Bryn did text. It turned out my concerns about putting the wrong number into his phone were both characteristically irrational and unfounded. I have learnt that I tend to be rather all or nothing when it comes to dating - I either absolutely know I do not fancy someone or become rather infatuated. I don’t seem to have a mild indifference setting. Don’t get me wrong, by infatuation I don’t mean obsession. I don’t become some sort of nut job, scanning my clothing for a stray hair to be cherished as a keepsake or looking at wedding dresses on Pinterest. I do still have some modicum of self-respect. I stick to the weird set of dating rules that are universally acknowledged: no double messaging, no replying to messages that don’t have any questions in them, performing some complicated mathematical equation to work out the time frame in which it is appropriate to reply to their message based on the amount of time they took to reply to yours, the positioning of the moon and what your neighbour’s cat had for breakfast. I don’t get it, who came up with these rules, where are they written down in their original biblical form and why can’t you reply to a message either when you see it or when you have the time to, as you would with any other friend of acquaintance. Ok, so I may not agree with the rules, but I begrudgingly abide by them. Maybe infatuation isn’t quite the word – what I mean is, if I meet someone and quite fancy them then I tend to lose interest in dating apps. I’m very much a one guy kinda gal. I’m not saying that I know after one date whether someone is THE ONE, I would just prefer to give them a go and find out for certain either way before adding anyone else into the mix.
Anyway, I get off topic. As I said, Bryn did text. By my standards two days was a pretty long time to wait before messaging someone if you fancy them but I appreciate other people might not be as definitive in their thought process as I am so I cut him some slack. Plus it was a friendly message, he made an in-joke about something we had spoken about on the date and asked how I was. Even once conversation was established though, the messages weren’t exactly flowing. I got a response about every day or two. He then suddenly announced that he was taking a week’s holiday. He was picking up his parents’ campervan and driving it up to Scotland for a weeklong solo exploration of the highlands and islands. He said he would be in touch when he got back. Now, I’m all in favour of campervanning, solo travel, tech time outs and Scotland but I did think it was a slightly odd holiday location, especially as the imminent arrival of Storm Ciara had just been announced. Each to his own though, it was actually quite a relief being informed in advance that I wasn’t going to hear anything for a week and knowing that he hadn’t stopped replying because he had lost interest.
True to his word, a week later Bryn got back in touch. The trip hadn’t gone exactly to plan. He had picked up the campervan and got an hour up the M56 before the exhaust pipe fell off in the middle of the motorway. The RAC had to come and pick him up and a week in Scotland turned into a week at home in Wales. He was on his way back to London and wondered if I wanted to do something. Somerset House were running late night opening hours and there was an exhibition on mushrooms that he particularly wanted to see so wondered if I would like to join him. In my eyes both the proactivity in date planning and cultural suggestion made up for the slightly inconsistent texting patterns. An entire exhibition focussed on fungi may not have been my first choice of date, or even exhibition, but it showed that the man had artistic and cultural interests rooted in natural phenomenon, which was a positive. When we arranged the date I was actually in the throws of a particularly aggressive case of sinusitis but the date was four days away and I was sure that I would have recovered by then.
The day arrived and I had not recovered. The whole of my face was aching and the amount of snot I was producing was so disgusting it was almost impressive. I considered postponing the date but endless texting is not a natural aphrodisiac and prolonged periods between dates, no matter how much you fancy someone, can kill a romance stone dead. By this point it had already been two weeks since our last date and I was keen to keep the momentum up so decided to power on and carefully time dosing up on as many anti-congestion and pain-killing tablets just before I left the house, hoping that by the time I reached Somerset House the multiple medications would have started to set in.
