I am sad to say that things did not work out between Ed and Flambae. As Ed joined back on dating square one, we soon realised that Ed and I were in a potentially mutually exploitable and highly beneficial scenario. We had been in different years at uni and hadn’t gone to school together – providing entire swathes of our friendship groups that the other didn’t know. These were entirely new and untapped single markets, ready and waiting for fresh meat to take a dip in their dating ponds and spice up their lives.
This was too good an opportunity to be missed. We decided to host a singles dinner. The premise was simple: I would invite five single female friends and Ed would invite five single male friends. The only rule was that neither of us could invite people that the other person had ever met. Mission accomplished and guest list confirmed, the date was set and invites were sent out. Eventually the day arrived and as the exceedingly well prepared and organised yo-pros that we were, we had painstakingly prepared the food the night before, ready to pop in the oven when we got back from work.
Our kitchen, although very pleasant, was not large, and dinner for twelve proved rather cosy. This wasn’t helped by the fact that we didn’t actually own twelve chairs so we had to improvise slightly. The seating plan was carefully arranged to strategically place Ed and I on makeshift chairs we had created from poofs and cushions from the sitting room. The seating plan in itself proved quite a challenge. We each had strong views on which of our friends the other would fancy so that was easy enough to orchestrate but beyond that we had to resort to guess work – the very nature of inviting members of our own sex that the other didn’t know made ensuring the boy-girl-boy-girl format was as compatible as possible rather difficult. We decided that all the men should move round two places for pudding, meaning that any particularly incompatible pairings would only have to endure one course of awkward small talk before being whisked off.
One thing I haven’t mentioned so far is that there was also a wild card in this scenario. One of Ed’s friends had had to pull out at the last minute. I was in communication on Bumble at the time with a guy I had met several years previously so on a whim asked if he would like to join and he very sportingly agreed. With the seating plan sorted and the food in the oven, our guests began to arrive. I can only compare the first half an hour of the evening to a twelve year olds’ school disco but with a slightly classier assortment of crudités and humus rather than party rings and sausage rolls. The room was unintentionally and awkwardly split - boys on one side and girls on the other. This was only intensified as people arrived; they were greeted by a barrage of names from a receiving line of the opposite sex before retreating to their own trenches.
I have to confess that I made a rookie error in the opening minutes of the game that would cost me greatly throughout the match…. As unknown male after unknown male arrived, I welcomed them fleetingly before rushing off to ensure that the beans weren’t boiling over, the sausage lattice wasn’t burning, and that everyone had drinks. It was only once we ushered our guests into the kitchen that I realised I had no idea who was who in the procession of guys in black jeans, Argentian belts, New Balance trainers and chequered shirts. I’m pretty sure they were all called Harry, Archie or Fred in various guises but chances of me matching a particular Charlie to the right hair-swished individual were minimal. I used the necessity of plating the food to leave them to avoid the awkwardness of trying to guide them to the correctly named seats.
Once forced intermingling of the sexes had begun and everyone was a couple of drinks deep, things became a little less awkward. Conversation slowly moved on from who went to school with whom and which insurance firm each of the guys worked for. I even managed some quite interesting conversations with Fred/Charlie/Harry about how to tell the gender of a jellyfish and the decrease in the Japanese population due to the increasing popularity of porn. We couldn’t expect our guests to pass an enjoyable evening purely through the means of intellectual conversation though. As pudding came to an end we launched into a rousing game of ‘Good pants, bad pants’ – chanting at each person around the table in turn until they gave us a glimpse of their underwear which was met with either cheers or boos. Little did we know that we had a dark horse in our midst – it was only when we reached our last male guest and he revealed quite the most exceptional pair of boxers that he admitted he actually worked for a high end men’s underwear company – no insurance firms or property for him! Bumble Bae had proved a rather serious addition to the party and sat looking somewhere between disapproving and gently bemused by these antics. To give him his due though, he stuck the evening out and even gave us a glimpse of his waistband when severely cajoled.
As base as this game may sound, it had the desired effect and Ed’s gin supply was cracked into. At this point the evening becomes slightly hazey but I believe a game of Tune My Radio ensued, followed by some highly competitive musical statues. Rather than trying to impress the opposite sex with our maturity and eligibility, there seemed to be a party-wide regression as musical statues was made all the more challenging by combining it with the childhood classic of ‘the floor is lava’. It took several smashed glasses and a broken chair before the party itself began to break up – the purpose of the evening having been completely forgotten. The regression to childhood appeared complete when the opposing sexes left in the tribes in which they had arrived, giving the impression that each thought the other had the lurgey and must be avoided across the playground at all costs.
There was one exception to this, the ever focussed and determined flatmate Ed. Three of the female guests had opted to stay over rather than face the trek home to North London. One particular guest, Rosie, had caught Ed’s eye and he was thrilled to hear she would be sleeping on our sofa. Several gins later, it was only whilst brushing his teeth that Ed realised Rosie could be the girl of his dreams. He didn’t have a moment to lose, he must act now; electric toothbrush still whirring in his mouth, he rushed down the stairs two at a time and flung open the living room door. Alas, too late, Rosie was asleep. Dejected, but with what were by now exceedingly clean molars, Ed retreated bathroom-wards.
Ed and I nursed our rather sore heads to work the following morning before heading to our respective homes for the weekend. It was only when we returned to the flat on Sunday night to be met with the kitchen’s detritus and to learn that our banging tunes had managed to fuse every plug in the house, including the fridge and freezer which had subsequently defrosted, did we decide that romance or none, it had been a pretty cracking party! Whilst the lack of snogs or wedding invitations does suggest the evening wasn’t a resounding success, word did reach us that two of our guests had bumped into each other on a night out and shared an impassioned D floor snog so our efforts hadn’t been entirely in vain.