Zip

He's been fussing with it for the last few minutes, trying to fit it one way and then the other, searching for a way to rejoin the pull tab to the slider. I want to tell him we tried that already last night. I want to tell him to start doing some proper tailoring.

Still I watch carefully, in case proper tailoring needs an audience.

Our two heads are bent over the puzzle, two sets of hands smoothing the fabric. I want to tell him that it's vintage. That I got it in LA. That when someone half a world away ran it up for themselves on a sewing machine they were also running it up for me.

'You sure this is from here?'

'Yes. Definitely.'

He looks over his glasses at me. 'How you do this?'

'I, um...' I mime reaching around to my spine but stop when I see the expression on his face.

'Totally broken.' He makes a gesture like the zipper's exploded. 'Someone pull too hard. Your boyfriend? Oh yes, he rush. Rush hour.'

I try to look nonchalant. An elderly Chinese man is quizzing me about my love-life. I can feel the blood flush my cheeks.

He shakes his head, not angry, just disappointed. 'Totally broken. Can't fix. Need new zip. For you, twelve pounds.'

I give him my name and number and, oddly, the country of my birth, but he hasn't finished with me yet.

He takes the dress, gives me a ticket and looks me squarely in the eye. 'You tell him next time, he be more careful. He no rush. Tell him...' The corners of his mouth twitch. 'Tell him slower is better.'

No Greeks. No Bakers. No Criers.

We're sitting round the kitchen table, and she moves aside the bottle of cava and eyeballs me.

'Are you Greek?'

I look at the others. 'Greek?'

'There was a Greek,' someone explains.

The others pull faces. 'What a dick.'

'No,' I say. 'Not Greek.'

'Are you emotionally unavailable?'

'Not really.'

'Do you bake bread with your new partner's initials in?'

'It's not the bread,' her friend clarifies, 'it's the initials. Or, y'know, hearts and things.'

'No.'

My interrogator shuffles the paper like a newsreader. 'Do you make marzipan fruit?'

'Really? Marzipan fruit?'

'I'll take that as a no. How about carrying people over puddles?'

I shake my head.

'Give cutesy nicknames within days of meeting?'

'Nope.'

'Can you make decisions?'

'Erm... maybe.'

She wags a finger at me. 'See what you did there. Last one: are you a crier?'

I prevaricate, but she's already topping up my glass. I've officially passed the Frog Test. Although, as you may have guessed, I'm not exactly the target audience.



The Frog Test is designed to do what we consistently fail to: spot the people who are destined to let us down in host of unexpected and mundanely cruel ways. The test is designed to ensure we never find ourselves choking out the words, 'He wasn't even that attractive. What the fuck!?'

Thing is, the test doesn't work. In tactical terms it's like moving your troops to defend targets that've already been blown up. You're braced for the suitor with the marzipan plums, but not for the one who writes a song about you or gets your spirit animal tattooed across the small of her back.

Which means that you and her and him and we are back where we started: kissing frogs.

Which is where this blog comes in.

Over the years I've heard stories stranger and funnier and sadder than anything anyone could make up. Stories of dates and flings and meet cutes and missed connections. And most of these stories get passed around for a while, like cheap paperbacks, until they lie forgotten somewhere, dusty and unread. This blog aims to dust them off.

So tell me your kissing-frog stories and I'll tell them on. To be clear, frogs can be male or female, young or croaky with age, and the kissing can be coy or entirely metaphorical. The tales can contain strong elements of wish fulfilment, visceral horror or mind-fuckery but they should be essentially true. I won't be naming names.



The plates are dirty and the cava, when I hold it up to the light, is empty.

'Should have known when I saw that loaf of bloody sourdough,' my friend says, shaking her head. But she's struggling to keep a straight face as we add more questions to the list.

Frogs of London better brace themselves.