After the great success that was his meaty dinner, Jack chickened out and flew the nest - he headed back down to his parents house in the South of England before things started heating up in Edinburgh. A disappointing conclusion for the readers of The Dater Analyst but a relief for me, partially due to the fact that my friend escaped before he came to physical harm and partially because I was really starting to run low on poultry based puns. Fear not though, Jack's tale of lock-down loving inspired another reader to ring in with a dating drama of their own.
Enter Greg. Greg is an old friend from uni who has been spending lockdown in London. Greg has inadvertently appeared on the blog before - he was one of the four friends we flew out to meet in Antigua as they finished rowing the Atlantic and was therefore the catalyst to the wondrous holiday romance that was "Atlantic Bae". Rowing three thousand miles wasn't quite enough to get him his own feature on The Dater Analyst but luckily he has been upping his game since then to provide more adventurous and interesting content. You would have thought that spending thirty-six days at sea in a seven meter long, two meter wide boat with three other fully grown men would have prepared him perfectly for lock down but two weeks in and he was quite literally climbing the walls, pacing the flat and injuring himself whilst attempting back flips. He needed a new challenge and what better place to start than with his love life.
He downloaded all the apps, conducted a full scale nude photo shoot within the confines of his flat to nail the perfect pictures for his profile and began furiously swiping. He was surprised when before long he came across Sarah, a girl he had known many years ago in his misspent youth (this isn't any sort of euphemism - he had only known her socially, not biblically). Whilst time had turned Greg into a Salty Sea Dog, complete with tousled beard, calloused hands and questionable tan lines, it had been far kinder to Sarah. She had blossomed into an absolute honey. Greg scrolled through her profile. Not only was she a honey but she was also a hero, she was a nurse. She was the backbone of this country, one of the front line workers we have all been so ardently cheering for for ten weeks of Thursdays. One of the questions Sarah had answered on her profile was "A shower thought I had recently": "Not really a good time to be dating a nurse right now...". Greg pondered this particular statement before commenting on it "I volunteer as tribute". How gallant! Greg sounded particularly pleased with this opening gambit when he told it to me but I didn't quite get it. It turns out that this is an iconic line from the global blockbuster Hunger Games film. I've never seen it. Thankfully Sarah's finger is more on the pulse than mine (as you would hope from a nurse) and she understood Greg's cultural reference. From the version of events that I received there was absolutely no cyber small talk, Greg jumped straight in with "Stroll with a rucksack full of prosecco, game?"
"Game, meet me halfway?". Sarah clearly really was down with the kids, she had seen Greg's initial Hunger Games reference and raised him a Black Eyed Peas quote. Greg is nothing if not literal, and having received the coordinates of her exact location, he put his navigational charting knowledge to good use, discovering that the exact half-way point between the two of them fell conveniently in a park. Location and time set, Greg turned his hand to the vital part of the date, the prosecco. The pressure was on for this date, Greg did not want to be the person who inadvertently passed Corona onto a frontline NHS worker. He bought his four bottles of prosecco (yes, I thought four bottles sounded a little excessive for two people as well but Greg didn't see why I found this quantity in the least bit unusual). I cannot pretend to comprehend Greg's thought process but prosecco purchased, he returned home, donned a pair of rubber gloves and a face mask, and decanted two of the four bottles of prosecco into disinfected Chilly water bottles, placing them carefully in a rucksack before removing his PPE. I didn't quite understand why he couldn't have just wiped down the prosecco bottle but there you go.
Armed with his backpack of booze Greg headed for the park. He quickly spotted Sarah who he described to me as looking "beyond buff" in a summer dress. They waved at each other whilst standing two metres apart. Greg carefully removed his backpack, unzipped it and stepped a further two metres back for Sarah to retrieve her pre-packed and pre-sanitised Chilly bottles of prosecco. In hindsight it might have been less romantic but more practical for Sarah to just buy her own prosecco, too late for that now. The bubbles and the banter flowed freely as they caught up on the years of each other's lives that they had missed, how they were finding lock down life and what it was like working on a Covid ward in full PPE. Despite the challenging circumstances, the pair hit it off. Luckily Greg had carefully laid a follow up plan in the hope that this would be the case.
