Another great article, Meaghan, which reminded me of an incident from my own mis-spent youth. It’s Friday, I’m eighteen, and tonight I have a date with Aurora, a funny and clever girl my own age who is also beautiful and, I’d always thought, out of my league. I’m riding my motorcycle through an intersection when BAM! A car hurtles into me. I end up skidding along the road for about 50 meters before coming to a halt wedged under a truck. Fortunately I’m wearing leathers so although my helmet & clothing are all ruined, I’m OK except for cuts & severe bruising to my knees.

But I’m a man! (well, nearly…) so the date night proceeds. I take Aurora out to the best restaurant in town, we have an amazing evening of conversation and humor, and we end up by going back to my place. Where we have surprisingly good sex not once but three times. Eventually we fall asleep entwined in each other’s arms.

And then… around 2am I wake, realizing that I have only seconds before those scallops reappear with overwhelming enthusiasm. I roll out of bed. And it’s now that I discover my legs have locked up, thanks to the trauma of the motorcycle accident earlier. I fall, hard. This wakes Aurora just in time for her to witness me emptying the contents of my stomach onto the bedroom carpet. A carpet I’d just had installed the previous week, at significant expense. And now here I am, face-down in a puddle of semi-digested scallops and everything else that comprised my dinner.

Aurora is, not surprisingly, unimpressed.

It was, alas, the first and last time we would ever have carnal knowledge of each other. And so it was I learned the importance of keeping the contents of one’s stomach inside the aforesaid stomach.

No matter how good a meal may have been, no one wants to see it a second time.