Great Dating Disasters (9)

I blame The Bookseller.  He set me off on this doomed path.

Perhaps I might not even have been at this wedding, but for him. (A strange story in itself. The bride was someone I'd met and become friends with at a wedding a few years before. I had introduced her to The Bookseller and they'd had a brief fling. Not so very long afterwards, she'd found 'true love', raced into marriage... and, unfathomably, put The Bookseller on the wedding invitation list. The Bookseller - a man of colossal indiscretion - is not to be trusted around his exes. So, I was obliged to attend to keep him out of mischief.)

The Bookseller's goading words to me, within just minutes of our arrival at the reception, were: "There's only one pretty girl here. And you'll probably monopolise her, like you always do."

For once, his assessment was remarkably astute, almost uncannily predictive. My friend, the bride, was an odd girl, a bit tomboyish, 'one of the lads'. She hardly had any female friends, and what few there were had all got married before her. The groom, recently moved to London from South Africa, didn't seem to have any friends at all. It was, thus, quite a sparsely attended wedding, and the guests were almost exclusively older family members.

There was only one single girl in the entire party. She didn't strike me as particularly pretty at first glance. And she was dangerously young. But she had something about her that drew a second glance, and a third: intelligence, vivacity, spirit.

Her mother was evidently appalled that she was spending so much time with this 'dirty old man' (although I was at this point only just past 30; I was in very good shape, after returning from my round-the-world backpacking year, and could still pass, I think, for early to mid-20s; and I'd just gone back to university to study law, and so was once again acting - and feeling - as if I were 19 or 20). She kept dragging her off to speak to some "nice young man" or other - well, I think there were only two of them, and they both looked to be in their first or second year at university. Evidently, the daughter did not find these nice young men very interesting, because she'd detach herself from them after a few minutes and come and seek me out again.

Very flattering, it was. And, my, yes, we hit it off. We had so much in common. In particular, she was a passionate film enthusiast; she liked Tarantino, and could give detailed arguments why; best of all, she shared my view that Reservoir Dogs is a more satisfying narrative than Pulp Fiction because of its perfect tragic arc, the epitome of Aristotle's conception. I'd been struggling to persuade The Bookseller of this for years; now, here was a young girl who made the case even more excitedly and cogently than I did.

So, I asked her if she'd like to come to the cinema with me some time in the following week (it didn't even feel like asking her on a 'date', the conversation was flowing so easily). And she said she feared she would be too busy. "Tough week at work?" I queried, trying not to appear too crestfallen. "Well, I have to finish a big art project for my A-Level," she said. I tried not to let my jaw sag too obviously. (A-Levels - 'Advanced Level' studies - are the senior high school exams in England. The most dazzling girl I'd met in years, the girl I'd just tried to ask out on a date was still at school - and perhaps as young as 16. She had seemed so mature; I had convinced myself that she must be at least 20, perhaps an undergraduate. The world started to spin around my head when I discovered she was possibly 14 or 15 years younger than me. I began to understand her mother's horror of me rather better.)

Well, it turned out she was only a few weeks shy of her 18th birthday - so my interest in her, our interest in each other, began to seem not quite so indecent. Her mother's guardedness towards me seemed to soften over the course of the afternoon. And the girl eventually managed to obtain her parents' permission to join the small after-party at a pub around the corner in the evening. Now I had her all to myself. I lost track of who else might have been there (even The Bookseller's notorious ineptitude was not going to mess this up for me!). I only had eyes for her.

Then, she realised she'd left something behind at the reception venue, nearly half a mile away - a pair of gloves, I think it was. I offered to walk with her to try to recover them. It had just begun raining, and we didn't have an umbrella. On the way back, the rain became a downpour. We kept on ducking into doorways or telephone kiosks every few yards down the road to try to get some shelter, but we were both absolutely soaked through. And every time we took cover from the rain in some archway or bus shelter or whatever... we kissed, passionately, exquisitely, at great length. Possibly the finest erotic memory of my entire life.

But wait, I hear the imaginary reader cry, that's not a dating disaster, is it? Quite the reverse!

No, indeed - but then, neither really was it a date.

