Help! I’m restaurant-phobic

Vernon fancies this new age elfin-faced French woman who owns and runs a restaurant. She’s hard-working, she’s a reader, and she has a great library, he says. He would chuck his Stetson into the ring, he says, but every now and again she comes out with some bonkers new age or woke statement that makes him lose confidence in her intelligence.

Vernon doesn’t oppose new age or woke thinking because he is on the right. (He is at heart a socialist.) He opposes it because he thinks it is shockingly unintelligent. ‘Man,’ he says. ‘If you saw her library, you’d think here is one bright lady.’

I understand his dilemma, I tell Vernon, but why talk? Against this Vernon argues that he has arrived at a stage in his life where he values companionship and intelligent conversation more than he does sex. But who knows, he says? Maybe if he went along for the ride she might convince him that the unintelligent position on woke and new age ideas was in fact his scepticism.