Riddle me this...

I was walking in a shopping mall exactly 12 hours after I had moved to the wonderful city of London, when this man walked up to me and said hi. You must understand a few things about me... I don’t have a reputation of being very patient with strangers. I took my mother’s advice to give them a wide berth, and before social networking, a boy/man/girl had to know someone I knew for us to have any chance of any sort of relationship. Yes, even I am not sure that my relationships did not have a touch of the incestuous about them (ß is not a confession). But moving on...

He introduced himself...he had a rather unmemorable name. I smiled thinking he was about to ask for directions, and I was already preparing the half-smile and dismissive ‘don’t know the area well, sorry’ line. Instead, he launched into the most heart-felt bullshit I’ve ever heard. I actually stopped and listened. He opened with ‘my friends and I were having a conversation about what we would do if we ever so a beautiful woman on the street’. Vanity is a strange bedfellow; it creeps up on you, throws out your contraceptive pill and ravages you without so much as an introduction. There I was, inflated with its child, smiling at this total stranger (who could have had a gun, a knife, been an undercover reporter. I will be dealing with my stranger danger sense, or lack thereof later), waiting for his next line. ‘We’re all in our mid-thirties, recently single and searching, and we figured that the best thing to do would be to walk up to the girl and tell her how we felt’. I took a deep breath in and waited... ‘I saw you and I thought, there’s a pretty girl I’d like to get to know, so here I am. Am I in any luck?’ I looked around and a hoard of tourists had stopped to observe this Shakespearean scene. I took on the air of a thespian and dramatically told him that were I not in a committed relationship, I would most certainly jump at the chance of having coffee with a delightful young man such as himself. He had grey eyes; I am still not sure how I resisted the urge to ask him out for dinner instead. He then asked me for a breakdown of his courtship tactics, and after about 10 minutes of hapless advice, we parted ways; me, blushing furiously and him walking very fast in the opposite direction.

I walked on to my destination, a little cafe round the corner, berating myself for perhaps being a little too dismissive. I’d even got to the point where I was muttering under my breath that this might explain why I was so very single, and occasionally lonely. I ordered a large coffee and retreated behind my computer to tweet, and illegally download F1 when I spotted the same gentleman about 2 feet away from me. For a woman he considered beautiful, I was suprisingly ‘inconspicuous’. He walked straight past me, and just as I was about to tap him on his shoulder and make a stalker joke, he stopped at a nearby table where another lonely girl sat, also on the internet, probably on twitter, and issued another corny chat up line, bits of which included ‘I don’t understand how someone quite so pretty could be sat here alone and none of the men are yet to pounce. Unless you’re with friends of course...’  She obviously wasn’t, and he sat down and they had coffee, and I presume a relationship, either of carnal or intimate nature ensued.

I sat there, very bemused and feet firmly back down to earth. I had just almost acquiesced to a date with a stranger, who also happened to be of loose morals, and God forbid, a smooth criminal. Somebody, riddle me this. Please.

[Next week, the chronicle of that very same evening shall ensue. There will be a lot to judge me for, so in your anticipation, I hope you find it within you to forgive the recent lack of tales.]

The perfect distance apart.

So apparently I don’t talk about work. This is novel for me...it’s like finding out that I am not as whiney as I sometimes think I sound. Either way, I started my new job as a doctor this week. I haven’t saved a life yet, haven’t done anything magical. In fact, all I’ve done is realised that I’m going to have to be one shit hot secretary for the next 6 months. You know...make sure everyone gets whatever it is they want when they want it, including thinking about when they’ll want to pee and informing them of the fact (my superiors are really nice, I’m just being facetious). Tomorrow will be exciting...I will see my first real patients, probably panic at the thought in the middle of dealing with them, and run squealing like the little coward I am.

Anyway, so in the midst of a very fascinating talk on the importance of governance security, and the need to vary the location of capital letters in passwords (I tried to stay awake, I really did...), my phone beeped signalling an email. I opened it expecting it to be some horrendous news, like further delay to my internet or cancellation of my credit cards. All the email said was ‘hey’. Then I scrawled back up and read the sender.  4. (link 1 link 2 ). He was the one that I ended things with (link 3) because it was the right thing to do (and because he was averse to communication and I talked too much) thought that email would suffice as an apology. I laughed a little, which lightened the mood of the seminar, then replied with a curt ‘you’re alive.’

Ten minutes later and my phone buzzed again. This time the lecturer went silent and looked around the room. I feigned a coughing fit, excused myself, and departed to find a corner in which to construct a hideously rude reply (the kind that make you blush when you’re done sending it). His email read: ‘Paris next week, cross the channel?’

[Side bar: Paris is exactly like you see on TV (if you go to the right places), and because there is free-flowing wine, chocolate, shoe shopping, cheese and pastries, endorphins run high and people really do feel in love. At least I do. My only visit had me flirting with dogs in the street, dreaming of unicorns and chipping my toenails as I tried to draw maps in concrete. My return to reality was painful and cold, but the moment....momentous]

Now, I am quite the resilient person. If I decide to be nice, I usually stick to my guns, and same goes for if I decide to be rude. But I was floundering here. How does one reply to ‘meet me in the city of love’? And anyway, what kind of intellectual compromise on his part leads to such behaviour?! This clown was selfish enough not to care that I’d graduated from university (despite my own valiant attempts at the contrary), got a house and a job. Not so much as a congratulatory message; people I barely knew had cared so much more. Why would he think that ‘meet me in Paris’ would mean ‘I’m sorry’? Surely that's what he was trying to say?! Honest truth, probably not.

So I really don't know what was the right thing to do, what with clouded emotions and revisited wounds. But I replied with ‘I think we are currently the perfect distance apart’, because really, we are.