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.
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