Miss Fifi Update 6

Last Friday I met up with Miss P for early-bird breakfast at Notes, our favourite new catch- up spot.  As evident from my lack of blogging over the last couple of weeks, I had to confess to her my tumble into 'a slutty suppers slump', where in the preceding week I had barely logged onto my dating profile, let alone met up with anyone. 

          Whilst we gorged on the best almond croissants in London, Miss P shouted at me to pull my slutty little socks up, strap on a pair and to go out and meet all the fine young men that “My Single Friend” has to offer. Leaving Notes determined to make some dating progress and to avoid the future wrath of Miss P and the other sluts, I arranged to meet up with a rather fun (and let’s be honest, exceedingly posh!) sounding polo player from MSF on Sunday.                      
            So that's how I came to be yesterday, awkwardly propping up the bar at the Orange pub in Pimlico waiting for The Polo Player to arrive. There was nowhere to sit, as the bar appeared to have been booked out for a “Made in Chelsea” cast party – the scene awash with Mulberry handbags and sculpted hairstyles. Soon enough though, a chap came striding towards me, grinning and laughing to himself as he air kissed my cheeks (both sides, we are in Belgravia daaaarling!) and introduced himself.
            I must have looked a bit perturbed by his raucous laughter, as he swiftly explained himself: ' Har har haaaar! Sorry for laughing. Nothing about you, you’re clearly a sweetie, but isn't this whole internet dating thing just TOO funny!? HAR!”I couldn’t disagree with him.
             We swiftly decided to decamp down the road to the deserted Ebury instead, where the only other punters were a couple snuggled in a corner. The girl was clearly enjoying herself, as she was with bare-legged abandon full-on straddling her partner - or someone who I suspect, may be better described as a “client”. As we wandered about to find a sofa of our own, the polo player said with a sideways glance at this amorous couple and a cheeky wink, "I'm up for a bit of that, if you are?”, before giving another raucous laugh and apologising profusely for his non-pc humour. He needn’t of, I was loving it!
               A more different experience from my previous two internet dates cannot be imagined- he was witty, interesting, incredibly knowledgeable and brilliant fun. We raced through the typical get-to-know you topics, but with lots more interesting and random chatter on the side. He told me about his (by his own admission) rather privileged childhood, and then his social “U-turn” in joining the army as a squaddie (and yes I checked, he still owns the uniform!). Upon discovering we were both from Sussex, we soon realised that Miss P herself is our mutual friend - small bloody world!
            Three hours raced past and before I knew it, it was time to head home. I left this very entertaining evening uncertain that I fancied him, but very much sure that I loved him. Even if I never see him again, I have to thank The Polo Player for reigniting my enthusiasm for this whole game! 

Blast from the past

More than a year ago, a random boy walked up to me in the pub, did an aeroplane impersonation, and asked me out on a date. With the attitude of “Well, it can’t really hurt, and everyone loves going out for dinner”, I went. It wasn’t super bad, but as you can see here, he wasn’t a keeper.

            He told me on the first date that he was in the throws of breaking up with his very serious ex (warning signs all over the place) and I decided very quickly that I didn’t want to fill her place.

            After allowing the whole thing to fizzle out, I was under the impression that I was free of him until he randomly text me nearly a year later, asking me out for another drink. I lied and said I was seeing someone – it’s so much easier than having to be mean and it’s a pretty hard statement to argue with.

            Unfortunately, people in relationships don’t use online dating sites, so when he found me online and sent me the following message, I drew a blank as to how to reply.

“I met a nice young lady from Pimlico once…lost touch unfortunately! How are you? X”

Damn. How do I get out of this one? 

A clash of personality?

I was dreading my date with The Personality Partner, absolutely dreading it. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that he was going to be a more actively obnoxious version of The Word Smith, and had it not been for a bit of a wine drinking slip up at lunch, there is a high chance I would have made my excuses and managed to avoid being stood on the steps of St Martins at 6:15.

