Author: Pete Sortwell
Category: Humorous
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‘You know what your problem is, don’t you?’ My best mate Barry said one day over a coffee.
‘No. That’s just it, I don’t,’ I told him, amazed that after years of consoling me he still thought I knew why it was that girls would rather change their phone number than speak to me again.
‘You’re looking in the wrong places,’ Barry told me, raising his eyebrows in a knowing way before taking a sip of his drink.
That was it, there was no more wisdom in Barry than that. You’re looking in the wrong places. No suggestions as to where I should look, no inside knowledge on the matter, just you’re looking in the wrong places. With friends like that, it’s no wonder I felt like chucking myself under a bus.
Barry had been in the same boat as me until a couple of years back when he struck lucky and managed to convince Mandy, the girl who took the coats at the bingo hall, that having him move into her place and eat all her food for the rest of her life was a good idea. Since then he’s been convinced he knows everything there is to know about dating and women. He doesn’t, though, he was as hopeless as me up until he met her, and it wasn’t all plain sailing from the get-go with Mandy, either. He had to pretty much stalk her before she even noticed him. Barry never even liked bingo, but he was more than happy to drag me along to watch him completely ignore the game and just sit in our little booth staring at Mandy as she tried to busy herself and pretend she wasn’t being stared at by the second ugliest bloke there that night. After a couple of months of Barry’s eyeballing campaign, Mandy finally gave in and agreed to go out with him for a plate of Chinese food. As it turned out, Mandy was interested in the same weird little Japanese cartoons that Barry was. Instantly they had a common bond, something to talk about and something to share.
It’s situations like that which make me think there is something in all this fate business. People who believe in fate think that everyone’s life is already mapped out, that it’s already there and just waiting to be lived. I mean, how can two fairly regular people, not the best lookers and into the same cartoons, find each other just like that? It was like a tractor beam, they weren’t wearing special Manga T-shirts or badges or anything, something just brought them together. Fate. It must be fate. It got me thinking, also, that fate must have been against me; either that or my fate was to be alone, forever.
‘Where should I be looking then, Barry?’ I asked, after having worked myself up into one thinking about fate.
‘In the right places, of course,’ Barry said, making me feel like belting the hot chocolate I was nursing into his stupid big head. After another sip of his coffee he continued. ‘Work out what you’re into, things you like, then go to places where those things happen. It’s not as if you have hobbies, is it? Get one and you’re golden.’
This was a lie. I did have a hobby. All my time was spent on it, too. I didn’t have many interests other than finding a girlfriend, and I don’t suppose that’d be something a woman would fancy discussing. Unless she was a lesbian, and then I’d have been in the wrong place, I suspect.
‘That’s not a hobby, that’s an obsession,’ he told me when I reminded him how much time I had put into my ‘hobby’. ‘And one that’s driving you crazy,’ he added.
He was right, too. I was going crazy. I very much doubt there was anyone as unlucky in the love department as me, not that lived in the community, anyway. I mean, even guys on death row still managed to find someone to love; fair enough, it was through letters or a slight change of persuasion, but they still found someone.
There was nothing I could do but concede to what Barry had said. Other than drink my hot chocolate and try and think about things, other than women, that I liked.
‘Come on, let’s see what you’ve got,’ he said, ferretting an old shopping receipt out of one pocket and a bookies pen out of the other. Together we hammered out a list of things that I’d shown interest in during my life so far:
Fish and chips
Feeding the ducks
WWF wrestling
Going to the dry ski slope and seeing people fall over
Duck Hunt on the NES
Writing my name on walls
He-Man
Skimming stones
Watching people fall over on YouTube
Women
I vetoed Barry’s suggestion that I enjoyed collecting my school bag from gardens after he’d chucked it over on the way home from school. As you can see from the list, there wasn’t much there that could be transferred to a joint interest with a woman, unless she was a computer game-playing bi-sexual interested in shooting, throwing and fatty food. Which, as desperate as I may have been, didn’t sound very appealing.
‘But what do you like now?’ Barry kept asking in between adding items to the list. My answer was invariably, women. Although I have to admit my love of fish and chips hasn’t waned since childhood. I eat it at least three times a week. Cod, chips and a nice big dollop of mushy peas. Bloody lovely it is. I’d dream that if I ever did get a girlfriend, I’d take her into the local chippy and show off how well known I am in my area. I just have to show my face and my food is wrapped and ready to go. Barry said this wasn’t something that would impress a girl, but I’m not so sure, I’ve seen plenty of women in the shop getting the same meal, with or without mushy peas, AND I’d pay for hers … that’s got to be a plus point.
‘Well, fish and chip obsessed women are few and far between, there must be something you like doing that involves meeting women. Even something you’ve always thought about doing but have never done?’ Barry asked, after clicking his fingers a couple of times to wake me from my fish and chip day dream.
