseph Gordon-Levitt Aaron Paul vs. Aaron Paul
court artists
Ocean Colour Scene
and
relationship advice via Neil LaBute.
Plus: Olly has had enough of these mother-fighting snakesDaily Mails on this monkey-liking plane; Helen’s Kentish childhood was nothing like the latest Wand Erection video (see below); and Martin the Sound Man did not do a William Hague, honest.
This week’s Bit of Crap on the App (get it for iDevices and Android) involves further discussion of cruises, namely why haven’t hipsters taken them up yet. Surely it’s only a matter of time, though – after all, nobody ever thought bowler hats or the A10 would ever make a comeback, and look at them both now.
As we said in the show, do share your most memorable birthday in the comments; and as always, share your QUESTIONS by leaving voicemails on the Question Line (Skype answermethis or dial 0208 123 5877) or sending emails to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com. Also go here if you want your own Answer Me This! mug. It’s so big, you could probably go for a week-long cruise in it.
After the rather unsavoury brace of love-related questions we’ve just had, let’s cleanse the palate with this from Lindsay:
Almost two years ago, my husband left me and I’ve spent the last year or so moving on, having fun and relearning who I am as a singleton.
I’m now in the place where I’m considering dating, however it’s a thought that petrifies me as I’ve never done the whole dating thing before and I don’t know where to even look for a lovely bloke.
So please answer me this: can you help me find the hot, tattooed rugby boys who would consider dating a Christian girl divorced by the tender age of 32?
AMTfans are a wonderfully diverse bunch, so there MUST be some tattooed rugby boys amongst you lot. Any of you also currently single and looking for ladies? Go to the comments, and answer these Bliiiiiiind Daaaaaate-style questions:
1. Where would you take Lindsay on your first date?
2. If you were a foodstuff, what would you be and why?
3. How’s your tackle?
Or just tell her a bit about yourself, you know, the usual. Let love blossom!
Poor old B from Montreal is complicit in a right pickle:
I have a bit of a situation right now. I recently moved into uni with a girl I graduated with. When we graduated we weren’t that close, we were just acquaintances; now that we live five doors away from one another we have become really close and that’ss all well and good!
The only problem is that she has a boyfriend (who graduated with us, and is also my friend) who lives quite far away and I know something about him that she doesn’t know. Before we graduated they were dating and he cheated on her several times and never told her! All her friends knew but no one ever told her because no one was ever close enough to her to tell her.
So basically they are still dating now and she is going to visit him in the US pretty soon and she doesn’t know. We keep getting closer as friends and she keeps telling me about him and how he is so good to her and how he never cheated!!! I feel as if I am keeping something from her and even though it’s not my secret to tell I feel like she should know (because he also cheated on her recently).
So answer me this: should I tell her about her cheating boyfriend and risk him not being my friend anymore and risk her getting hurt, or just shut up and forget about the looming guilt that this secret is crippling me with?
Since this sounds like one of those situations where no outcome is likely to be happy for all three of you, I’m taking the coward’s way out and deferring to you readers. Go to the comments and advise B, because B has a pained conscience even though his infidel friend does not.
We’ve come to this question from Mo a little late, since the critical deadline was the end of September. Sorry, Mo! Though you do seem to be ‘suffering’ from a ‘problem’ that many of our listeners would love to have:
Around February I meet a girl who is 37 and I told her that I am 27, despite her saying I am too young for her I managed to lure her into sleeping with me, the first problem is I am actually 23. Should I come clean? If yes, why ruin a good thing? (The sex is good, we are both quite adventurous.)
The second and maybe the main problem is why I am not breaking up with her or cheating? It is not like I love her (we did clear this matter between us that we cannot love each other even with artificial 10 years age difference!!). Even now that she has gone abroad for 3 months I still am not cheating on her although I had the chance to go out with girls my age!!
I cannot break up with her now cause she is not coming back till the end of September (I hate breaking up on SMS or Skype etc) and once she is back I wanna have sex with her for a couple of months before I do anything, but by then it is Christmas and who wants to break up in new year? So suddenly it will be a year I have been with this girl that I still do not call my girlfriend!!
I should say I do treat her nicely and with respect and I try to be a gentleman and not a jerk!!
Help me with my dilemma please!!!
By now, I presume she has returned, and you have embarked upon the beginning of your two-month sex adventure, which means you probably have not done what you should have done before and broken up with her. Why do I think so? Because if you have to ask why you’re not breaking up with someone or cheating on them, you’re really too silly to be in a relationship. Sorry, ‘relationship’.
(Also, she’s not a girl. And not in a Britney ‘Not a girl, not yet a woman’ way – she’s 37. SHE’S NOT A GIRL. At least one of the two of you is going to have to get used to this.)
However, you do keep making feeble excuses for why you have not broken up with her. Where does it end? ‘I can’t break up with her at New Year, but then it’s Valentine’s Day in February so I can’t break up with her before that, and if I break up with her right after Valentine’s Day everyone will think I’m a heartless bastard, but then it’s Easter and I want the egg she’s bound to buy me, then in May it’s World No-Tobacco Day and it’d be too stressful to break up without nicotine, then it’s the summer so I’ll probably want to have sex with her a lot, then it’s her birthday, then it’s Halloween and I want us to go as Bonnie and Clyde together, then it’s Armistice Day which is solemn enough, then Christmas, then New Year again, then I’m 80 and she’s 94 and I can’t tell her I want to break up with her because the shock might kill her and she still doesn’t know that I lied about my age.’
I’m rather expecting her to dump you because you’re not decisive enough.
As some of you may have observed over the past two years, we have another weekly noise-making gig aside from Answer Me This! – we’re the internet correspondents on BBC 5 Live’s Saturday Edition with Chris Warburton. It is the jewel of Saturday evening radio, and on Saturday 6th October, you can see that jewel sparkling for yourself!
For one night only, Saturday Edition will be recorded in front of a live audience at 5 Live’s studios in Media City.
So if you want to treat your own eyes to the visual spectacle that is live radio, and you can be in Salford Quays 8-10pm on 6th October, email chris@bbc.co.uk or text 85058 with the message, ‘I want to come to Saturday Edition’.
So we’ll see you there, yeah?
For illustrative purposes only – actual appearance of live radio may vary
Hello listeners! Refreshed by a month off, we return with an episode bursting with fresh new questions. Well, fresh except for the one about the Spice Girls, which we maintain IS fresh as long as you fell into a coma in the summer of 1996 and only just woke up. If that is your situation, we’ll help you catch up on what you missed. We hate to be the ones to break it to you, but Kate Moss and Johnny Depp split up. And things have been awfully quiet on the Meg Mathews front lately.
Everyone else, put Answer Me This! Episode 229 into your ears:
Plus: Olly is terrified of his own pubes (until they start paying rent for their residence upon his body); Helen’s attempt to trick the Tooth Fairy backfired right into her bank balance; and Martin the Sound Man dreams about how, in an alternate universe, Simon and Garfunkel would have replaced ‘The Sound of Silence’ with the sound of cartoon hammers.
This week’s Bit of Crap on the App (available for iDevices and Android) is a question from Ginger Paul about toilet attendants, bog butlers, lavatory landlords, ablution assistants – whatever you want to call them, the principle is the same, but what’s with all the lollipops? Loo-lipops? Lolli-poops?
Our new series will be running all the way to Christmas, but only if you send us QUESTIONS: leave voicemails on the Question Line (Skype answermethis or dial 0208 123 5877) or send emails to answermethispodcast@googlemail.com.
Answer Me This! Podcast 