            However, wine was drunk at lunch, and opting out of the date just felt like delaying the inevitable, so I braved the buzz of Thursday night in Covent Garden, and was at the agreed meeting place bang on time.

            Fortunately I was actually pleasantly surprised by the guy that arrived to meet me. Where with The Word Smith I had taken social incompetency for banter, with The Personality Partner I had learnt from my mistake and had been reading into comments and jokes way too much, inevitable dreading the worst. It turns out, he was utterly hilarious, and everything I had started flagging warning signs at were actually perfectly normal conversations / jokes in the making.

            I think that the test of a date in the world of online is the number of drinks you get through before you call it a night. One drink was a complete and utter failure (The Word Smith), two drinks was nice enough, but having got a round each, you’ve definitely seen enough (The Biking Engineer) and three drinks or more means that you’re both fairly keen to carry on chatting, and the fact that the person sat opposite you is a complete and utter strange doesn’t really worry you too much. This was a three drink date, and I think that we can thank The Personality Partner’s sense of humour and comedy story telling for that one.  

            Conversation started with the safe (work, home, family), branched into the slightly wider spanning (recent trips with friends, holidays, most embarrassing moments) and even reached a slightly uncomfortable low which found us discussing the website that we had met on, and our reasons for being there – yes, I told him about Slutty-Suppers (although not the blog, obviously) and I think it worried him slightly. In fact, his exact words were “Oh good, so you’re going to be discussing this whole evening in minute detail with your friends? Yeah, that’s not intimidating in the slightest.” Imagine the reaction disclosing details of the blog would have inspired…maybe next time.

            I suppose that’s the crux of the matter – whether there will be a next time, and having been asked, I think that, in the spirit of making the most of the situation and celebrating the fact that I didn’t want to kill him or myself within the first few hours of our acquaintance, I think there just might be!

Outed at work

I had a work lunch today with a man that was, for all intents and purposes, an absolute arse – seriously. But, he is a friend of my boss and a man that we could potentially do business with in the future, so the two of us headed over the road to Hawksmoor for steak and what I thought would be some work related chat.

            Unfortunately, due to his fairly close friendship with my boss, chat centred mostly on general banter and news sharing, so when the issue of online dating came up (my boss finds The Word Smith story utterly hilarious and feels the need to share it with pretty much everyone) we ended up dwelling on it for quite some time. The guy we were meeting used Guardian Soulmates when he was online dating a couple of years ago, and as such, felt the need to ask me a barrage of questions about who I was finding, and requested to see all their profiles.

            Having shared a couple of comedy stories whilst point blank refusing to share my or their profile details with him, we went out separate ways so that we could finish up a couple of bits of work before the end of the afternoon.

            Two hours back in the office, and I received the following email (with my boss cc’ed): “I would have thought you could have come up with a more imaginative name than Miss P?!” with my profile content copied below.

            Now I’m not a crazily private person, and the fact that I have shared the most entertaining stories from my online ventures with my office goes to show that I’m not ashamed of the fact that I’m online and making a bit of a hash of it. That said, there is something about a couple of paragraphs where you shameless attempt to sell yourself that’s incredibly personal, and if there is one group of people that don’t need to have access to it, it’s the boys I work with. I get that’s it’s sort of funny, and that in refusing to show him my profile I was just adding to the entertainment factor of the hunt for him, but still, did my boss need to see it?

            One of the main fears of each and everyone of the Sluts when we were discussing making profiles and getting them online was that someone you know might find you on there – either when they’re looking for dates or just for the comedy value of publically humiliating you, but I don’t think anyone thought it would be a work related ousting.  Fortunately, I seem to have reached a point in life where nothing much will shame me into submission. Still, I don’t think I’ll be going for lunch with that guy again, whether there’s steak on offer or not!

In the eyes of God

It’s been boiling away in the background for a couple of weeks now, fuelled by drunken (on his part, not mine) night bus messages and random extensive conversations about his new house and how crap he is at DIY, but tonight I am finally due to meet up with The Personality Twin, and I have to say, I’m not really too excited about it.