When we did get together for a date, those really didn't go so well. The 'maturity' I'd so admired at the wedding party was evanescent. With make-up and a posh frock and entirely adult company, she'd been able to play the grown-up. But it wasn't yet her natural register. After an afternoon of cushion fights in her 6th Form Common Room, she was goofily juvenile - still quite charmingly vivacious, but not nearly as impressive as she'd been on that first meeting. After a couple of weeks, we reached a mutual decision that it wasn't working out, that the age gap was a bit too much. (We remained friends for a while, though. She sent me some postcards from her gap year; and I saw her again a year later, just after she started at Oxford - a Platonic catching-up-with-each-other 'date'.)

She was the youngest girl I've ever been out with (since I was at school myself, that is), and it was much the biggest age gap I've attempted to span (although a difference of 14 or 15 years seems less improper if the woman is over 30; I suppose it's possible I might set a new record here at some point).

I mention this now because of a very vivid dream I had at the start of this week, a dream in which I found myself attracted to a very young girl (not illegally so, I hasten to add; but still rather shamingly, inappropriately so - much too young for me), and felt myself consumed with guilt over it. But that, I think, is a story for another time and place.

Top Five Things That Can Go Wrong On A Date

My pal DD borrowed my 'Great Dating Disasters' theme for her radio show on relationships a few weeks back.  Unfortunately, she didn't feel that the topic had the legs in it for a whole show, and jettisoned it only about a third of the way in, in favour of interrogating her poor guests more closely about their own love lives.

However, this got me thinking about the topic some more, wondering if I could categorize the various types of possible disaster for one of my 'Top Five' lists.

An American friend of mine, counselling the need for perspective in these matters, used to say: "It's not a bad date if you don't end up in handcuffs.  In handcuffs in the back of a cop car, that is.  Obviously, ending up in handcuffs could be a very good date..."

An even worse example of the extreme end of the spectrum that occurred to me was the Stephen Waldorf incident, a notoriously botched police raid that was a huge news story in the UK around the time I was starting university back the '80s.  OK, it might not have been a 'date' as such, but this guy was in a car with a young lady whom the police had under surveillance because they believed her to be romantically involved with a dangerous criminal who had recently escaped from custody (a guy who had twice shot at police officers attempting to arrest him earlier in the year).  The police, not unnaturally rather jumpy about this manhunt, mistakenly identified poor Waldorf as the escaped prisoner - and shot him full of holes.  He survived, and eventually made a full recovery - but it was a horrific episode.  Since then, I often think to myself, if I don't end up in hospital on a life-support machine, it hasn't been a bad date.

Anyway, let's get on with the list....

Top Five Things That Can Go Wrong On A Date

5)  One or both of you are running badly late.

This is a particular problem for us here in Beijing - which is a rather spread-out city, with still rather limited coverage by the subway network, and some of the most horrendous traffic in the world.  Moving across the CBD in the early evening can be hellishly SLOW.  And cabs can be in very short supply at peak periods (an awful lot of drivers go off shift at around 7.30pm - really!).  However, I wonder if this isn't a problem that's been created - or exacerbated - by the universal adoption of mobile phones.  In the bad old days when we usually had no way to contact someone we'd arranged to meet once we'd both left our home or office... well, we had to make more of an effort to make bloody well sure we'd make the rendezvous on time.  Now, I'm prepared to be tolerant if you're just a little late, or if you've suffered really exceptional bad luck; but if you just didn't anticipate that it might take 45 minutes to get from Wudaokou to Sanlitun on a Saturday evening... well, I'm going to be inclined to think that you are at best inconsiderate, and at worst extraordinarily stupid.  And you should think the same of me if I screw up that much.  If you've been in this city any length of time at all, it's really not difficult to estimate the likely travelling times from one district to another in different traffic conditions.  C'est la politesse des princes.

4)  The service ruins the evening.

Of course, you should try not to let the externals ruin the evening.  The evening should be about you and your companion, your conversation, the chemistry between you.  But the circumstances in which you are trying to have your conversation will inevitably have some impact, possibly a really huge impact on how enjoyable the evening is.  And we do live in the country - the city - with possibly the worst customer service in the world.  Really - yes, it's got a lot better in the last 5 or 6 years, but it's still TERRIBLE.  And you're never completely immune from the risk of such a bad experience: even in a place with foreign management, even in a place that usually has high standards, even in a place you think you can rely on... there may be new staff, the manager may be bunking off for the night, perhaps the chef's girlfriend has just left him... bad things can happen at any time.  The possibility of outrageous incompetence - and occasional violent psychosis - from your serving staff is a constant threat in Beijing.

