This week I eat, scoot and leave, have my fill of Scandi spin-offs ...

and go – umm – ‘nuts’ for jogging

Scarper and chips

IN media land they say three’s a trend so as word filters through to the Dirty Diary about a trilogy of bizarre but apparently linked events, it’s safe to assume we have a bona fide example of it on our hands.

The trend in question involves people ordering food in a restaurant and then legging it when it’s time to settle up, but doing so in a manner which, though I hate to condone dishonesty, shows a certain sense of style and no small amount of chutzpah.

The craze for what’s being referred to as “eat and run” incidents seems to have started in Spain, where they even have a word for it: “simpas”. In March, a group booking of 120 turned up at the El Carmen restaurant in the northern town of Bembibre, racked up a bill of around £1,700 and then had the cheek to make their exit under cover of a massive conga. That was incident number one.

A few weeks later, a nearby restaurant suffered a similar fate, this time when a 160-strong “wedding party” (aye, right) left a bill of £8,500. That’s incident number two. And so to incident number three, which involves 33-year-old Australian rapper 2pec. Or Terry Peck as he was referred to in court when his case – and it is a beaut – came in front of Queensland magistrate Joan White recently.

Now, until 2pec arrived on the simpas scene, the poster boy for the movement was the Polish vagrant who notched up a string of simpas-related arrests in Spain. Police repeatedly pointed him in the direction of the local soup kitchens but, not unreasonably, he told them he preferred restaurant food instead. He just wasn’t minded to pay for it.

2pec’s entry into the simpas Hall of Fame came when he sat down at a beachside restaurant on the Gold Coast and allegedly ordered two lobsters, a baby octopus, somewhere between 17 and 21 shots of vodka (accounts vary) and several beers. It’s amazing that he could even walk after that lot. But not only could he walk, it seems he could also run and swim: faced with a £370 bill, it’s alleged that 2pec disappeared into the sea. The police were called and had to borrow a jet ski to apprehend him. 2pec later claimed the lobsters were overcooked, a culinary slight that brought a sharp response from a Mr Hunnybun, assistant manager at the restaurant in question. “We pride ourselves on cooking our lobsters perfectly,” he told ABC News. Even better was 2pec’s excuse for leaving the restaurant so hastily: he said he was running to help a friend he had spotted who was giving birth on the beach.

Lagom louts

BESIDES “simpas” we’re going to be hearing a lot more foreign words in 2017, mostly the ones in Spanish, German and French which translate as “No, you can’t keep Gibraltar”, “No, the City can’t continue with the lucrative practice of ‘passporting’ after Brexit” and “Yes, we are moving the border to your side of la Manche. Suck it up, buttercup”.

Luckily, we can pretend none of this is happening by sinking into the warm embrace of “lagom”, a Swedish word meaning “just enough”, which has spawned a slew of new lifestyle books. Granted, its vaguely minimalist ethos isn’t quite as cuddly as the hot chocolate and blankets vibe promoted by the last Scandinavian design concept to wash up in Waterstones – “hygge”, the Danish word for cosiness – but it’s good enough.

You can read all about lagom from August in The Little Book Of Lagom, a partner to The Little Book Of Hygge which has sold almost 200,000 copies since it was published last year. Come autumn, we’ll be drowning in further titles devoted to the subject. There’s even a cookbook coming.

Essentially, lagom promotes an ethos of moderation and balance in all things – something the Brexit negotiators would do well to take on board before they do actually declare war on someone – though whether you’ll be allowed to allocate room on your decluttered Ikea Billy bookcases for all the literature on the subject remains to be seen.

Hell’s balls

GIVE a man a blank wall and a spray can and tell him to draw something and he’ll almost certainly oblige with a crudely-rendered facsimile of the male genitalia. It’s kind of a default setting and, appropriately, uses even less brainpower than is required to draw a smiley face. Two circles. An extended ellipse. Simple. A child could do it. Give a man a GPS-enabled smartphone and a fitness app which lets him track his movements on a map and then post them online, and you find the same thing happening – especially when he’s actually encouraged to do it. That’s the case with the #GoBallsOut campaign to raise awareness of testicular cancer. Using running apps like Strava, joggers in New Zealand have had hours of fun creating penis-shaped doodles with their exercise regimes. Not that people necessarily need encouragement. Even before #GoBallsOut launched there was a cornucopia of genitalia-related “art” being posted on run-mapping apps like Nike Plus, though some of these “run artists”, as they’re called, are high-minded enough to occasionally deviate from the tried-andtested anatomical outline.

Last week, two Welsh marathon runners created the outline of a massive Welsh dragon in Carmarthenshire. It took them eight hours. Other fine examples of “run art” include a massive Super Mario (in northern Seattle), a gigantic Homer Simpson (in Brighton) and even a Turin Shroud (in San Diego). But for every one of those, there’s 100 clever dicks.

Goops upside your head

ANY “run artists” who likes to jog barefoot and have had their fill of genitalia should consider drawing a vast Gwyneth Paltrow face using their apps and posting that online instead. The woman, pictured left, who once said “I would rather die than let my kid eat Cup A Soup” and who introduced the idea of “conscious uncoupling” and “vagina steaming” for “energetic release” is now promoting another zinger on Goop, the weekly lifestyle publication she “curates”.

It’s called “earthing” and basically it means walking around with your shoes off. This allows you to pick up the earth’s electrons and thereby neutralise those pesky free radicals you didn’t know you were supposed to be worried about. This, in turn, it’s claimed, can help with everything from insomnia to arthritis.

My kids walk around with no shoes on all the time. I don’t know if they pick up electrons from the earth but I do know they pick up dirt, splinters, stray drawing pins and other bits of uncategorisable detritus, and that not even the threat of being forcefed Cup A Soup will make them put on their baffies. Mind you, neither of them has arthritis, so maybe there is something in it after all.