            Having just about managed to get over the mentally scaring date with The Word Smith, to have then got through the date with The Biking Engineer without anything going too awry, I have am awful feeling that this evening is going to mark a return to form for me, in that it’s going see a dip back down to ‘dire’ in the enjoyment stakes.

            Whilst on paper The Personality Twin is right up my street (similar interests, fairly closely linked opinions and able to cover a range of conversational topics that don’t make me want to stab my eyes out), he is also dangerously close to being what my Mamu would describe as ‘a bit of an arse’. In fact, he’s not just close, he’s pretty much there – he talks about putting up shower caps, is on some voluntary council thing at work, he sings in a choir three nights a week and he thinks it’s really witty to plan important work presentations in the theme of Faulty Towers. Hmm, if only I had noticed this, oh I don’t know, three weeks ago when I started down this ridiculous path, then I wouldn’t be facing yet another challenging date prospect when all I really want to do tonight is go home and mooch.

            Well, there’s no way out of it now – even if I pulled out a half baked excuse to delay D-day, the amount of background work that has gone into this one would mean that rescheduling would be inevitable, purely serving to prolong the whole process. Nope, when the time comes, I will be standing on the steps of St Martin’s, awaiting his arrival. Well, I will probably be standing somewhere up the road waiting for his arrival so that I can approach with caution and not be caught off guard and to reassure myself that, if I really need to, I can leg it at the last minute and just delete my online account. Ahh, the romance!

This has been great, I’ll give you a call, we should do this again sometime!

We’ve all seen the episode of Friends where Chandler goes on a date with Rachel’s boss (the one with the mascara goop – blurgh), and regardless of how badly each evening goes, he leaves her at the end of it with the parting comment; “Well, this has been great, I’ll give you a call, we should do this again sometime!”

            I’ve always assumed that this was because he’s a boy, he’s foolish and he just doesn’t really know what else to do, but having followed up on dating disasters with Tits McGee, it appears that this is something that actually does happen in real life – and to totally normal people too!

            I’m not sure if it’s been ingrained into us out of a forced politeness, or if it just sounds like the right way to round off an evening when you are 100% certain that absolutely no kissing is going to be taking place - it’s like saying “I’ll see you soon”, but a stranger-friendly version because, let’s face it, you’ve never seen them before, so the chances of randomly bumping into them are fairly slim (I have a horrible feeling that this is going to happen eventually, but until that dreaded day…).

            I suppose it stands as something of a testament as to how well the date went if nothing else; there is absolutely no chance that The Word Smith was going to get anything other than a wave and a cringing sideways glance as the bus failed to race him along the road home, leaving me huddled in a corner to try and avoid eye contact. The Biking Engineer, on the other hand, who is also never going to get a second date, at least got a fairly polite farewell, even if it was laced in lies.

            This might be something that needs to be discussed at a future Slutty Suppers Club – how do you say thanks, but no thanks, without sounding awful and without tying yourself up in tricky potential second date territory. 

Undercover flirting

This weekend, whilst catching up on work in Starbucks (I’ll be honest, it was 50% work, 10% news sites and 40% social networking, but whatever) I got into a Guardian Soulmates conversation with a rather random boy that has the most American style photo imaginable (think big hair, cheesy pose, maybe taken from a work profile of some sort) but the most apparently British background.

            The interesting thing about this one is not the incredibly cheesy photo, but rather than his whole profile is written as though he’s a spy (ie – a rip off of a selection of James Bond movies), and all conversations since initial contact was made has been based around secret service based banter.

It’s all very bizarre, and in fact, it’s the sort of behaviour that I would normally run a mile from (I’ve met crazy once recently, I don’t need to meet him again any time soon) but I am fairly intrigued to see where this one goes – maybe a date in Dans le Noir, a quirky restaurant were you sit in pitch black and can’t see either your date or your food…that could be fun – and definitely worth a blog post or two!