3)  You run into a bunch of friends.

In my famous (?) series of posts on 'Dating in Beijing' a few years back, I noted that one of the biggest obstacles to getting a relationship off the ground here in Beijing was what I termed "a hothouse intimacy".  Despite the proliferation of foreigner-friendly venues in recent years, there are still only a relatively small number that are very good - or very popular - at any given time.  And we expats tend to have large and overlapping circles of friends and acquaintances.  It really is pretty difficult to go out anywhere in 'laowai Beijing' without running into someone you know.  It can thus be next to impossible to cultivate a one-on-one relationship with a member of the opposite sex, because you can never get any time alone together.  I suppose the very worst variation of this would be running into an ex (that very nearly happened to me the last time I went on a date, a few months back!).  No, the very worst would probably be running into one of her exes.

2)  Unsuspected incompatibilities.

Or... the badly chosen date venue.  I have recounted on here before the sorry tale of the young woman I took to a gig by top Beijing punk band, SUBS.  Ideally, planning a date should be a matter of negotiation, of establishing shared interests.  But sometimes... you make a suggestion, and the lady acquiesces "just to be nice" - and you find out too late that she's absolutely going to HATE it.  And I seem to dislike a lot of things that most other people like.  My interest in a woman has cooled very rapidly when she's suggested going to one of the bars on my 'Hate List' for an after-dinner drink.

And topping off this list we have.....

1)  The chemistry just isn't there.

Even if no gross incompatibilities of taste or opinion emerge... sometimes there's just no spark.  I suppose this is more of a danger on a blind date, and I never really do those (well, I've gone on two in my entire life; and they both went astonishingly well!).  However, sometimes there seems to be at least a little chemistry there on first meetings, and you think - hope - that more could develop.  Then, suddenly, out on a date.... you discover a dismal, catastrophic, total absence of chemistry.  Maybe you should persevere anyway; maybe it's just temporarily absent (she's had a rotten day at work, received some bad news from home, had to put up with a really horrible cabbie on the way over here)?  More probably you were mistaken, deluded about the potential in this relationship at the outset... and there really is NO HOPE.  But does she feel the same way?  And, even if she does, perhaps she's still hoping to get a jump out of the evening?  It's wretched, WRETCHED to be in this sort of situation, wondering how quickly you can extricate yourself without hurting her feelings.

Of course, I have omitted the more extreme possibilities - what we might call the 'Act of God' dating disasters, where random external circumstances contrive to give you a hellish time even though you and your date may be getting along splendidly together: muggings or lost wallets; extreme weather (snow or heavy rain in Beijing is a miserable experience; and we suffer sandstorms and toxic smog too); earthquake, fire, riot... or being attacked by a squad of armed policemen.  I once had a date melt down on me because she'd just discovered (as in, an hour before she came out to see me) that her ex was about to get married to his previous ex (with whom he had evidently never completely broken up, despite living with my date for three years)  -  yep, that was really ugly.  But such calamities are, mercifully, rather rare; and I wanted to focus here on the more generic.  Do you think there's anything I missed?

Great Dating Disasters (8)

Some years ago, I sort of almost very nearly dated a rather glamorous French lady for a week or two.

Our first 'proper' date (after an initial flirtation at a networking do, followed up by two or three less pressurised 'meeting with friends' encounters) went wrong in just about every way conceivable.

We had agreed to meet on Tiananmen Square (her idea). Not the best plan: it's a very BIG place, there are crowds of people around, and the phone reception's fairly shitty (or it was back then, anyway). And I couldn't understand exactly where she was suggesting we rendezvous. We managed to meet up eventually, but it took 20 minutes or so, which was a slightly angstful start to the evening.

We went to the Li Qun Roast Duck Restaurant for dinner (her idea). Again, not the best call: it's a very basic kind of place - tiny, noisy, dirty (part of its unique 'charm'; but not really conducive to a date). The service is surly, and they love to make you wait (especially if you're a foreigner). And it's more or less exclusively a kaoya place: people go there for their Beijing Duck; the rest of their food is, frankly, pretty ropey. We didn't have time for a duck dinner anyway; and this is not the kind of place you go for a quick snack. So, we left after just a few 'small dishes', feeling frustrated and hungry.

