The rules of dating - numero 498423984

Tonight I had a date.

She was very nice and friendly, and good fun too, but I didn't fancy her. I'm not sure if she fancied me. Maybe, but it was hard to tell.

First we went to Cafe Kick on Shoreditch High Street. It's very picturesque and peaceful; as we stood on the street watching the fashion victims of the locality saunter past, 4 police cars, 3 police vans and the dog section zoomed past, sirens blaring. The vans and the dog section went the wrong way - 30 seconds later they sheepishly (if that's possible with blue lights, sirens, and cropped-haired armed men at the wheel) came back and turned off towards Old Street.

After that, we walked up to Roadtrip on Old Street. If you know the area you can probably tell I hadn't planned particularly well (see the below post for some of the reasons for this lack of planning). Roadtrip is actually quite a nice little bar. We had a chat and a drink on the cavernous leather sofa, I made of point of saying I had some of the obscure Detroit house records the DJ was playing (this was met with a blank look), and exchanged dodgy dating stories (my Stephen Fry one always wins - I'll blog on that sometime).

I went to the bar and encountered a gorgeous girl serving me my gin & tonics. I wasn't sure if it was the raised platform at the bar, but she was tall. Really tall. Nearly as tall as me. For me, that's a plus point.
As soon as I took the drinks back I couldn't stop thinking about talking to the girl at the bar again. I began devising a method to obtain her telephone number and secure a date with her while being on a date with someone else. There's probably something in The Game about this, but I never read it all the way through.

Half of me felt very bad, half of me felt somewhat pimp-like....yes I'm somewhat deluded in this respect.

I made an excuse to go back to the bar, which was the premise that my card was behind the bar running up a tab, and managed to get served by the same girl. I went straight with asking her for her number - she responded by saying she thought I was going to ask if she played basketball, as that's what all the other guys asked.

That response put me off said game somewhat. Just as I had a riposte, my game was taken down when I turned around and there was my date, with an expression somewhere between perplexed and resigned.


Suffice to say, that was the beginning the end of that first date.