‘I’d quite like to go on a booze cruise one day,’ I told him. ‘Come to think of it, we’ve always talked about going on one.’
‘Christ, this isn’t getting us anywhere, is it?’ Barry said, getting stressed and holding onto his nose like it was about to fall off and only his thumb and forefinger could stop it happening. ‘Look.’ He laid his palms flat on the table. ‘Do you think it’s because you’re …’
I cut him off.
‘It’s not because I’m short. Women aren’t only attracted to tall men. It’s not like I’m a midget or anything, is it? So no, it isn’t because I’m short,’ I told him, digging my heels in on that particular argument.
It’s true, I am short. I’m not that short, though. To be a midget, dwarf or any other derogatory term people like to use for people that aren’t as tall as most people, you need to be under four foot ten and I’m four foot ten and a half, which is over one centimetre or ten millimetres more than that, so it’s clear that I’m not a midget. Also, I knew that before the Internet was invented, so that proves I’m right and in fact, very knowledgeable on the subject. Too many people rely on the Internet for information these days. It’s unreliable, Google is the worst place to look if you need to find something out. Don’t even get me started on Wikipedia. I mean, what sort of knowledge source lets any old Internet psycho enter whatever they like as ‘fact’? It’s ridiculous. I have a set of encyclopaedias, bought them a few years back. They’re much better and more factual than most of the shit on the Internet. It’s actually quicker to get the book I need off the shelf, flick through the pages and find what I need than it is to look on the Internet for hours, find the answer, then check and double check that it’s correct. My encyclopaedias are all I need. The computer I have is just used to find women.
‘Why don’t you try speed dating? There’s got to be someone out there for you and I think that’s the best way to go,’ Barry said.
‘Tried it, didn’t work,’ I said, thinking back to the disaster that it had been on the occasions that I had tried it.
‘Yeah, but that’s how you fail. Giving up gets you nowhere,’ Barry explained hitting a chord within me. It’s true, I do give up on things fairly easily. Not the entire goal, but the various different ways of getting to it. I have been known to stop trying if something doesn’t work the first or second time. Take dating w
ebsites, for example; I’ve joined up and paid a year’s fee on more than I care to remember, then after experiencing a couple of dire dates, just packed it in and looked for another one. I suppose I’m just too keen.
‘Will you come with me?’ I asked Barry.
‘Absolutely not, my friend. I’ve got a bird. No need for places like that.’
‘Nice,’ I replied, not appreciating Barry’s attempt at a joke. ‘I’ll try it again, but I want to go to a different one this time, Last time it was soul-destroying, I couldn’t face seeing the woman who ran it again. I mean, surely it’s rude to tell “the only person she’s ever met to get no interest whatsoever” that he is just that?’
‘I think it could be rude. But it’s a little bit funny in a tragic kind of way though, you’ve got to admit that,’ Barry said.
‘It would be if it wasn’t me she’d said it to,’ I confirmed.
It had been tragic. Now, for those that don’t know what speed dating is, I’ll explain; the organisers get an equal amount of males and females in a room, then on the night one group is selected, usually the females, to go and sit at a table. Then the men have to go and sit at each of the tables in turn and ‘sell’ themselves to the woman. They get two minutes with each woman, then an alarm or bell sounds and the leader shouts ‘Change’ and the men all move clockwise to the next table and do the same thing again.
On that particular evening I’d sat down opposite a woman who was pretty average-looking. Someone who I would have expected to need speed dating to get a look-in. She was almost spilling over the chair she’d managed to perch on and her face wasn’t so much disfigured as lopsided. I have to admit, I wasn’t really impressed on first sight, but being the gentleman that I am I decided I’d give it my all and see if I could see past the folds in her face. I discovered that she worked in a bakery, that she still lived with her grandmother and that she didn’t want to be doing either of those things, but as the council wouldn’t give her a flat of her own and Hello magazine wasn’t looking for writers that couldn’t spell, she was going to be staying in the bakery for the duration (of her life probably). I, in turn, informed her that I was a car salesman — I’d decided to lie and that was the first thing I thought of. I could have been anything, but I chose that. My brain clearly decided to work against me that day. I decided not to tell her the real truth about my job. It would only either disappoint or disgust her, no one likes insurance companies or the people that work for them.
I told her proudly that I did have my own place, paid for by me, and I added, ‘I’m allowed to have anyone I like over.’ I raised my eyebrows up and down as I said it. It didn’t have the desired effect, though, she just sneered. As did every other girl I tried to impress with that particular fact; one even called me a wanker before turning away in her chair and refusing to talk to me for the last one minute, forty seconds of our ‘date’. The over-exaggerated sigh and shift in her chair alerted half the room to the fact that my date with Karen, number 7, wasn’t going well, and I think this had an effect on the overall outcome of my night. After I’d sat at thirty-five tables for two minutes each and given my all trying to impress every single woman there (and hopefully persuade one to come back to my place) I waited in a quiet corner of the bar while the forms we’d all filled in were looked through for a match.
