Great Dating Disasters (2)

I have been threatening a series on this topic for ages, and tentatively kicked it off a few weeks ago with an account of a couple of embarrassing hiccups in my whirlwind romance with The Bombshell.

I have alluded to the following story before as well, but here is a slightly fuller account of the lessons I (should have) learned from the episode.

It is a bad idea to try to arrange a date while there is a football tournament on. Particularly if it is the World Cup, and it is a day when England are playing.

It is a bad idea to fool yourself into thinking that you can catch at least part of the game before you rendezvous with the young lady.

It is a bad idea to watch the game in a bar that has no mobile telephone reception.

It is a bad idea to arrange a date with a lady who has been complaining about what a full day of work she has, and what a tiresome work social event she is committed to in the early evening. (You try to convince yourself that she'll be looking forward to her time with you all day, that it will be a welcome relief from all the earlier stress and tedium. But in fact she'll just be exhausted and crabby.)

It is a bad idea to suggest a rock gig as a date - unless you are sure the lady likes rock music/this particular band. (She might have told me upfront, when I made the suggestion - but I suppose she was just humouring me.)

Despite my preoccupation with the football (happily jettisoned in favour of the romantic pursuit: she was a quite dazzling woman), and the difficulties of communication (I had to keep dashing outside from the football bar every 5 minutes to check for incoming text messages), and her fatigue..... it might still have worked..... I might possibly have been able to extricate us from the rock gig and take her somewhere else for a quiet drink...... BUT..... she turned up with a couple of work colleagues that she had been unable to shake off (yes, I might complain that she hadn't tried hard enough), and that set the seal on an utterly disastrous evening.

She quit Beijing for good very shortly afterwards, anyway. Destiny was not smiling on us.