Blind Date

It was raining, of course isn’t it always when you do your hair, but I couldn’t help feeling this was a bad sign. I logically know that these things are not signs but emotionally it still affects me. I felt that way on Saturday when I was working at Kings Weston and this lovely young couple were getting married – oh but the rain, it’s not a good sign - would I have called it off? I had a driving lesson in the morning that went surprisingly well. Maybe it was because I wasn’t fully concentrating, because I was to busy being worried about lunch to be panicking about whether I could reverse round a corner maybe without the panic element I realised that the manoeuvre was actually remarkably simple. But the rain kept falling.

I got my instructor to drop me off in town so that I could buy an umbrella, which of course immediately turned inside out and broke. I was going to have to face it this was not going to be a great entrance, and to make matters worse I was early. Note to self; never arrange a blind date at a restraunt that you don’t know and that is a little pretentious. My bad feeling was getting worse and the internal dialogue that it had taken me years to tame was getting restless “you don’t have to do this, just turn around now and keep walking” the voice from the back of my head, the one that always kicks in with it’s very discrete and manipulative way of saying ‘run away, run now you don’t have to face life’. Only the fear of that voice and where it might lead if I started listening again kept me there. How bad could it be?

I spotted him coming towards me, or rather marching at such speed that I didn’t get a chance to gather my thoughts past wondering how his hair had looked blonde in the photo but that it was actually very dark and rather grey. He was shorter than Id imagined with quite a slight build and that unmistakable red face. I had noticed it in the photo but the picture was a holiday snap, him and his daughter on a beach and the red face could have been caused by the sun but in Bristol on a wet day in April it was obvious that it was the drink. He came straight up to me and kissed me on the forehead. Yes the forehead! I was shocked. It felt much more intrusive than a kiss on the lips might be, that you expect or at least are familiar with, no-one has kissed me on the forehead since… well I’m not even sure when or even if. It seemed so condescending, patronising, disabling.

When I think about it he was very like my Uncle Tom in London, my uncle who had got stuck in the 80’s where all deals were done in the pub and life was evaluated by how much money you could earn and how ruthless you could be. Quick thinking and always thinking about the next deal or bragging about the last one. He ordered a gin and tonic and asked to see the wine list even though I had clearly stated that I wasn’t drinking. (Yes we were back in the eighties, I had those kinds of lunches with my uncle and they were vaguely pleasant then because of the volume of alcohol. Now it was going to be a case of how quickly can I get out of this) I had conveniently rearranged my day to him swapping round the morning to work and driving in the afternoon conveniently giving me both a dead line and a reason not to be drinking. By this time there was no point in telling him I didn’t drink at all, I knew that it would be a scenario he would not be able to get his head around and might actually requite some input from me into the conversation which otherwise was optional.

He did ask a little about me but showed very little interest in my response preferring to talk of his new venture with club crème lap dancers. He’s a solicitor who walked out of the practice he was at just before Christmas (did he walk or was he pushed?) and these girls were his first independent clients. I’m not going to retell the whole story because believe me it’s not that intesting and had undertones of being very seedy and also I question how much of it is actually true. He asked me if I knew anything about tax. The negative answer didn’t seem to matter the point wasn’t is this legal, again it was just another excuse for him to witter on about how much money he makes what an interesting life he leads and how clever he was. The only person he impressed was himself.

Even the waiter seemed to be looking at me with pity – or was it an assumption that I was selling myself out to this man, this lifestyle. Or was I just becoming a little paranoid? When we ordered he made some cheap embarrassing comment about ‘in the 15 years we’ve been married I’ve never known you eat vegetables’. I cringed quite visually. I lit up, the tell tale sign that I’m not even going to bother trying here. If I had the courage I would of just cut it short there and then but I suffer from terminal politeness nowadays and there were the social formalities to be adhered to and besides I was actually quite hungry and it would be over soon enough.

The food was over priced and over cooked, I left still feeling hungry, or was that empty feeling in the pit of my stomach something else? It was still raining and he insisted on driving me back to work, adding to my frustration considering that I had decided I was heading straight for Sarah’s for some cheering up, and the possibility of cookies. As we walked to his car, which incidentally was about as far away from the restaurant in the other direction from my work, he asked if he could take my hand while actually gesturing towards doing so. Fortunately my hands were firmly shoved deep within my pockets and they were not bunging. There were no saving graces here. I can think of nothing positive to say about this man except he paid the bill, I didn’t even offer just in case he was gracious enough to accept. He spotted a young pupil from the firm he used to work for quietly going about her business of getting a sandwich for lunch and dreaming of somewhere else, in his brash exhibitionist way he greeted her with very loud claps and hollers of ‘wake up wake up’ introducing her to me saying that this girl once said that I was the most interesting man she had ever known. She must have been either very drunk which is quite likely or very desperate. She did not look overly pleased to see him, embarrement all round except for Tony of course who doesn’t seem capable of such a considered response.

Got to the car just before I finally lost it and went screaming of into the night (although it was still only two thirty it had felt like a very long day) I was praying for no traffic delays. I couldn’t bare going round the one way system so got him to drop me off as close to the office as possible. Even he had starting to detect that I hadn’t had the best time in the world, probably through my rigidity and lack of dialogue. Earlier he had started to say about giving it a bit of time to get to know each other using my line ‘it would be nice to click in the first instance but does that ever really happen’ as a starting point but I had miraculously managed to stop him, although it wasn’t that ingenious a ploy I just ran off to the loo. This time he just said he’d leave it up to me to contact him.

Well I’m quite busy the week hell freezes over with Garry the psychopath, Mike the neurotic and Julie Burchill the just plain infuriating, but the following week I might just have a window.

So it was change direction again, I didn’t want to get any closer to work just in case anyone spotted me and off to Sarah’s for those cookies declaring that the internet dating experience is most defiantly over! … for now.