The centrepiece of our night out was to be a classical recital at the Forbidden City Concert Hall (my idea). Alas, it was one of the International Festival Chorus' shows. Not that there's anything wrong with the IFC... except that they do tend to draw big laowai crowds, and it is almost inevitable that you will run into a couple of dozen people you know at any of their events - not ideal for a first intimate evening with a romantic interest! However, it seemed particularly ill luck that her flatmate was there - just a couple of seats away from us. A bunch of my friends were in the vicinity as well. So much for the 'intimate evening'!

I was then rather appalled that - despite the lady's apparent credentials as a person of breeding and culture - she chattered throughout the concert (quite loudly at times) to her flatmate.

By the time we left the concert hall, the language barrier had divided us: she preferred to talk French with her flatmate, which left me with little choice but to chat in English with my friends (I used to read French pretty well, but I never developed any confidence in speaking it; and I am well rusty now). We all went off in a gaggle to get some drinks somewhere, but the 'date' was effectively over.

I think I only saw her once more after that.

Really, I can't conceive of anything else that could have gone wrong with that night. I mean, her flatmate just happened to be sitting in the same row as us at the concert??!! Could this possibly be The Worst Date In History? I think so.

The Bombshell's back....

And I'm gonna be sorry....

Hey na, hey na.....

Great Dating Disasters (7)

Continuing my helpful How Not To.... series.

Looking back on it, I suppose one of the biggest problems in my romantic life has been never getting to the 'date' stage at all.

That seems to be happening again at the moment.

I had established friendly (I hope, obviously curious, but not pushy) e-mail contact with my great crush-ette of the last month; but the lady was slow to respond to gentle promptings to reveal her phone number (or to contact me by phone, since I'd given her my number). [In fact, I'd obtained her number through a mutual friend, but fretted that it might seem a bit stalker-ish to use it out of the blue. I wanted the trust signal, the encouragement of her giving it to me herself.] That she did at the start of last week, since when we have been in semi-regular contact by SMS. Now, I love that medium of communication, and I think I'm rather good with it - diverse, witty, and at times, yes, flirtatious. However, it's not great for the early-stage building of a relationship: it's so easy for messages to go astray, or arrive at a bad time, or have their tone or purpose misinterpreted, or go depressingly unanswered for whatever reason. I should probably just call her - but again, this seems a slightly awkward step to take, when the text message conversation hasn't quite done enough to prompt it, hasn't yet given any clear enough signal of her expectations of my interest in her or of her possible interest in me. But yes, I probably should just call.

The problem is that her text messages seem to keep veering between friendly (oddly over-friendly, though not quite flirtatious) and brusque/irritable/too-busy. She has explained that she has had a very busy spell at work, and has had a lot of friends visiting over Christmas (and is now engaged in a round of 'farewells', since she'll soon be leaving Beijing - I had thought she told me she was expecting to return later in the year, but she will now neither confirm nor deny this). I understand, and don't want to put her under pressure to come on a 'date' with me when she's got so much else on - but telling someone that you have no time at all to meet up for the next 10 or 14 days is rather too stern a discouragement!

I had been angling instead to be included in some communal get-together; not such a tall order, I thought, since we have a number of friends in common. However, on Monday she told me - rather snootily, it seemed to poor lovestruck me - that there was now unlikely to be any chance of our meeting up before her departure (still over a week away, I think). Well, except that she was meeting some folks for dinner - including several of our mutual friends - at a restaurant just a few hundred yards from where (she knows) I live; but she didn't think to include me in this plan. I got wind of a proposed 'outing' in my neighbourhood through one of the mutual friends (not realising it was to be her party) and innocently tried to invite myself along (thinking it was just going to be cheap eats and a bar crawl with a bunch of mates) - but was coldly spurned, both by my lady heartwrecker and by the friend (all I got was a very belated invitation to join them later - much, much later; like, 4 hours later! - for a drink at a bar; I was rather pointedly not invited to the restaurant).

So, that's that dead in the water, then.

