Dinner (or lunch) of doooom!

I am very fortunate to have two lovely girl-friends (as in 'girls that are friends' rather than 'girlfriends', who hog the duvet and comment on your personal hygiene). They bake me cakes and buy me ice-creams which is pretty much all it takes for me to love them dearly.

I'm not sure about the whole etiquette of revealing people's identities in a blog, so I've decided to give them code names. Actually, neither minds me using their real names, but come on, who doesn't like the fun and mystery of a code name!?

So, let me introduce you to Keira Husky (as in 'lover of wolves-pretending-to-be-dogs', not as in '40-a-day smoker with a gravelly voice') and Jessica Cupcake (as in, erm, yes the sponge cake with a tasty frosting on the top).

They're both young, beautiful and intelligent ladies who, during a misguided lapse in personal judgement, let me into their lives. Jess is also known to Keira and I as 'Jessington', the shortened version of her full title, 'Jessington World of Adventures' (a name so commonly typed that it is firmly established in my auto-correct dictionary). I'm trying to come up with something similar for Keira that ties in with Alton Towers or Legoland, but alas I've yet to manage it.

As a motley trio, we get up to all kinds of japes and adventures. Sort of. We mainly discuss them whilst eating nice food or drinking cups of tea, rather than actually carrying them out. Either way, it's so nice to have really good pals who I can share my time and thoughts with, without them needing to be physically restrained.

Three may be considered a crowd by some, but for some reason, we all click and get on really well. But, just last week it came to light that we actually have a serious disagreement on something. After many hours of late night phone calls and deep discussions, we have just about managed to patch things up, but I can sense tensions are still bubbling beneath the surface.

So, in the hope that you and your friends don't have to suffer the same trauma as our previously happy gang did, I thought I'd share this bone of contention with you. Then, should it ever rear its ugly head in a conversation, you can quickly change the subject and hopefully still live happily ever after.

In the name of entertainment, I'm going to dramatise events just a touch. It may help you to imagine the following as an American tv-style reconstruction. I've blown the budget on hiring Tom Cruise to play me, so the girls are represented by Bella Emberg and Thora Hird (yeah, I know she's dead, but great value for money).

So we're sat in a local Indian restaurant, enjoying their amazingly good value all-you-can-eat buffet. They serve a really good selection actual Indian food, rather that just curry. Three courses for £9 is an exceptional deal for a greedy fatso like Tom Cruise who was seen piling his plate on many different occasions (in between stopping for autographs and talking to random fans on mobile phones like he always seems to do at movie premieres these days).

It had been a little while since we'd seen each other, so we were busy catching up with what we'd been up to. This usually involves lots of exciting adventures and achievements from the ladies, whilst I curse my atrocious memory and make stuff up so as to appear nearly adequate. But then it happened. What meal were we actually eating? I said dinner. The girls insisted in was lunch.

Sure I agreed, lunch is another name for it, but to me it's dinner. At school, we had 'dinner hour' and 'dinner ladies' - no mention of lunch.

But what then to call one's main evening meal? Jess & Keira insisted that was actually dinner. But I always call that tea!

No, they protested! Tea involves dainty sandwiches, scones and cake etc. I said that's only the case if it's preceded by 'afternoon'.

The only meals we could agree on were breakfast and supper. But despite this concord, the girls were angry and started to thrash their fists on the table and throw their cutlery to the floor. There was the sound of breaking glass as the restaurant fell silent. Somewhere a baby cried.

Luckily, Tom Cruise managed to calm everything down with his winning smile and a quick sermon on Scientology. Having agreed to disagree, we then moved onto pudding. Or is it dessert? Or afters?

Here's a picture of Jess and Keira. Hard to imagine how in just the blink of an eye, these lovelies can turn from rational, intelligent people to enraged wildebeests with such deranged views on meal names.


Feel free to post your views on this in the comments below (but remember that I can delete them, so you'd best agree with me).