Dear Professor,
A guy I work with is recently divorced and wants me to join him in spending his weekends socialising and hitting the clubs to meet a potential new partner. I'm 31, happily married and have lost the appetite for loud music and dancing until the early hours of the morning. But he says I'm the ideal ‘wingman' because I'll make him look good - whatever that means. A few months ago he rejected my friend request on facebook and hardly ever spoke to me. Now he's acting like I'm his long-lost brother, patting me on the back all the time and buying me lunch. Should I help this guy find love? I feel like I'm being used.
Calum
Firstly, I loathe the term wingman, which I believe originated in the movie Top Gun, the silliest example of anti-Soviet propaganda ever to reach cinema screens (although Rocky IV comes close - no self-respecting heterosexual Russian ever sported such an immaculate hairstyle as Ivan Drago's gravity-defying flat-top).
Secondly, you ask if you should help this guy find love. He's only just got divorced! Sounds to me as if he's ready for love the way Santa Claus is ready for another round-the-world voyage.
The worst thing you can do right now is allow this desperado near the opposite sex. He'll bore them senseless with his relationship woes. He'll be crying into his cocktail. Worst of all, he'll be using stale chat-up lines that went out of fashion with Old Spice aftershave and three-button suits.
He needs to be eased back into the dating game slowly, gently and, yes, with a suitable sidekick. By the sound of things he has chosen you because you're a bit dull, aesthetically challenged (ie ugly) and will be, in Top Gun parlance, the Anthony ‘Goose' Edwards to his Tom ‘Maverick' Cruise. A bit insulting, don't you think? By all means help this guy out, you old softy, but don't come crying to me when, after succeeding in finding love, he disowns you faster than a MiG 29 fighter jet. Because that's what's going to happen. And you know it.
Dear Professor,
While at an office party over the festive period I discovered a colleague damaging someone's genuine fur coat with her nail file in the cloakroom. She claimed she was just doing her bit for animal rights and pleaded with me not to say anything. While I am sympathetic to the anti-fur brigade, I can't get the incident out of my mind. Should I snitch on her?
Hitesh
As a boy in Novosibirsk I often wore fur (I was particularly fond of a lynx bomber jacket with detachable hood that made me the envy of the village), but I had little choice in the matter. In sub-zero temperatures, any other material provided insufficient warmth. To wear fur in the Arabian Gulf, however, is obscene and unnecessary. Frankly, had I been in your shoes I would have mutilated the thing myself out of anger. Your vandal colleague is to be commended, not criticised for her fur-fighting stance.