As they finished their first drink - their first drink being a bottle, not a glass, a bottle of prosecco each, Greg realised the sun was sinking lower in the sky. If you cast your mind back to the beginning of this post I mentioned that Greg had been literally climbing the walls of his flat as he struggled with the confines of lock down. On one of these excursions he realised that it was actually quite easy from their garden wall to jump a small gap onto a staircase which led up to the roof of the building. From there it was possible to watch the sunset with a view out over the City of London. Even better, the roof had complete privacy as none of the surrounding flats looked directly onto it. At the time of his discovery, Greg had thought that this would make an ideal date location so as the pragmatic and forward thinking nutjob that he is, he had immediately gone online and purchased an official "No Entry" sign. He attached this to the staircase to ensure that if he did ever want to take a date up there, he would not be disturbed by any of the building's other residents.
The day had come, he had just such an occasion to play his trump card and socially distantly court someone with his romantic vista. When Greg wasn't busy repackaging prosecco pre-date, he had also managed to move two blankets and two sets of cushions out of his flat, over the gap beyond their garden wall, up the fire escape and onto the roof. I can only assume that the pre-mentioned prosecco PPE had been worn for this exercise too. Greg thought of everything, he had teed up his flatmate who, upon receiving a message that things were going well and that the pair would be returning to the flat for phase two of the date, nipped up to the roof with a speaker and a bucket full of ice for their remaining beverages. I mean, I think I need to take some date planning tips from Greg, this sounds like it was an absolute masterclass in wooing and romancing.
The plan worked perfectly, Sarah made it safely onto the roof and comfortably ensconced onto their separate blankets they whispered sweet nothings as they watched the sun go down. I guess that more accurately, they probably had to say the sweet nothings quite loudly - what with the ambient background music I imagine it would have been quite difficult to hear a whisper over the two metre void between them. Nevertheless I'm sure it was very romantic. Eventually, though, nature called. By this point they were nearly two bottles of prosecco down respectively so I'm quite impressed that needing a wee hadn't been an issue up until this point. Not wanting to ruin the mood, Greg nipped off behind a nearby chimney stack to relieve himself in private. Mission accomplished and deadly four storey drop off the roof avoided, he returned to his date.
Shortly after they heard a shout coming from behind them. Now, I don't know what the words were that were shouted absolutely verbatim but I believe it was something along the lines of "Oi, you f***ing paedo, what the f*** do you think you're doing, how f***ing sick are you? We saw you, standing on the roof with your f***ing dick in your hand looking in my daughter's bedroom". Sarah and Greg were rather surprised, who was this man and what on earth was he talking about? Then things slowly started to click into place in Greg's somewhat inebriated brain. He knew that the part of the rooftop they were sitting on was completely secluded but he had been too focussed on managing to pee without falling off the roof to think to check which flats looked on to his choice of al fresco lavatory. It transpired that it was the neighbour, rather than his daughter who had been in her bedroom at the time so no children were actually traumatised in the incident but as far as the neighbour was concerned, the intent was there.
It was clear that there had been a misunderstanding but it was going to prove challenging to explain this to Greg's rather angry neighbour. The angry neighbour was also coming unnervingly close to breaking the two metre social distancing parameters so Greg decided the best course of action would be to apologise profusely and beat a hasty retreat, Sarah quickly following two metres behind.
Once safely on solid ground and out of range of the neighbour Greg explained what had happened. It was an entirely understandable mix up but unsurprisingly, accusations of pedophilia do have an ability to rather put a dampener on the mood of a date. After a fond wave from two metres away, Sarah headed home. Alas, Greg has not heard from his Nurse Bae since.