Meek and Mild

It was a balmy in London last night. Amber light was saturating the evening and turning the Thames into a sultry, rippling ribbon as it flowed under Wandsworth bridge.

I paused, walking to The Date in a carefully casual outfit, to drink in the optimistic hint on the breeze and collect myself.

I hate first dates. But it would be foolish for forgo them for that reason.

Reaching The Ship, a riverside pub with an enviable view of industrial barges and a giant Sainsbury’s, I found it seething with the after work BBQ crowd. As Londoners are wont to do, they had obviously excavated their summer wardrobes and donned them in a fit of zealous excitement.

Success was not absolute. I will have to mark the forest of competing Hawaiian shirts down a localised epidemic of sun blindness.

The Young Man was waiting inside for me, anxiously texting his exact position in case I’d missed him. Or maybe he was concerned about the beer goggles as well.

I was surprised. He wasn’t Quasimodo.

In fact first impressions were decent. About 6 ft, shortish dirty blond curls with sun glasses nestling on top, a casual blue striped shirt rolled up to the elbows and non-Simon Cowell jeans. OK so far. There was even a glimpse of chest hair peaking above the top button – and I’m a sucker for that.

He recognised me immediately (good sign) and kissed me hello on each cheek before offering to buy me a drink. Large Dry White collected we burst into the fray and managed to commandeer a couple of seats at a table.

Initial conversation was slightly stilted. I was disconcerted by the way his gazed darted to and fro as we spoke, as if he was on the look out for a rescuer. A further distraction was the BBQ man who had a microphone and was calling out the numbers of people’s orders for them to collect. “Number. 64! Come in number 64 your order is up! Number 64!!”

Sadly there were no pedalos to be seen.

He didn’t get that joke.

We chatted through 3 drinks, which was fine. But fine is all it was.

He didn’t seem to have anything to talk about. We did the “so, what do you do?” - which is essentially a bit dull after the first 5 minutes. The “so, how are you enjoying London?” (he’s just moved here). The “so, what else do you like to do with your time?” …..

But there was nothing there!

I think I scared him.

I gave him every opportunity to initiate conversation, to get stuck in, to be himself. But found myself driving all the chat and steering us around any potential silences.

Whilst all the time those nervous blue eyes darted hither and thither.

He was nice and a gentleman. But there was no spark. I don’t think I’m difficult and was more than happy to ask him about stuff. But the banter was not returned and the nervousness was palpable.

Come half past ten I decided to call it a night. He readily agreed. Walking back through the throng I mentioned that I was going to pop into the loo before heading off, quite frankly expecting him to wait for me and then say goodbye at the end of the road.

Not so.

This seemed to be the get out clause he’d been searching for. Mumbling, ‘lovely to see you’ I got a smart peck on the cheek and could barely see for the dust rising from his heels as he sped away to safety.

That was unexpected. But at least I didn’t have to deal with the kiss/no kiss dilemma.

I metaphorically shrugged and pottered home through the gloaming, musing on whether I am actually intimidating, or whether he was just a little too on the meek and mild side.

The jury’s out on that one.

Date with a Young Man

I seem to have a date tonight. This is rather a surprise.

A couple of weekends ago I went out for drinks with my Oldest Friend (OF). As well as being a brilliant friend, OF doesn’t have an ‘off switch’ so it was with some trepidation that I found myself leaving the nice, cosy pub at last orders and being frog marched down the road looking for ‘Fun!’

The ‘Fun!’ search seemed like a great idea whilst standing in the murky glow of the streetlights by the pub.

It seemed like a sort-of-good-idea once we’d been walking for 10 mins and our feet were starting to hurt.

It had been downgraded to who’s-good-idea-was-this? once the only bar passed turned out to be in the midst of the local council estate with a selection of staffies chained up outside and a stolen car doing handbrake turns in the car park.

So by the time we stumbled across another establishment, our standards had slightly slipped.

We paused outside the bar and peered at the tatty-cornered, homemade poster blu-tacked lopsidedly in the window advertising ‘An Evening of Afro Funk!!’ This left us none the wiser. Squinting through the grime mired glass we could see minimally enthusiastic gyrations from an eclectic audience and a rudimentary ‘stage’ crowded with The Band.

OF pushed open the paint flaked door and took a deep breath. Unfortunately this led to slight choking as she inhaled the musty, dampness of stale hops and ‘alternative’ hygiene.

Still, this was a girl on a mission and not one to be kept from her chardonnay by a stoned bartender or almost total darkness.

Suitably refreshed we found a table from which to take in the atmosphere; mainly one with a good view so that we could have a good giggle at our peculiar pub companions.