And, once again, I never even got to Step 1 - asking her out.


I probably should have been more forceful, more daring. I should have made some wild declaration along the lines of "I think you're the most fascinating woman I've met in years and your eyes have enslaved me and...... I don't care if you're leaving Beijing and never coming back, I simply must spend at least one evening with you before you pass out of my life."

But I didn't. Because I am romantically useless.

But I am learning. Slowly. Maybe next time will work out a little better. Maybe I'll at least get that one date.

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....

Great Dating Disasters (5)

As with comedy, the secret of great tragedy is mostly in the timing. When I was working in Toronto a decade ago, I was introduced through a mutual friend to a young actress/singer. I wasn't exactly smitten at first sight: she was a bit short for me, and girl-next-door pretty rather than drop-dead beautiful. Also, I learned early on that she had a steady, live-in boyfriend who was on the brink of becoming a fiancé, so any nascent romantic ambitions I might have had were being firmly held in check. But... well, I met her several times over the next few months, and we got on rather well. I found it puzzling that the boyfriend was never in evidence. She was part of the cast of a long-running musical comedy revue, which I went to see 4 or 5 times (I love the theatre; especially when I'm getting comped!). We would sometimes go out for dinner or a drink after the show (never quite a 'date' - the friend who'd introduced us, or another cast member was always riding shotgun). There was never any sign of the boyfriend. I gathered he hadn't been since the opening night - that's not very supportive; but... yes, maybe he hated the show, or theatre in general. But not meeting her after the show - EVER - that did seem very strange (particularly as the guy was apparently unemployed, and thus not having to worry about being in bed before midnight). I sensed that all was not well in this relationship. Yes, she was starting - in slow, sneaky, almost imperceptible steps - to grow on me. She was girl-next-door pretty, and rather bright, and vivacious and talented (she had a monologue in that particular show that was just brilliant) and amusing and... well, she was quite a package. Reddish auburn hair, too - always a bit of a weakness of mine. And then - surprising no-one except her - her worthless boyfriend did a runner. Very abruptly, with no real explanation. She was a bit of a mess for a while. This didn't seem an auspicious time to be making a declaration to her myself. I didn't want to be just her "rebound". In fact, I think I'd pretty much decided - perhaps even before the breakup - that I wasn't going to pursue this because I was running out of time, I only had a few months left in Canada. But I wanted to be a supportive friend, so I asked her out for lunch one day, to see how she was doing (I had one of those wonderful non-job jobs where I could skive off for a day almost any time I chose). We wound up spending most of the afternoon together in the Queen Mother Café, a well-known eatery on Queen St. - starting early with a light lunch and then just hanging around chatting, ordering some tea, chatting some more, ordering more tea and cakes. The talk flowed surprisingly smoothly: I prompted her to examine her emotional state, without, I hope, being too intrusive; and she talked quite a bit about the arsehole ex, without getting obsessive or overwrought. We talked about a lot of other stuff too: her past acting career, new plans for the future, favourite places to eat around town, and so on. When she finally had to leave, she said brightly, but with evident surprise and relief: "Well, that was easy!" I think she'd been concerned about how pushy I might be in pressing my affections on her. She'd probably also been worried about how she would feel going out with a man alone, about how she would adapt to the single life and dating again after being in quite a long relationship. Yep, I think she had regarded our little lunch meeting as, kind of, a date - potentially some sort of romantic reconnaissance. And perhaps I'd made it so "easy" for her by not treating it as one at all! But if it had been a 'date', it would have been hands-down