My failed romance with Mobile Bae made me realise that when it comes to finding love I cannot leave my romantic fate in the lap of the gods, or more accurately, in the lap of my mother. So I have done what any millennial would do, I have turned to Tinder. After a great deal of non-discriminatory swiping and awkward cyber small talk… I now have a date this weekend with Simon, a local goat farmer.
My upcoming date with Simon made me think back to my singular past experience of releasing a man from the comfortingly removed virtual-space of my phone. My flatmates and I had decided to have a dinner party to celebrate finishing our finals. As the day of the party arrived we realised our numbers of girls far out-weighed that of boys. We decided that Tinder was the only logical solution to this problem. An hour of manic swiping and frantic typing later, we had managed to convince Xavi to join us for dinner.
Now, we weren’t finishing our four-year degrees having learnt nothing. We had taken our parents’ warnings on board of the dangers of talking to strangers so had arranged to meet Xavi in the local pub first… just to check he didn’t come wielding an axe or with suspiciously large laptop-sized pockets. Like all good hosts, we delegated the cooking to our other guests and hurried down the road to meet our mystery man. With a name like Xavi and a very Mediterranean looking Tinder profile, we had high hopes.
Eventually the door opened and in from the night walked our not-as-tall-as-his-picture-suggested, dark, Greek stranger. Since taking his photos, what Xavi had lost in hair, he seemed to have made up for in width. As we exchanged initial formalities it also became clear that Xavi’s English wasn’t quite as fluent as our earlier flirtatious cyber repartee had suggested. Xavi didn’t seem to be concealing any weapons though, and our TV wouldn’t have fitted in his Sainsbury’s carrier bag, so we got some shots down him for Dutch (or rather, Greek) courage and marched him back to meet our other guests.
Aware that he was attending a dinner party, Xavi had very politely bought his own bottle. This was, however, a bottle of tequila. We offered Xavi a glass of wine but he seemed keen to stick to his spirits, which he drank by the tumbler. In my sheltered upbringing, I have never before seen tequila drank as an accompaniment to a meal but I saluted Xavi on his dedication to the party. Maybe the format of the evening had got lost in translation but it was only when we sat down to eat that Xavi mentioned he had actually already eaten and didn’t really want anything else but was quite happy to watch us eat.
As the evening progressed, the tequila and Xavi’s grasp of the English language diminished. It is unsurprising that playing drinking games in a foreign language when intoxicated proved challenging for him but once again Xavi must be applauded for his participation. He even offered to teach us some Greek games. I’m not sure that the finer details made it through the language barrier but not all of our guests immediately took to his game, which largely seemed to involve snorting tequila.
As Xavi’s 75cl bottle of tequila came to an end we felt our social experiment probably should too. With a sincere-sounding promise to get in touch with Xavi when I next found myself in Corfu Town, we bade him good night. Xavi has set the Tinder bar pretty high; I’m excited to see how the Cumbrian goat farmer will compare to our tequila-snorting Corfiot…