Bunch of Fives: butteredfeet

butteredfeet is an online audio soap opera, delivered in bitesized form via Spotify/iTunes. Intended to be a meditative, warm podcast-style story of “unsettling slices of arbitrary love lives”, each short episode takes the listener to an ill-timed moment, resulting in a poignant and more-ish collection of mini-dramas.

In their Bunch of Fives, they offer up their curiously specific choices of places to go on a third date in Newcastle.

Dobbies Cafe

The place for a hubcap of tea cake, whiffs of gilets and the hum of broiled slop from slow cookers. It’s the cashmere jacket potato crew! If you like holding hands between little gold butters with a view of ‘Granny’s Garden’ signs then the tedious gnomes will be your chaperones. Pull up a chair and gaze into the eyes of a cheese scone before they’re all gone.

Packed lunch on Gateshead side during Quayside Market Day

Fed up with spilling expensive street food down your fifty quid t-shirt? Is that onerous snaking between folk in mobility scooters becoming a chew? Then get yourself on the Gateshead side of the river on Quayside market day. Pitch yourself on that bit of gravel just up from the Jury’s Inn and whip out a romantic packed lunch on the hoof. What says third date better than a cold quiche and some pointing at morons spending their wages on five pound meat free brownies and old Wranglers that smell of Horlicks.

Gravespotting – All Saints, Jesmond

Repose upon a bench of three planks instead of the requisite four, nipping at your backsides and reminding you that you’re very much still alive. It feels impolite to witter on, given the circumstances, so you say almost nothing and share a grab bag of Chilli Heatwave Doritos. A beautiful, black-clad young couple drift by in silence, gliding as though phantoms above the cracked paths that leak moss. You watch over Ronnie Forsyth, who shuffled off this mortal coil on December 17th, 1964, and ponder that his experience of snacks would have been very different to your own.

The poorly-coordinated Netflix and chill (most homes)

The exquisite leoparding on the crust of the ‘Legit Best Pizza Ever’ sweats itself flaccid in the box. We shouldn’t eat until we’ve locked our Netflix on. The slaps and grinds of people masticating is incredibly irritating to me (you). The joyless scrolls through cinematic ephemera is approaching 35 minutes now. The imminent threat looms large amid the cheeky nibbles of ‘nduja chunks, now barely the temperature of old people’s skin. “Let’s. Just. Pick. Something.”

Noise gig at Byker Morrisons Bins

DIY skronk is happening. You’re well into music, yeah. Edgy stuff, nothing what’s on the radio. Even purchased an Autechre album a while back. But the bearded savant mouth-farting into a Gumtree trombone is honestly too much. The feedback resonates from the dripping bins smeared with memories of butchery and the threatening promise of three more acts, as you bear your unrelenting carrier bag of cans.