the best one of my life. It had gone amazingly well. There seemed to be a rapport, a coincidence of interests... and a comfortableness together that I've seldom achieved even after much longer and deeper acquaintance with someone. So.... the hell with "Maybe it's still too early for her". Never mind "I only have two months to work on this". I was going to ask her out again. And this time, it would most definitely be a date - and, hopefully, a decisive step towards initiating a relationship. Dinner and a movie was the plan. But this one didn't go nearly so well. She seemed tense and unhappy. I fretted that she was having doubts about whether she was ready to go out with anyone else yet. It was worse than that - it transpired that the ex-boyfriend had just walked back into her life. In the most devastating possible manner. I shouldn't go into too many details, but suffice it to say that he revealed himself as one of the most feckless, duplicitous, manipulative bastards you could ever imagine, and even if I hadn't had a personal interest in the matter I would have been strongly inclined to take a metal pipe to his shins. In fact, it was probably only my personal interest that deterred me from doing so; I didn't want there to be any risk that mere jealousy was playing a part in my righteous rage against the scumbag. Unfortunately, she was still in love with him, and vulnerable to many of his conniving little tricks. She was tempted to take him back, but knew it was a very bad idea. She was in emotional turmoil. I knew I had to back out of the way a little, until she got her head straight about all of this. I tried to let her know how warmly I felt about her, that I was there for her if she needed me - whether just as a friend and confidante, or as something more. Things were looking pretty hopeless for me, though. The mess just dragged on and on, and kept on getting worse and worse. It broke my heart to see her so unhappy, but there was nothing I could do. It was perfectly understandable that she collapsed into an "all men are BASTARDS!" frame of mind for a while; but I fear I caught rather more of the fallout from that than the ex. The last time I tried to speak to her, she slammed the phone down on me - twice (though, I think, without even realising it was me at the time; she subsequently told me - in an explanatory but not really apologetic e-mail - that she had been in the midst of a climactic row with the not-quite-ex and couldn't bear any distractions.... alas, that, perhaps, is all I'd been to her all along: a pleasant distraction at first; but at the end, through no fault of my own, an unpleasant distraction). And it had all spiralled into disaster for me, the situation transformed in a trice from a very promising prospect to a raging shitstorm, during that wretched Sunday evening date. Even the title of the film we'd chosen seemed to be making mock of me, pouring salt on my wounds; as I observed in an e-mail home shortly afterwards, "It's probably not a good idea to take a girl you are falling - inappropriately - in love with to see a film called Deep Impact." (One of those comet-strike-about-to-destroy-the-Earth films. Actually, not too bad - much, much better than the Bruce Willis vehicle Armageddon, which came out about the same time. I like to think that it may have played an important part in paving the way for Barack Obama's election, since Morgan Freeman made the idea of a black President thinkable - and desirable! - for the first time in a major film.) There was a final corollary to this unhappy story, a real "Do I hear the distant laughter of God?" moment. In my last few weeks in Toronto, they started running a TV ad for the provincial lottery in which she appeared. It was shown a lot: it seemed to be on almost every time I switched on the TV - I must have seen it dozens of times in just a couple of weeks. A girl on a trolley-bus was about to check her scratch-card ticket and started fantasising about what she would do if she won. My heartbreaker was not playing the girl on the bus. They had got a similar-looking but slightly dowdier young actress to play her; no, my girl was playing the fantasy - beautiful girl driving an open-topped Ferrari. We only saw her from behind, wind streaming through her gorgeous auburn hair.... as she drove away. Yes, yes, I get the message.

