The Dating Detox: A laugh out loud book for anyone who’s ever had a disastrous date!

I see Mitch supervising the iPod war, kiss him hello, and then feel obliged to kiss everyone else in the room hello, which means I’m basically tottering around darting my head about everyone’s face like a little bird for the next three minutes. Finally, I finish working the room and get back to Mitch.

Mitch is one of my best friends, but forget any ideas you might have about me secretly falling in love with him or vice versa: he spent the first year of university chasing after Bloomie and I, then resigned himself to best friendship, and now professes to find us physically revolting. He’s a banker, like Bloomie, but I’m afraid he probably is an arsehole, at least some of the time.

He’s also a complete tart, but since he never leads the girls to believe it’ll be anything more than just sex, he gets away with it. Just.

‘How’ve you been, Special Forces? I heard about you and Posh Mark.’

‘Mmmm,’ I say. Special Forces is his nickname for me—because of SAS/Sass. Except when I’m really drunk. Then he calls me Special Needs.

‘Tough luck, though he was too thick by half. But for fuck’s sake don’t talk to me about your feelings. DO talk to me about this intriguing Sex Vacation.’

‘Dating Sabbatical.’

‘Whatever.’

‘Big crowd tonight, Bitch?’ I ask. It’s not a very clever nickname, but it makes us laugh.

‘Don’t change the subject…But about seventy or so, I should think,’ Mitch says, scanning the tight-white-jeans-encased bottom of a girl in the iPod group. He turns to me. ‘I’m a trendsetter, you know. These parties are totally recessiontastic.’

‘Huh?’ I say.

‘Houseparties are the new going out. Front rooms are the new Boujis Beer is the new Cristal.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘Where’s Gekko? I need to talk to her about a work thing later.’

‘Kitchen.’

Mitch calls Bloomie ‘Gekko’ in a rather sweet Wall Street reference—she says she hates it, but I’m not sure she does. He walks through to the kitchen, high-fiving and low-fiving people all the way. Mitch is good at collecting people. Most of the crowd tonight will be our university friends, and then satellite friends from everyone’s work, school and extended family. Being part of this insta-crowd makes living in London a lot easier: an ever-evolving gang without too much effort. My first year in London, pre-Mitch and Eddie and Bloomie and Kate joining me, is barely worth talking about. I call it The Lost Year, the one before I went out with Arty Jonathan. I spent most of my time getting drunk with the other new, green Londoners in horrible chain bars, and taking nightbuses back to Mortlake, an area in South London that you can only get to by buses and sheer willpower, where I shared a manky little flat with four strangers. Then, thankfully, the old group all moved to London and I quickly phased out my new friends for the cosy reassurance of my old ones.

‘Sass! I hear you’ve become bitter!’ says Harry, a podgy architect who’s been involved in a passionate conversation about Jack Johnson for the past few minutes. He was skinny on the first day of university. His shirt now strains against his gut so tight that I can see the cavernous shadow of his belly button. I smile at him and don’t say anything. He adds cheerfully, ‘Sworn off all men!’

The rest of the iPod-battlers look up and grin.

Holy shit, my friends are gossips. Looks like news of my Dating Sabbatical has hit the streets. Rule 4: avoid talking about the Sabbatical.

‘I’d rather swear off them than under them!’ I reply cryptically. I’ve made better comebacks, but I decide to pretend it was a killer riposte, raise a knowing eyebrow at Harry and swan off to the kitchen to find Bloomie.

Despite work very nearly getting in the way of a timely sartorial decision, I managed to come up with a rather soul-cheering outfit. It’s a rather short fitted black mini dress with sheer black tights and ankleboots, and my hair done in a rockabilly-quiffy-ponytail thing. (Yes, yes, why I am dressing as a Robert Palmer girl meets Elvis when I ostensibly don’t want to attract attention is a mystery to me too, but old habits die hard. Anyway, ‘drop your style standards’ isn’t one of the rules.)

Bloomie is standing at the counter, a cigarette jammed in the corner of her mouth like a cowboy as she manhandles a bottle of vodka, a bottle of blue Curaçao, a punnet of blueberries and a blender lid. Eddie—one of my other best friends in London—is standing next to her, holding two bottles of Morgan’s Spiced Rum, a bag of bananas, a coconut and some mango juice. This is the point of Mitch’s houseparties, by the way. We all bring various ingredients, he borrows blenders from everyone who has one (are you kidding? I don’t own an iron, dude, let alone a blender) and we make up cocktails and name them. Yes. It’s dangerous.

‘This is it, kids,’ announces Bloomie as dramatically as you can with a cigarette in the corner crease of your lips. ‘Prepare to experience the most mind-blowingly awesome cocktail since the Knickerless Bloomer.’ That, obviously, was the name of her cocktail at the last party (white rum, coconut milk, Malibu, strawberries and a pinch of cinnamon).

‘No fucking Malibu this time,’ calls Mitch, as he leaves the kitchen with a round of shots for the iPod brigade. ‘Every cocktail Gekko makes has fucking Malibu in it. It’s like being at school. And stop fucking smoking in my kitchen.’

