A Christmas Story (Great Dating Disasters [6])

I met a traveller on the Oxford Tube
Who said, "'The Lights Going On And Off'
At the Tate is somewhat ill-named,
In that the lights are mostly 'off'...
Unless you ask the attendant
To switch them on."

Strange, but true. This is not quite a 'dating disaster', but it fits with the general theme of possible romance thwarted by malevolent Fate. This happened a few days before Christmas in 2001 - the year before I moved to China.

My travelling companion was an improbably pretty – but ridiculously young - art student (an aspiring sculptor, no less) who took the seat opposite me on the bus just before Christmas. I am ordinarily a rather curmudgeonly traveller, taking the traditional English 'reserve' to extremes. But this girl made two or three attempts to get me chatting, and eventually I gave in.... and had a surprisingly good time! Her witty and irreverent take on the controversial 'artwork' then on show at the Tate Modern Gallery utterly won me over. And things just got better from there: it was one of the pleasantest bus journeys I have ever taken.

Alas, she was running late on an urgent errand to deliver a package to a swanky shop in central London (very mysterious - what a splendid MacGuffin!), and when the bus started getting bogged down in late afternoon traffic on the outskirts of the city she had to hop off in haste to try her luck on the Underground. Such haste, indeed, that we didn't get around to telling each other our names, let alone exchanging contact details.

Now, before the storm of nudge-nudge-wink-winks begins, I must make it clear that she was not at all my type physically (far too petite, and far too YOUNG: late teens or early 20s, but looking scarcely fifteen or sixteen…. and, at the time, I was already in my mid-30s. Impractical, indecent, unthinkable!). However, I had very much enjoyed her company, and I thought it was a shame that I didn't even know her name - particularly so if she were going to develop into one of our great artists of the 21st Century. So - uncharacteristically - I determined to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

My only lead was the name of the shop she was delivering the package to, a place where she apparently had a holiday job: it turned out to be a hugely expensive perfumier on the Burlington Arcade, an ultra-ritzy mini-mall just off Piccadilly.

Christmas crowds - and my own packed schedule - almost thwarted my resolve. On the first attempt to drop in there the next day, I was running badly late for another appointment by the time I managed to find the place, and I wasn't able to go in. (Not just cold feet, honestly! Well, maybe just a little bit.) The day after that, I was frustrated by the absence of any shops selling Christmas cards in the vicinity (can't give just any old card to an artist, can you?); I eventually found something suitable, but was then frustrated by the absence of anywhere to sit down to write in it (no pubs in that locale either!); I think I eventually took refuge in a large bookstore, where I could take some time to compose a suitably charming, friendly, low-key, non-stalkerish message. That took quite a while – but I finally made it to the store with my card just before closing time.

I waited patiently amid all the mink-wrapped matrons spending hundreds of pounds on their seasonal toiletries. Then, when I finally got my turn at the counter, I explained my mission as delicately as possible - not wanting to embarrass the artist or myself. And of course, the shop assistant had no idea who I was talking about! I persisted gently, and at last it transpired that there was a sister store in Bicester (just north of Oxford), and that an assistant from that branch had delivered something from there on the day and time in question. The assistant told me the Christian name of the girl, though she didn't sound too confident about it [and I, alas, have now forgotten it], and promised to forward my card to the Bicester shop.

I had no great hopes that my message would reach the girl, and even less expectation that she would bother to respond (although I had, in a rare gesture of optimism, included my e-mail address). But this was more of an effort than I have ever made, before or since, to try to make contact with a girl I’d only fleetingly encountered - a marked divergence from my usual bumbling shyness and hopelessness.

As I was leaving the shop, one of the matrons remarked to me (oh, they must all have eavesdropped on my little saga - it's a tiny, tiny shop), "Well, that's a lovely story, anyway..."

I replied, "Thank you, but I think at present it's only a good beginning to a story."

* The Oxford Tube, for the uninitiated, is an express coach shuttle service between Oxford and London. It was launched during my student days in the mid-1980s, and, since most of my old college friends still live in Oxford (or else in London), and since I have often been working in London (or in Oxford), it is a service I have used many dozens, perhaps hundreds of times over the past twenty-odd years.

'The Lights Going On And Off' by Martin Creed (a Brit of about my own age; oh what strange 'careers' we '60s boys have charted for ourselves!) debuted at the Tate Modern gallery in London that year (and has since been recreated in a number of other leading galleries), one of the more notorious works of contemporary 'art': an empty room in the gallery, bare floor, featureless white walls, and a large overhead neon light that intermittently plunges you into darkness. You'd think that at least the switching on and off would be electronically controlled in some way - perhaps with some subtly signifcant pattern of changing intervals; or with a purely random interval; or maybe in some way interactive, triggered by the entry of a spectator into the room (or how many spectators were in the room, or where they were stood, or their heartrate, or something). Well, I gather it was supposed to be just on a fixed timer, changing every 5 or 10 seconds (rather boring!); but for a while this mechanism had broken, so the lights were on (or off) all the time - unless you had the gumption to ask the attendant what was going on; at which point he could participate in the 'artwork' by turning the lights on (or off, or repeatedly on and off) for you. Maybe it was better that way....