Great Dating Disasters (4)

Reminiscing last week about the Bus Bar (second version) and the good ol' days of the "Devil's Triangle" (in the old Gongti Beilu car park) brought to mind another of my Great Dating Disasters. Well, I suppose it wasn't so much a 'date' as an accidental amorous encounter. In Yugong Yishan (the old, good one) for a gig one mid-week night four years or so ago, I happened to bump into a rather gorgeous lady lawyer I'd just recently met. We were both rather drunk, and she was getting very flirtatious. Great Odin's Raven! That kind of thing just doesn't happen to me very often: someone I fancy turns out to fancy me; we meet by chance, without having any of the anxiety of trying to set up a formal 'date'; and she makes all the running. I was thinking I'd died and gone to heaven. So unused was I to such a happy combination of circumstances that I made a near-fatal blunder almost immediately: as soon as the gig finished, I said, "Hey, let's go to the Bus Bar." Was it inexperience? Or recklessness? Or a perverse sense of fun? Or some obscure self-destructive impulse? Whyever would I have supposed that a mature, glamorous, professional woman would enjoy a pit of sleazerie like the Bus Bar? I think I had tried to explain to her what it was like beforehand, had given her the opportunity to opt out - and she said she was willing to give it a try. I loved her for her daring, her openness to new experience, her lack of prissiness. Maybe my powers of description had let me down on this occasion. Or her powers of imagination had. Or maybe she thought I was just joking. The reality of the Bus Bar - on a particularly bustling early-Thursday-morning - was obviously far, far below her very worst expectations. She responded to the spectacle with a look of pure horror which haunts me to this day. What had I missed out? Windowless, claustrophobic, undecorated hellhole? Walls clammy with condensed sweat? Thick clouds of cigarette smoke scented with ganja? Packed to the rafters with African drug dealers? No, no, I'm pretty sure I'd mentioned all of that. All part of the place's distinctive 'charm'. But they were playing some good music on the speakers, and the place was buzzing. She gamely agreed to stay for one drink. I left her unattended for a couple of minutes or so, while I did a quick tour of the bar greeting friends. When I came back, she was deep in conversation with a huge Nigerian who was apparently very keen to develop some kind of import/export business with her (I rather think this was just a euphemism for sex, but she seemed to be taking him at his word). I managed to extricate us from that situation without causing too much awkwardness. And we left soon afterwards. Yes, in fact, this night can probably be accounted one of my (rare, rare) great dating successes. But I did come perilously close to blowing my chances by succumbing to the siren call of the dive bar. There are fairly few women who can even tolerate, much less appreciate the dive bar experience; and this lady was not one of them. It was pure good luck for me that her gratitude for being 'rescued' outweighed her resentment at being taken there in the first place. There's a Gary Larson cartoon I particularly love (but have never been able to find on the Net): Two big sharks in the shallows just off a desert island are watching a swimmer scramble up the beach to safety. One suddenly remarks to the other, "Hey, our dorsal fins are showing! I wonder how many times that's given us away?" It's a telling metaphor, I feel. With me, the great overlooked failing in my sex life is a tendency to let the possibility of a good bar experience distract me from closing the deal. Repeat after me: When a woman starts indicating a willingness to go to bed with you, do not suggest a last drink on the way home. Especially not in a dive bar.

The near miss (another 'dating disaster')

Attempting a fitful tidy-up of my office today (in anticipation of possibly moving to pastures new in a month or two) I happened upon the business card of a young woman I got to know briefly last summer. It had been mislaid for the last 8 or 9 months.

The thing was.... well, I had bumped into this lady quite a few times in a favourite bar. We'd got chatting. I liked her. She liked me. But there didn't quite seem to be the chemistry there. She, I thought, was giving out something of a 'not available' vibe. And I had one or two other potential romantic interests that were distracting me at the time. I found her very smart, and rather attractive, but..... I wasn't 'in pursuit'. It just seemed like a mildly flirtatious bar friendship.

In fact, a few times on parting (I think I had walked her to a cab at least a couple of times, and might even have shared a cab home with her once, because she lived not far away from me) she had warned me rather sternly against trying to kiss her. (The idea hadn't even been in my head, honestly. Maybe she was trying to plant it there?? I take people too literally sometimes, I know....)

But then..... we shared a cab home again. It was my turn to get out first, a block or so short of her destination. And she suddenly kissed me as I was saying goodbye. Quite unexpected. Passionate, yet tender. And very, very nice. Perhaps I was partly bowled over just by the surprise of it all: I was thinking, "My god! When was the last time someone fancied me like that?!" It was all very giddy and exciting - but perhaps just a delusion of paradise born of particular, fleeting circumstances. But.... well, you know how some kisses somehow don't do anything for you, and others just put your head in a spin. This seemed to be one of the latter. I probably should have invited her to come home with me right then and there, but I don't often do that 'first date' thing. And it was very late, we were both rather drunk, and we both had to work early the next morning. "Next time," I thought, "next time."

Unfortunately, over the subsequent weekend, one of my best friends was having extended birthday celebrations. And she was snowed under with work. We chatted on the phone and exchanged a few text messages, but couldn't find an opportunity to meet up.

And then....... my mobile phone somehow deleted her number (don't ask me how! It seems to happen to me quite a lot - whether through inadvertent key-pressing in the pocket, or, as I fear is the case and probably rather more common, through the tiny memory getting maxed out and randomly jettisoning items as a result of some bizarre glitch in the chip's operating system). It was annoying, but I didn't panic immediately. I still had her business card somewhere. Somewhere! Couldn't find it. Well, I figured she'd get in touch with me again. Nope (it's hard for girls to make the running, I suppose, especially at the outset of a relationship; perhaps she feared that I was involved with someone else, or just "wasn't that into her"). Ah, but I'm bound to see her again in that bar, right - the one where I've met her half a dozen times previously in the last month? Er, no. She stopped going there, apparently. And the place closed down anyway a few weeks later. Well.... she only lived a block or two away from me (I never sussed out her exact address, but it really was very close by), close to my local subway stop - surely I'd run into her on the street before long???