‘You wish, Bitch, my darling…’ says Bloomie, very obviously more concerned with arranging the ingredients on the counter.

I lean over and kiss Eddie hello. Eddie and I dated for two weeks at university, and broke up for heartfelt reasons now forgotten. (He doesn’t make the list as one of the official breakups, obviously.) Eddie’s been in a long-distance relationship for the past two years with a girl called Maeve who lives in Geneva, of all places. They see each other once every two months, and he doesn’t even talk about her much. I secretly suspect he’s just lazy and doesn’t want to bother to play the field. Eddie’s an engineer. What he actually does all day, I just don’t know. Builds things?

‘What’s shaking, Edward?’ I ask.

‘Not much,’ he says.‘My sisters are in London tomorrow night. They’re going to Spain on Sunday. Wanna help me entertain them? Dinner, somewhere cheap and cheerful in Notting Hill?’

‘Good luck finding that,’ interjects Bloomie.

‘Love to,’ I say. ‘Love the lovely sisters. How’s Maeve?’

‘Good, fine, she’s fine. Now, do you know how to open a coconut?’

‘“Open” a coconut?’ I repeat.

‘I’m making a tropical punch.’

‘What a stunning idea,’ I say.

‘Not original enough for you, my little creative bunny? Fine. Here’s a twist for you: when someone drinks it, you have to hit them in the face. Get it? Tropical punch.’

I start to laugh. ‘Take my fag, darling,’ Bloomie interrupts. This darling means me, I know, so I reach over and take it from her mouth, and she immediately whirls around and throws her hands in the air. ‘Everyone! I have a secret weapon! I have a pestle and mortar and I shall be muddling blueberries with sugar as the base for tonight’s winning cocktail!’

The crowd in the kitchen laughs and whoops. After a few minutes of muddling, and some blending of ice, vodka and Curaçao, she pours the cocktail into about 15 of the many double-shot glasses Mitch purchased specifically for his parties. She raises her glass: ‘A toast to the Blue-mie Moon!’ and drinks it. We all repeat ‘the Blue-mie Moon!’ and follow suit. (If this drink takes its inspiration from the mojito, then it’s a long-distant, slightly inbred, unpleasantly blueberry-skin-filled cousin.) The night has begun.

An hour later, and we’ve had Mitch’s Marvellous Medicine (tequila and crème de menthe; disgusting), the Molasses Fiend (this one was mine, and if I may say, it was a toffee-espresso delight), a Deep Deep Burn (Tabasco—need I say more?) and a Bite Me (butterscotch schnapps and Baileys, garnished with crushed up bits of Crunchie). Eddie has been banished outside to wrestle with the coconut and a large cleaver, and someone new has discovered, as someone new always does, that blending lemonade and ice leads to tears.

Bloomie and I have taken up our customary early-party position perched up in the big kitchen window, so we can hold our fags outside and comment on activities inside at the same time. It’s a delicate operation in a mini dress, but the adroit placement of a teatowel over my thighs sees me through. The best thing about sitting in the kitchen window, of course, is that it’s low-effort socialising: everyone comes in when they arrive to say hello and try a cocktail or five before situating themselves near the booze-and-ice buckets planted strategically around the living room, stairs and garden.

I tell Bloomie about my night with Kate, and the finger-gunning Yank. She cackles with laughter.

‘I also had some rather good stuff happen at work today,’ I grin, and waggle my eyebrows.

Bloomie whoops. ‘About fucking time, darling. Did you bitchslap them back into place?’

‘Something like that,’ I say. ‘I won’t bore you with the details…Where’s The Dork?’

Her face goes gooey with happiness. ‘On the way. He just texted me. He had to have dinner with his sister tonight. She’s pregnant. Her name is Julie. She lives in Paris. She sounds really nice.’

I am shocked. This kind of babbling is entirely unlike Bloomie and utterly delightful to see. We smile at each other, but before we get caught in a sickly-sweet moment I quickly turn my smile into a manic, scrunchy-nose-frowny-pig grin and turn my face back into the kitchen…just as an utterly divine man walks in from the living room.

He’s very tall, with broad shoulders and dark hair. And his eyes are locked directly on my scrunchy-pig face. Shit. I quickly try to set my face to pretty, but it’s too late. He’s already glanced over me and back to the group of people he walked in with. Good thing I’m not in the market to get attention from men, I say to myself.

Bloomie swings her legs back in. ‘Mitch’s cousin is here!’ she says to me. That’s Mitch’s cousin? I think. Mitch is blond and skinny. She hops down from the window sill with the careless aplomb of someone wearing jeans, and skips through the crowd shouting ‘Jake!’

I ease my way down delicately and decide, Dating Sabbatical or not, I can’t quite face meeting a good-looking man named Jake who just saw me looking like a pig and will therefore dismiss me without a second thought.

Instead, I turn to see what the current mixologist is up to. It’s Fraser, another old friend from university. He’s looking his usual prematurely middle-aged self in corduroy trousers and a slight belly, and is pulling Valrhona chocolate powder, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, full-fat milk and a bottle of brandy out of an Ocado delivery bag. We kiss hello.

‘Help me!’ he says. ‘How the bugger do I work this godawful contraption?’