Bearing in mind the fact that OF was already two sheets to the wind (and has no known concept of appropriate behaviour) I should never have said to her, over the din, ‘That guy at the bar’s quite cute’.

Barely had the sentence left my mouth, and the little voice in my head said ‘Nooooooooooooo!’ than OF had leapt to her feet, somewhat unsteadily and made a beeline for his chum with the throwaway line of: “I’ll take his wingman, you go in for the kill….”

I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by this, but hastily followed her for fear that she would selflessly throw herself on his poor friend to ‘take him down’ …

I was right.

I suppose her direct action approach did work in a way as I soon found myself talking to this chap, mainly as a protectionist tactic to prevent mortal embarrassment.

In turn OF draped herself over his mate in her delight in finding out that he was French (she has a thing about accents) occasionally prodding him to elicit more deliciously accented tones, and proceeded to flirt outrageously. It is her forte. I on the other hand have enough inhibitions for the both of us, even after OF’s liberal dispensation of wine, but did manage some friendly banter.

Some 30 minutes later our glasses had been drained and I was beginning to feel the lure of my bed (alone you understand!). Railing against OF’s drunken determination to continue the party I stood fast. Sense prevailed and phone numbers were shyly asked for, and given.

So, tonight I will be meeting up with this Young Man in a pub down by the river. Due to the possibility of beer goggles the other night I am quite prepared to find Quasimodo crookedly propping up a bar stool and dribbling into his pint.

Anything else will be a bonus.

Names

Now, before you get excited I am categorically NOT pregnant. But do seem to be surrounded by fertile goddesses at the moment and so have begun to take more of an interest in what they choose to name their cherubs.

So far today we have a Jersey (boy) and an Aristotle.

I might be of traditional bent, but to me Jersey = Channel Island, dairy cow or item of clothing. Not a child.

I don’t mean that a name has to be mundane, but I have trouble in imagining little Jersey getting through the playground years without a considerable amount of grief!

Aristotle on the other hand could be borne if the child were either Greek or the progeny of professional philosophers.

He isn’t.

I do rather like it when a name is personal to a family. A recent “James” is named for where his parents were on a round the world trip when they discovered his soon-to-be-existence: Santiago in Chile (Santiago is a corruption of ‘Saint James’). I think that’s great. The name means something to them and yet doesn’t saddle their son with decades of explanations.

A name is a huge decision. You want one that will set your child up for a happy and successful life. It has to be right whether they decide to be a CEO or an artist, doctor or yoga teacher - whether their idea of a good time is golf and a nice sherry, or hitch hiking across India. Not easy!

It may be that you don’t want to follow the prevailing trends. Amongst my friends there seem to be waves of Jacks and Mollys at the moment. Lovely names, but they will be surrounded by namesakes in the years to come. Every generation has its common names, in my day the same was true of ‘Sophie’ and ‘Kate’.

We are also seeing a revival of what my mother calls “Victorian Scullery Names”, encompassing anything from Ruby to Alfie to Maisie. I tend to find them sweet, but my mother’s generation often have to withhold a gasp.

Prospective parents have to consider the surname too. And try to double guess the cruel jokes that might shadow your precious baby through his/her childhood. Something the parents of an old school contemporary Richard Head obviously never did. He is now called Charles.

This task is much harder for the parents of girls as you have no idea whether your darling daughter will one day marry and take on a different appellation. This happened recently to a lovely ‘Iona’ when she married a Mr. Hoare.

No jokes there then.

Some names are really fitting. I have one friend called “Annabel”, a name I have always had a soft spot for, especially as it means “loveable”. Sweet! Less adorable was Annabel’s discovery, teaching in a primary school in Vietnam that in a local dialect her name means “Fat”.

Not so loveable.

It is startling how much names affect our impressions.

I am open minded meeting a ‘Ben’. I have no preconceptions of that name. They could be any age, profession, background etc. I’d assume they were male, but that’s about as far as my assumptions would go.

However, I am painfully aware that if I meet someone with one of those made-up Gansta names like Shaniquay or a name spelt in a ‘cute and unusual way’, like Chaarli – I will already have pre-judged them to some extent.

It is wrong of me; I don’t think I’m the only one.

I did an internship in the US once, in Washington D.C. One of my jobs was to answer the phone because my boss thought that my English accent presented a good impression of our department.

I vividly remember one morning picking up the phone and doing my usual greeting spiel to hear a broad Southern drawl announcing:

“Hi, I’m Randy!”

Why would you do that to a child?!

Overheard

Overheard: a conversation between a couple of 7 year olds at the local pool yesterday:

Boy 1: “D’you know that in the Olden Days when my dad was young, a fiver was worth, like, loads of money?”