This approach seemed to work and by the time I walked into the Lyceum pub opposite Somerset House I was feeling much better. If you do opt for an exhibition as a choice of date, I would recommend going for a drink first. It’s difficult to navigate the opening catching up part or getting to know each other part of a date whilst also walking around a gallery where you’re supposed to be focussed on drinking in and connecting with the artistic expressions around you. Gallery goes also seem to be both silent and snooty. Dating already makes me pretty self-conscious, so the added pressure of being quietly evilled and judged in my small talk topics by my fellow art-appreciators was a terrifying prospect. So we had a quick pint and chatted away first, catching up on Bryn’s less adventurous than planned holiday and reminding ourselves of why we had initially been interested in each other (for clarification, this bit was done internally, it wasn’t a verbal discussion).
From there we headed over to Somerset House where our mushrooms awaited us. I must applaud Bryn on a second excellent choice of date location. We walked into a floodlit and completely deserted courtyard of one of the most architecturally impressive buildings in London. After the bustle of The Strand the silence of the courtyard was total. Had this been a third or fourth date, or even the end of a second one, it would have been the ideal location for a romantic snog, or even a handhold, but it all felt a little soon for any of that. We headed into reception and Bryn said he might just nip to the loo before we went into the exhibition. This seemed like a good idea so I went to do the same. The inside of the building was as empty as the outside so we headed off down an echoing corridor in search of a toilet. I hadn’t banked on Somerset House being quite so woke though - it only had one enormous room of unisex toilet cubicles. By this point we had little choice but to both head in. Suddenly having the place to ourselves was no longer romantic but incredibly awkward. We opted for stalls as far away from each other as possible but in a cavernous chamber of a loo, no sound was left to the imagination. It was the most excruciatingly awkward wee I have ever done. Even six months into a relationship feels too soon and unsexy to hear a partner pee yet here we were, date two and emptying our bladders in each other’s company. There was no option but to make a joke out of it as we washed our hands next to each other and headed in search of the fungi.
It quickly became clear that an exhibition on mushrooms was about as weird as you would expect an exhibition on mushrooms to be. There were some very sweet drawings from various illustrated editions of Alice in Wonderland but other than that the exhibits included rather a lot of conceptual paintings, a video of a man sitting in a field dressed as a mushroom, a collection of every stamp that has ever had a mushroom on it and a burial suit made entirely out of mushrooms. In some ways though, the oddities of the exhibition were a bonus. We had a lovely time giggling at some of the more unusual pieces and pretending to look as transfixed and serious as the other attendees. I knew that we had recovered from the awkward wee encounter when Bryn wrote my name in a computer fungus simulation in the last room – who said romance was dead!
We exited through the gift shop and found ourselves on the terrace of Somerset House, looking out over South Bank and the London Eye. Bryn asked if I fancied something to eat. As prepared as ever, he already had somewhere in mind. We ambled across Waterloo Bridge and turned left, strolling along the river. From previous dining experiences around that area I was expecting a rather run of the mill Wahaca or Wagamama meal so was surprised when Bryn cut up a side street. I was even more surprised, having woven through the back alleys, when we reached our destination. We came out on a little street I didn’t know existed. After leaving all the modern architecture of the South Bank and the National Theatre behind, walking onto Roupell Street quite literally felt like stepping back a hundred years. We were suddenly on a street made up entirely of two story, terraced, brick houses with sash windows and brightly coloured doors. The inhabitants of the street coincidentally seemed to have developed a penchant for collecting vintage cars (I’m not sure if they had chosen to live here because of this or had started this hobby because of where they lived), meaning the road was lined with old models. There wasn’t a Tesla or Golf in sight to break the street’s magic. It looked exactly like a scene out of Peaky Blinders and apparently has been used as a set for the show on more than one occasion.
Our destination was the pub half way down the street, The King’s Arms. After my “Ode to the English Boozer” in my last post, The King’s Arms took the idea of a quintessential pub to whole new levels – it was pokey and crowded and wooden with an open fire and low three-legged stools as the only seating option. There was a surprise in store though. The backroom of the pub still had the traditional wooden beams, its walls were decorated with copper pan, coronation plates, black boards and old football scarfs but the aroma didn’t match the visual. The back of the pub had been turned into what appeared to be a very popular Thai restaurant. We put our name down for a table and headed through to the bar.
