I once dated a man who’s name I didn’t know

True story.

It happened about five years ago. I saw him every day when I was at work and thought he was utterly beautiful. When I was at work I had a name badge on.

For about a year, I smiled and tried to start conversations. For a year, he smiled politely but didn’t respond. Then one day I went to get some photos developed and he was standing there in the shop! Thankfully, the photos were of friends and I at a party so I looked presentable enough.

When I went to pick them up, he finally responded to my advances and chatted a little. The chatting developed over the next few months until he finally asked me to go for a drink. He’d been saying my name when talking to me for quite a while by this point. Obviously, having a name badge on made it easy for him. But by the time we were going for a drink, I realised I didn’t know his name and we had been flantering (flirty bantering) for too long for me to now ask him.

When he gave me his number he just wrote it on a peice of paper, without his name. Before our date, I tried going online to the website of the shop where he worked but there was nothing about staff names. And so I went for a drink with a man who’s name I did not know.

When the man gave me a gentle kiss goodnight at the bus stop, I still did not know his name. When I saved his phone number under ‘Man,’ I still did not know his name. When we text back and forth to arrange a second date (which we did not end up going on), I still did not know his name.

When he disappeared off the radar altogether for a year or so, then showed up back at my work needing someone to talk to and saying he’d been married and divorced in the past year and struggled with alcoholism, I still did not know his name.

When he cried a little so I took him somewhere quiet to sit and gave him a hug, I still did not know his name.

When he asked me what he needed to say to prove he was still interested (I, unfortunately, no longer was), I still did not know his name.

And now, while I’m remembering how odd that all was, I still do not know his name!

The bus journey of memories

I get on, beep my Oyster card and sit down. I have a magazine with me, intending to read it, but I know deep down I won’t actually read it. Because this bus journey is one which runs through the memories I have made since coming to London. I’m always drawn to look out of the window.

It starts by the pharmacy where I would come and get Bio Oil every week or so after my operation last year. To try and make my huge hideous scar fade a little. Next I’m at the garage I used to walk to when I was allowed off bedrest, to try and get my energy back. There’s the bike shop where I wheeled my bike in despair one day when I had a puncture while cycling to work. It was a brand new bike and I felt very protective of it. I hung around nervously while they took it in the back to fix, trying to catch a glimpse of it. And there’s the shoe shop where I worked for six weeks before leaving because the manager was awful. And opposite is the Waitrose I don’t like because it’s laid out differently to the one I usually go to. There’s the pub I once went on a date to. One of those dates where you realise that someone is much more likeable from a distance. Moving on to the getting-to-know-you stage had been a mistake. The Oliver Bonas shop is next. I’ve never been in there. I had a friend who worked at one of their other shops. On the left is the running shop which used to be a running and cycling shop. I lost faith in them when they got rid of the cycling part of the shop. I was quite a regular visitor, used to get kitted out in my lycra there. Then here’s the garden centre on my right. I used to cycle down here for compost and seeds etc, when I started keeping an allotment in my final year at uni. Next is the Memories of Mortlake shop. I always look at it from my bike or from a bus window and think it looks lovely but have never been in. Next, we are at the traffic lights and the bus stop on the other side of the road is where I used to wait when I worked at a coffee shop where the shifts started at 5.30am. Once, while waiting for the bus there, an old man started mumbling and shuffling over to me and when I listened to his mumbles, he was asking me what colour my knickers were! I promptly set off walking fast for the next bus stop. Next we come onto a road which is flooded with early London memories. We’re passing my old university on my right and the council estate where I lived for two and a half years having loads of fun but with the worst landlord in the history of the world.