How it works is the leader of the group gets you to tick boxes on your way round the room, ‘yes’, ‘maybe’ or ‘no interest’, then her computer processes the information and comes up with two people that are matched either in the ‘yes’ or ‘maybe’ columns and the corresponding results are sent via email, along with the relevant people’s contact details and a picture so you can remember who’s who. When I was filling out my form, I decided to forget how Karen had ignored me and give her a chance anyway. I ticked ‘maybe’ for her and ‘yes’ for everyone else. Now, although you have to wait until you either get home or get your smart phone out (if you’re a tosser) to see who was interested, you could see how many matches there were. My card? Zero matches. No maybes and no yesses. That was when the leader, Zoe, as high on life as she had been all evening, delivered the killing blow that she’d never had such a dismal failure of a man darken her speed dating door.
‘Not everyone finds love here, but I’ve never had not one single show of interest in a person before. Even big Linda, she’s one of the regulars, usually shows interest in all the men in the hope of finding love. You must have said something really awful,’ Zoe told me.
‘Oh,’ I replied. There wasn’t much else to say, although there wasn’t that much time to think about it as Zoe had more encouraging remarks to make.
‘I’ll have to change my advert now,’ she said putting her bottom lip out in a way that made me think she was fairly sexy.
‘Or you could show interest,’ I suggested hopefully.
‘Oh. Oh, no, Jason. Sorry, but …’ Zoe said, looking down at me, ‘just, no,’ she finished, before walking off, shaking her head.
As I left, I saw her necking a shot and I’m fairly sure it was the thought of me that made her shudder rather than whatever it was in the glass.
Once I’d finished reminding Barry of how much of a complete waste of time speed dating was, not to mention the little bit of my soul that I’d left in the back room of the Pig and Whistle that night, he had a suggestion.
‘Find one with an angle. There must be different types of dating places, we’ve already established that speed dating gets the highest ratio of people seen in the lowest amount of time, so find a speed dating evening that has an angle.’
‘What, like speed dating for munters?’ I asked.
‘Well, you said it. Basically, yes.’
‘But I don’t want an ugly girl, given the choice. I want a pretty one who’ll accept me for who I am and maybe, just maybe, sleep with me just once. Or more than once,’ I told Barry, laying out the terms I’d just invented for this plan. ‘More than once would be better.’
‘Well, therein lies the problem,’ Barry said, draining the last of his coffee. ‘You want a pretty girl, but even the ugly, fat ones that still live at home don’t want anything to do with you. This is what I meant by an angle.’
‘Yes, but you’ve not told me what angle, Barry! You’re just sitting there talking about how I should do things just because you finally managed to get out of the hole that I’m in. Doesn’t mean that I’ll be able to find someone, no matter how much you talk about angles!’ I shouted.
‘Ooooooh. Mr Touchy. It’s not my fault you’re in this situation, is it?’ Barry retorted, also getting pissed off.
‘Oh, don’t give it all that. You’re always playing the “it’s not my fault” card.’
‘Well, this isn’t. You’re the one who can’t find a girl, I’m just trying to help. It’s clear you’re not interested in listening, this is why you’re struggling. Your way doesn’t work and you’re not prepared to listen to anyone else.’
‘You haven’t fucking suggested anything!’
‘I have. I said you should …’ Barry started, but I cut him off.
‘Fuck off, Barry.’
‘Say what?’
‘You heard, just fuck off, I’ve had enough of you,’ I told him, seething. Seething not so much at him, but at the situation. I should’ve never discussed it, I knew it would piss me off.
‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do: I will fuck off, and you can shove it, you miserable old git,’ Barry said, getting up and putting on his coat. ‘And I’ll tell you something else for free, you need a deaf, dumb and blind woman, that’s the only sort I can see putting up with you, you ugly, short-arsed whinger.’ And with that Barry strode out of the coffee shop leaving me to snap a couple of wooden coffee stirrers in an attempt to make myself feel better — it didn’t work.
Barry could stay in a strop, he was like that sometimes. He’d calm down once he’d had no human contact other than with his bird for a week. He did have a point, though. A blind girl. She wouldn’t be able to s
ee I was ugly, or short. It was the perfect solution.
Well, they do say lose a friend, gain a new plan. What’s that? They don’t? Well, they will now. I might write in to the publishers of my encyclopaedia and suggest they add it to the inspirational quotes.
Bride and Gloom: sometimes love is better off blind
Read an extract from the book:
~Prologue~