in which I force you to act as my therapist

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hello!

Hi! I’d write a proper intro but I’m still reeling from this piece about The Flying Jacob, a popular Swedish dish with a great name and an entirely nightmareish recipe. It calls for - I’m so sorry to bring you into this - “shredded, grilled chicken topped with sliced bananas and Italian salad spice to be submerged in a mixture of whipped cream and Heinz chili sauce”. Obviously you must then add some “fried bacon chunks and peanuts”.

In the words of world-famous crank Naomi Wolf: No! No!!

Anyway the actual feature is pretty great, and taught me both about Swedes’ baffling but endearing love for bananas and about where that great passion initially came from. I would recommend it. It does end with the writer telling us that we ought to all try The Flying Jacob, but I shan’t be doing that, thank you so much.

(If you’re now in the mood for a palate cleanser, I’d recommend this lovely bit of research on “mysterious Syrian artefacts” which turned out to be ancient baby rattles. It’s really very sweet.)

A column

Editor’s note: what follows contains potentially toxic levels of cloying self-pity. Proceed with caution.

I went through my first break-up at 18. I'd been seeing this massive loser for a couple of months and he'd cheated on me with a virgin then written a song about it, and performed that song with his band in front of both me and the now-former virgin, and yet somehow he was the one who ended up dumping me. Being a teenage girl is just terrific.

Because he was very British and very awkward, and I'd only been in London for under a year, he broke up with me and I didn't realise that's what he'd done. I thought we'd just had a chat about our relationship and that he wanted to take things slow, and I was alright with that. I invited him to stay over for pizza afterwards.

A few days later, his exceedingly straightforward Russian best friend had to be dispatched to talk to me and make sure that, yes, I knew I was now single. The whole thing was exactly as mortifying as you'd imagine. It also got worse a few weeks later, as our entire group of friends was going to the same festival in east London.

The loser had, of course, already got himself a new girlfriend by then, but we'd agreed that neither of us would be overly physical with anyone else in front of the other for the duration of the festival. We both felt that was a reasonable thing to agree on. Well, "we".

On the second morning, I came out of my tent and found him and his new squeeze lying on the grass, making out like two people seconds away from going at it, and obviously I lost my mind. I grabbed a bottle of what I thought was Apple Sourz and took a large sip, and realised too late that it was actually absinthe. It was 10am. The rest of the day was a bit of a blur.