The university buildings cover the whole right side of the road until it ends at the road I used to cycle down when going into the park. I went through a phase of cycling around Richmond Park twice every morning first thing, before I did anything else. Next is the little cobbled road on my left where my uni friends and I would get a takeaway from Dong Phuong’s at least once a week, minimum. Next, up the road to the motorway and on my right is the other council estate where my friend, Sophie, and I viewed a flat before ending up at the one we passed earlier. We pass by Putney Heath and another council estate where Sophie and I viewed a flat with a girl we didn’t know, who never got back to us about whether she wanted to move in. It was a bit of a walk from uni anyway, so we opted for the one just over the road! Turn left and follow the motorway through Wimbledon Common, which I used to cycle across when the coffee company I worked for, needed me to cover shifts at the Wimbledon branch. I once got very very lost on the common for over an hour. I was quite frantic by the time I found a dog walker and asked him for directions. We’re now in Wimbledon Village and the bar where my friend, Robyn, brought me years ago, when I first came to her house and we had gone out dancing. We danced to Kylie’s Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. I had learned the dance moves from the video and we did them, over and over. Down the hill and approaching Wimbledon station, where we dropped Joe off to get the train, before going to the bar I just passed. We turn before the station and it starts to get into unchartered territory. We pass through Southfields, where I thought for years that my friend Jay lived. She would always leave early in the evening to get home on time and I wondered why she was being so over-cautious. After all, she just needed to jump on the one bus…. I think it was Sophie who pointed out that she did not live down the road in Southfields. She lived significantly further away in Southall…. Oops! Well it’s all south, that’s what I say. We go through lots of areas which are unfamiliar until we hit Tooting, and the cafe on my left where I once met Joe so we could go and explore Tooting, to report back to a friend who was soon to move to a campus there from abroad. And the restaurant shortly after where I met an old uni friend for dinner a few months after my operation, still feeling a bit fragile. This is where I get off, to do a bit of exploring and to make some more memories.

Sometimes I think too much

Something quite exciting happened yesterday. I was in work, doing my thing, when a customer came in. She’s been in quite a lot lately. She’s new to the area. She’s lovely.

I stopped what I was doing and we chatted for a bit, just chitchat. Another customer came in and I served her then went back to chatting to the friendly lady. She got some stuff and, while she was paying, said her and I should go for a drink sometime as she doesn’t know anyone in the area yet.

I immediately was like “That sounds great! Yeh, definitely.” She said she’ll pop in tomorrow and leave her number….

All of a sudden, I started thinking. Bad move. I felt like I’d been asked on a date. I was thinking about what we’d talk about, whether there’d be enough conversation to sustain an entire evening or whether we’d freeze under the pressure. Should I ask a friend to call half an hour in to the ‘date’ so I could pretend something had happened and I needed to leave? What should I wear? Should I just go in something super casual, like the clothes I’ve worn to work that day? Or go a bit fancier? If I go fancy, will it look like I’ve got ridiculously high expectations for the blossoming friendship? I’ve never undertaken a friendship in this way, there’s always been a longer ‘getting to know you’ period before we took the plunge and went for a drink. I’m a little nervous. If we go for a drink and we find that, while it’s pleasant, we don’t have enough in common to become best friends forever, how will we go about reverting back to our original positions as Customer and Deli Assistant? Will there be a lingering awkwardness whenever she comes into the deli, about the fact that we tried, and failed, to be best friends forever?

Clearly I think too much. But sometimes it’s best to have thought these things through first, to be prepared.

In actual fact, what will probably happen is we’ll go for a drink, have a lovely time, then do it again the next week or a few weeks later. And the friendship will continue in this manner. Maybe we’ll invite each other for dinner sometimes. It will probably be quite a nice fulfilling friendship.

But that doesn’t stop my mind working overtime, prior to our first ‘going for a drink’. Any advice on dos and don’ts of a first ‘date’ with a potential best friend?

The worst date ever? (and more getting excited)

This isn’t really about the actual date, although it was pretty bad. It’s more about my reaction to the date.

When this gentleman asked me out to dinner, it was one of those out-of-the-blue, I-don’t-really-know-you-very-well, this-is-a-surprise things. I thought he might be nice so I said yes and he immediately gave me his phone number on a piece of paper. He’d obviously planned ahead.