No. She disappeared from my life without trace. After one kiss. (Well, three.)

I suppose that's not really a 'great dating disaster' story, more of a 'great dating non-event' story - but I don't want to start having too many category tags on here. It seems to fit with the general schema of romantic ill-fortune which defines this series.

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.

Ooops!

There were two less-than-perfect moments in my recent (not-quite) love affair with a visiting businesswoman (well, apart from her not falling in love with me, and leaving after 6 days, that is...). The rest of the time we spent together was unbelievably harmonious and blissful; yes, yes, probably too-good-to-be-true. But our first and last meetings were tainted by moments of acute, though rather amusing embarrassment for me. And I can't help but wonder now if there was some kind of omen in this.

I met her in a favourite little bar down on Nanluoguxiang. She'd been poring over a map in the corner, so I had been politely ignoring her. Then she came over and asked me and the boss for some restaurant recommendations. I didn't want to seem too pushy (and I had, alas, already eaten that evening), so didn't suggest accompanying her to a restaurant. However, having ascertained that she was a visitor and unaccompanied (and drop-dead gorgeous), I did mention that there was a nice gig in the neighbourhood later in the evening (my jazzy friends, the No Name Trio, playing at Ginkgo) and that I would be delighted if she could join me there after her meal if she had time. She agreed that that sounded a very attractive suggestion, and asked me for details.

Now, Gingko was not so very distant from where we were, and not too difficult to find, but since she was a stranger, in Beijing for the first time, I thought it would be helpful if I could give her a card with the address and telephone number on it. I was pretty sure I had one of Gingko's cards somewhere in my wallet (I have dozens of cards for bars and restaurants in my wallet!). Yes, sure enough - here's one. Only as I was handing it over to her did I notice that there was a name and phone number scribbled on it. A girl's name! I honestly have no idea who that girl was, or how I came to have her number written on a restaurant's business card. (I suspect that the card had been given to me by someone else, Nico the manager, maybe; and that I'd never even noticed there was a personal phone number added to it.) No, this did not tend to show me in a good light, I fear; it suggested that I was some sort of inveterate lounge lizard who chats girls up in bars every night.... and subsequently doesn't even remember who they are. However, I managed to apologise, and make a joke of it; and I think my embarrassment and bewilderment were so obviously authentic that she was inclined to be amused by it too (although she did tease me about it later, rather charmingly, when she wrote her own contact details on the same card for me, and then added, "Don't give this away this time!").

Anyway, all smooth sailing from there on. Until her last night. She had decided she would like to see part of a festival of films on modern dance that was screening at the Ullens Centre in Dashanzi that week. I had to work in the CBD until early evening, and so was faced with a bit of a mad scramble to get out there in time for the start. I therefore told her I'd meet her inside the auditorium. Once I finally found a taxi, and got clear of the rush-hour logjam on the 2nd Ringroad, I made improbably good time and managed to arrive with 5 or 10 minutes in hand.

Ah, but then.... at the box office, I happened to run into a lady journalist friend - outrageously sexy, something of an old flame. We hadn't seen each other in ages, so she was being very chatty, very friendly.... insisting we walk into the show together. Oh dear. I'm going to look like a lounge lizard again, aren't I? I couldn't find a way of explaining to my lovely friend that I didn't want to sit with her, or even really to be seen with her, because I was kind of on a date with someone else.... but I did manage to detach myself from her almost as soon as we were through the door. And I don't think my New Romantic Interest noticed this fleeting 'infidelity', or thought anything untoward of it, if she did. Phew!

And so, the rest of our last evening passed as wonderfully as the previous five had done. But I really, really, really do not want that to be our last evening.

Anyway, those two slight misadventures turned out to be more amusing than disastrous, thank heavens. But I still feel these anecdotes would make a suitable first post for my long threatened series on Great Dating Disasters.