Boy 2: “Yeah. Like a fiver was the same as like £350”

Boy 1: “And d’you know that in the Olden Days my dad says you could buy a dog for £2?”

Boy 2: “£2?? Wow. That’s amaaaaaaaaaaazing!”

Boy 1: “Yeah. My dad’s auntie bought 3”

Common Sense

As I can’t run at the moment (see: sort-of broken leg) I have decided to buy a bicycle so that I can cycle to work and not turn into a lard-arse in the meantime.

I am going to have to keep this bike outside (small flat) and be very careful about securing it (living very close to a football ground = easy to ‘loose’ bike).

For that reason I have just phoned my insurance company to find out:
A) The amount I am covered for a bike – so that I buy one under that amount
B) The type of lock I need – so that I am compliant with the policy

Simple?

According to the woman (and I say that with scorn and bewilderment) she cannot give me those pieces of information until I have bought a bike.

Actually, when pushed to answer what sort of lock I would need she said, in a nasal whine, “a 5 lever mortice lock”.

Well, I’m no Handy Andy, but I’m pretty sure that I am not going to use a front door lock to secure my bike to a lamppost.

How can it make any sense not to let me have this Very Basic information so that I abide by the policy and am covered for potential theft? It’s is My Policy after all. I’ve Paid For It. All I want to know is how to make sure I am covered!!

Before I blew a total gasket I left a message asking to speak to her manager who is, nasal now slightly patronising tone, “in a meeting”.

Oh really.

Diagnosis

At least I have a diagnosis on my pre-marathon injury (http://notenoughmud.blogspot.com/2009/04/getting-close.html)

For the past few weeks I have been trying to get to the bottom of things:

Initially I went to my GP.

Who referred me to a sports physio….

Who referred me to a sports specialist….

For which I had to go back to the GP for a formal referral.

Then via the specialist I had an initial consultation…

….a spinal MRI scan

Another consultation

…..a nerve conduction test (consisting of needles being inserted into the muscles of my leg and an electric current running through them)

Another consultation

….a lower leg MRI

…a CT scan

….a set of bloods

Another consultation

Et voila! We have an answer!

It seems that I have a stress fracture of my right shin. It was there, all milky and slightly ominous looking on the MRI image stretching for a good couple of inches inside the bone.

On the one hand this isn’t good. I have 2 more months signed off games and, essentially, a bit of a broken leg.

On the other hand it proves that I wasn’t going mad and gives me a reasonable excuse for my slow marathon time!

Newsflash - Cyber-Friend is Real!

Last Saturday I met Miranda for lunch in Johannesburg.

How cool is that?

It turned out that we were both in Jo’burg - Miranda down from Tanzania to have her baby; me over from London to visit family and friends.

Sometimes fate doesn’t just whisper in your ear so much as run up and Tango you in the street. I mean, just how likely was it that 2 people who met whilst blogging, living in Tanzania and England, would end up in Jo’burg on the same weekend?

Anyway, once I got over the fortuitous coincidence I was delighted to start planning a meeting - but then I got a bit nervous.

Nobody knows I blog.

This means I have got rather used to expressing myself in a virtual vacuum. Enjoying the interaction with my bloggy cyber-chums whilst safely ensconced in a discreet computer bubble. Now this boundary was going to be breached. Exciting, but a bit unnerving.

Fortunately I had no qualms about who I was meeting. Miranda’s ebullient, creative and friendly personality comes across in her absorbing posts and I had a strong inkling that we’d get on like old friends.

Luckily – I was right!

We met in a hotel, me and my friend K under instructions to look for a very pregnant girl on her own. She was hard to miss. Once initial introductions were out of the way, and I had bitten the bullet and explained to my confused friend K how I actually knew Miranda (letting her off the hook of convoluted deceit) we settled in for a thoroughly chatty time. We soon found out that K also knew an old, and sadly much missed, friend of Miranda’s from Zambia.

I couldn’t make these coincidences up if I tried.

All of you Times of Miranda fans will be delighted to know that Miranda lives up to her fabulous prose and even more, is a disgustingly radiant and neat 9 months pregnant. Not a swollen ankle in sight!

A lot of people don’t ‘get’ blogging or why we do it. And I can understand their misapprehension. But there is something really wonderful in the fact that two people, of roughly the same age, with such radically different lives, can come to be friends like this. And that is something to champion.

So, in conclusion: I got to discover that Miranda is, in fact, real and she got to find out that I am not really Father Christmas.

I hope she wasn’t too disappointed.

Maybe next time I’ll make it to Arusha!