On designated Dinner Day, I turned up and we walked to the restaurant. Not a lot of chat going on but I thought we’d get talking when we sat down. We got to the Japanese restaurant and got menus. The waitress came over pretty quickly and he said he was ready to order food. He ordered a bunch of stuff and then the waitress left so I realised he must have ordered for both of us. I was a vegan at the time and just knew he wouldn’t have ordered anything suitable. Anyway, when the food arrived, I managed to nibble on a vine leaf or something. This was all happening relatively quickly and the food was a good topic of conversation so I didn’t notice the main problem until we went for a little drink at the pub. We got a drink each and sat down at the table…. And I started up a few conversations… And nothing… Nothing! He had nothing to say! Disaster!

Now I’m quite a chatty girl. The type you have to shush if you want a turn at saying something. I can find something to say about most stuff. But this was ridiculous. I was expected to conduct the entire evening like a monologue because he didn’t have a thing to say!

Sample conversation:

Me: “So where did you grow up?”
Man: “Alaska.”
Me: “O that’s interesting! What’s it like there?”
Man: “Nice.”
Me: “…Um. So when did you move here?”
Man: “Two years ago.”
Me: “… Um. I grew up in Liverpool. It’s really nice there, yeh. I moved here a few years ago, to go to uni. I really like it….. etc etc…”

One word answers. And no conversation starters. Every time I asked a question, just a single word answer and no return questions. I ended up just asking myself questions and then answering them, for the sake of there being some conversation. He told me one thing, about a scene in The Simpsons where they made a joke about a computer and emailing. He really laughed. That was the high point of his conversation offerings for the night.

Suffice to say, I scarpered as soon as possible and ignored his ‘I miss you’ text sent the next day. ‘Of course you do,’ I thought, ‘You live in a world of silence. Of course you miss someone who’s talking to you.’

So I forgot about it and moved on… Until one day I was at work. I worked in a little coffee place in a train station. The customers could see inside most of it but there was a part just out of sight where the stock room was. As I was leaving the stock room to come around to the front, I looked up and saw The Man From The Date approaching. Like a rabbit caught in the headlights, I stopped dead and ducked down. There was a bin next to where I was standing so I crouched behind it. It wasn’t a very big bin, mind you. If he had looked over, he would definitely have seen me. After he left, my colleagues were looking at me strangely. I pretended to be searching around for something.

It happened the next day as well. I was standing next to the coffee machine, in full view and I saw him approaching from the left. So I just ducked down and stayed still. Ridiculous. When the other person on shift saw that I hadn’t made the drink, she came over to make it, so I had to move out of the way. I crawled (that’s right, crawled) across the open space into the stock room to hide. It was a pretty open-plan place. All he had to do was look slightly to his left and he would have seen me crawling across the floor. How stupid is that?

Why didn’t I just stay standing up and say something normal like, ‘Hi’. I could have done it in a detached way, to let him know I was just being polite and not inviting any interaction. Not that he knew how to do that anyway. But for some reason, I just kept hiding from him. It happened one more time, and I leapt over to the bin to hide again. I then didn’t see him for a while until he arrived a few months later, with a girl in tow so I stopped hiding behind bins then. How silly.

The moral of this story is = don’t say yes to a date before you’ve ascertained whether it’s possible to converse with the asker.

On a completely different note – in my quest to get more excited about stuff, it’s my friend’s birthday today. She’s Filipino so I’m going to embrace everything Philippines for the day. Their flag is red and blue mainly (I’ll whip out the jumper and coat I wore to get excited about the Jubilee) and the Spanish were there so I’m going to say ‘Hola’ instead of hello to everyone today (yes, I’m aware that they don’t say hola, they say ‘Kamusta’ but people won’t know what I’m going on about if I say that). I’m also going to have fish for dinner because I remember eating a lot of fish when I was in the Philippines. I’ll report back tomorrow.