By this point my pharmaceutical cocktail was beginning to wear off. My face was starting to hurt and I could feel the snot starting to build up. Unfortunately this wasn’t the sort of snot you could hide by the occasional nose dab or a series of small subtle sniffs. It was that super thick kind of snot that doesn’t dribble down your nose but sits at the top and if left unattended, feels like it has blocked off your entire nasal airway and is slowly drowning you from the inside out. It’s so thick it almost gags you and alters your voice until you can no longer breath and speak simultaneously. At this point you only have two options: the first is to blow your nose which not only produces copious amounts of a substance unnervingly similar in colour and consistency to the eponymous character of the film Flubber, but takes you from being a reasonably attractive millennial to closely resembling an elderly retired military officer who carries a handkerchief in his breast pocket to frequently blow his disproportionately large nose which probably also has extensive hair protruding from it to match his bushy eyebrows and weirdly hairy ears. The second is to attempt to sniff your snot-cork back up. This is normally a full body movement and creates a sound similar to turning on a nutribullet without realising you have left a teaspoon in there. Neither is a particularly sexy option. I went for the latter and tried to time my sniffs for when Bryn was either as far away as possible or there was a peak in background noise.
My attempts were not successful though, when we got to the bar Bryn announced, “Oh look, they do hot toddys. It sounds like you’re just getting over something, why don’t you get one?” Hint taken. Unfortunately the hot toddy did not seem to have much effect. Not only was I phlegmy but I was also getting tired and it was clear that conversation topics were running thin – swapping podcast recommendations was fine but sharing board game recommendations felt like a real low point. Eventually our table was ready and we headed through. I must say, from what I could taste of it, the food was absolutely delicious. Things went from bad to worse though when my sinusitis was joined by my neurological disorder and my whole body began to shake. I suppose we were already sitting down so the situation could have been a lot worse – trying to navigate a mushroom exhibition with the disco jitters would have been an absolute minefield. I had also already mentioned my neurological disorder and its symptoms on the first date so it shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise. That being said, as happy as I am to talk about it, this was the first time I had actually started shaking on a date and now although totally compus mentus, my whole body was convulsing. In hindsight I could have handled it better but at the time I panicked and thought the best thing to do would be to just pretend it wasn’t happening, easier said than done when trying to eat noodles with chopsticks. To give him his due, Bryn did the same and didn’t comment on my shaking or the fact my meal now covered the majority of both ours and our neighbours’ tables.
He also mentioned over dinner that he had to be up at 4:00AM the next morning for a sauce sourcing trip to Amsterdam. Bryn had either clearly had the same views on prolonged gaps between dates killing the vibe and had committed to the second, however inconvenient, or he was trying to think of a reason to wrap this whole thing up pretty sharpish. Given that the end of a meal provides a pretty natural closing point to a date anyway I would like to hope it was the former and that the reality of his early start was just beginning to loom. Luckily by the time we had paid the bill the shaking had stopped so he didn’t get to witness the full wonders of me trying to walk with the disco jitters (as the name suggests I closely resemble a drunk middle aged man on the dance floor at a wedding). We walked back to the tube where the final nail in this romance’s coffin was the ending I try desperately to avoid on any date – the on-tube farewell. We had an awkward journey on the Victoria line, painfully aware of the looming farewell and the quiet, listening presence of the other travellers. Not only did we have to say goodbye on the tube but we also had to do whilst sitting next to each other. Eventually we got to Euston and had that rushed and weird sideways, pokey-shouldery hug before I got off. Funnily enough, after the strong performance from my one-woman nasal orchestra, there was no farewell snog this time. I was not particularly sad, I was tired. I may have not been at my best that evening but I also felt that we had run our natural course, even if I had been on my best possible form, I don’t think there was that much left for Bryn and I to talk about. He clearly agreed, neither of us have messaged the other since.