Wednesday

Well, today has been an eventful day. Just a few short weeks ago my love life was totally empty, with only the occasional tumbleweed blowing past, and now it is so complicated I'm having troubling keeping up with it. But I'm not going to say any more about it.

But I am reminded of the time I went out with a 27 year old called Mr X (names have been changed to protect the identity of those concerned). I hardly ever get to tell the full story any more, so here it is.

A couple of years ago when I was just 16, I started going to my mum's boyfriend's keep fit class where I met a man named Mr X. Mr X was very nice to me and we became pals so when, down at the pub after the last class of the term, he turned to me and said "my mate often gets given free cinema tickets, I could take you some time if you want" I thought nothing of saying "yes! that would be great!".

It did occur to me that this little outing might be a little more friendly than I was anticipating, but I thought no, he's over a decade older than me, he must just be being nice...

So one afternoon Mr X picked me up and we sped off towards some cinema complex in his old and rather battered car. We arrived to find that the film didn't begin for another 2 hours so decided to go bowling to pass the time. It turned out that Mr X was rather good at bowling, so that even with the barriers down, he got a score of almost 300. I, on the other hand, had great difficulty hitting anything and scored about 30. My poor performance was not helped by the fact that Mr X kept grabbing my hand in an attempt to teach me how to bowl (an incident that made me think this was not quite the innocent outing I'd envisioned).

After 3 disastrous defeats at bowling I suggested we might have a go at pool, a game I am slightly better at. I offered to break and leaned over the pool table to take my first shot when it suddenly occured to me that I was wearing a rather low cut top. I immediately leaned back. The rest of the game entailed me trying to take shots at various balls whilst standing completely upright and keeping as much of the table between me and Mr X. I did do better at pool though, and won one game.

Anyway, after all this it was finally time for the film. We went into the cinema where I purchased the popcorn (after firm instructions from my mother that I must not let him pay for everything, or feel that I owed him anything), although at Mr X's insistance it was just the one large popcorn, I think he was hoping for hands brushing past one another in the popcorn bucket but I made very sure that didn't happen. As the film began, Mr X leaned towards me and whispered, "if you get scared, you can always hold my hand...". Somehow I managed to sit there through the whole film, although I was leaning as far away from him as possible. As soon as the film finished I was up and leaving the cinema with Mr X trailing along behind me. I told him I wanted to go home so we got back in his car and went back to my house. He parked outside and started to lean towards me, at which point I opened the door, jumped out, thanked him for taking me to the cinema and legged it towards my front door as fast as I could...

And, until very recently, that is the only date I had ever been on. It seems rather sad. Oh well, I've been telling the story of it ever since.