Memory Lane

Part I of infinity

I know you were promised an essay on ‘Things I Thought As I Looked into a Toilet Bowl Full of Sick’ but thankfully I had a better idea for this week. I was talking to my new housemate about dating and she was of the opinion that dating could be fun. Huh, I thought. I remember when I used to think dating was fun. So I decided to take a little stroll down memory lane, and round up every Tinder/Hinge date I’d ever been on since I first joined the ruthless conveyor belt of online dating.

I started making a list:

And realized that even the ones I can remember (I think there are probably twice this many) are too numerous to talk about in detail. So please enjoy instead: A non-exhaustive list of the Tinder/Hinge dates I have been on that I could think of something funny to say about. For GDPR I have maintained their anonymity by adding ‘BL’ to the start of all their names. I think this is a genius system for which I should be congratulated.

What’s that? You can see their actual names on the image above? Oh NO!

Bliam

Bliam was the first ever Tinder date I went on and I distinctly remember feeling nervous about it all day at work. If only I had known how long this road would be. When I think about the fact I felt nervous I want to go back in time seven years and laugh in my own face.

Highlight: during our Tinder chat we developed a joke whereby we started naming ideas for pornographic Lord of the Rings websites. My personal favourite was ‘Naughty Nazgul’.

Lowlight: he was a visiting Australian staying in a hostel so we ended up having cramped and difficult sex on the lower bunk of his shared dorm room (mercifully otherwise empty).

Blurtis

Blurtis and I went on our first date to a casino in Stratford (his suggestion, obviously). Why? I don’t know. I think I spent the entire date trying to work out why anyone in their lucid mind would suggest that but he wasn’t forthcoming on the topic. We didn’t even gamble, we just drank a £15 cocktail and then left. I think things improved after that, but he never revealed why he chose such a lunatic venue for our first meeting.

Highlight: he took me to the best (only) Argentinian restaurant I’ve ever been to and paid the bill while I was in the bathroom, which is something I objected to in principle but also he was a lawyer and I was an entry level translation project manager so realistically I couldn’t afford to even be in the building.

Lowlight: he invited me to his birthday party at some nightclub so I could meet his friends, but I was losing interest so decided to cancel by text a few hours before, because I used to be a coward. This in and of itself isn’t so terrible except a month or so later I was at a bar in Covent Garden (seriously, what was I doing the first few months of living in London? A bar in Covent Garden?) and got chatting to a group of guys next to me and it transpired that they were Blurtis’ friends, who I had been supposed to meet but had blown off at the last minute. What made matters worse is I was at the bar waiting for…

Blaniel

Blaniel showed up to our first date absolutely coked out of his head, which was annoying at first and then highly amusing once I started getting drunk. We saw each other on and off and with varying levels of drama for a couple of months. We used to go drinking in Camden quite a lot, which is obviously embarrassing but was also kind of a great time. Since I know he’s reading this (Hi Blan!) I’ll stop there.

Highlight: he somehow got roped into going on a date with a columnist for Cosmopolitan who had developed a theory that all men were actually called Blaniel, and decided to prove it by going on a series of dates with men named thusly. When she found out he was Mexican she referred to him as ‘Spaniel’ for the remainder of the article, which was my first insight into the fact that you don’t actually have to have any good ideas to be a journalist.

Lowlight: on one of our weird Camden nights out someone spiked my drink so Blaniel had to take me back to his to recover, upon which I discovered the only decorative thing in his room was a peeling (unframed) Liverpool FC poster. Big serial killer energy. He also lived in Plaistow, which speaks for itself.

I realize that story makes it sound as though Blaniel was the drink spiker, but he was not. Did I mention this was in Camden. The Venn diagram of suspects and residents is a circle.

Blangus

Fast-forwarding a little here for the sake of not having to re-live some of the boring ones in between. Blangus was my first date after moving to Edinburgh and was (and is, probably) a fantastic person who I fell very in love with. Unfortunately after three dates he revealed that he was incapable of being in a relationship, so instead we developed a ‘friendship’ which consisted of him thinking we were friends and me being in love with him.

Highlight: he has a kid now! So I guess he can be in a relationship after all. Figures.

Lowlight: I was so desperate to spend time with him that I once gave myself a chest infection by spending all night in a park in March wearing only a tank top and a thin jacket because I didn’t want to waste time going home to change.

I probably should have anticipated that this would need to be at least a two-parter, so we’ll leave my conquests there for this week and dive instead into:

One good thing:

I ate the best sandwich I’ve ever had in my life at a restaurant which I will not name because it’s also my secret date spot, if I ever go on a date again. The sandwich contained a goat bolognese lasagne. I will not be taking questions at this time.

One bad thing:

In the NHS’ campaign of putting disgusting pictures of smoking’s side effects on the front of cigarette packets there is one image that really turns my stomach, that of a foot that looks like it’s had a brick dropped on it and is somehow related to tobacco usage. Normally if I get given that one in the shop I ask them to change it for another one that doesn’t make me want to hurl everywhere, like the one about how smoking harms kids (meh) or makes you impotent (irrelevant). But this week I wasn’t paying attention while I was buying my stash and found myself with not one but TWO packets with Frankenstein’s foot on, so I had to smoke them all immediately so I could throw the packaging away. Probably not what the NHS intended.

No contexts:

On humble-bragging: