I scan the room, doing the mathematics nobody admits to doing.
Ten men.
I am, generously, attracted to three.
One is wearing a waistcoat without irony. Another looks like he might be here because he got lost on his way to a Wetherspoons curry club. And then there’s the wild card: a Chinese student who can’t be older than eighteen, to which no one has raised that it’s “30s & 40s night” while equally sidestepping the safeguarding concern.
I check my reflection in the blacked-out window. Average is all I see glaring back at me. Average height, average build, a little soft around the middle since the sabbatical became a lifestyle; I’m the kind of man people used to call “boy next door” although not since Britney last had a top ten hit. But the kind eyes help. Strangers tell me things in queues. A woman in Greggs once shared about sleeping with her boss’s wife while lining up for a vegan lattice.
Unfortunately, this is speed dating, not confessional, and what I mostly want right now is industrial air-con and a shirt the colour of camouflage.
I sigh and glance at the event host, a relentlessly chipper drag queen named Mercedes Bends, dressed head to toe in leopard print, with matching Bette Lynch hair, who looks like she runs on vodka Red Bull and healing crystals. She claps her hands together. “Okay, everyone, places! Let’s make some magic!”
Magic. Yes.
I came tonight with the sort of optimism normally reserved for lottery winners and labradors. In my head, speed dating was going to be a glittering carousel of possibility, a human pick-and-mix where somewhere between “semi-professional magician” and “accountant with a good pension plan” I’d stumble upon The One. I pictured fireworks, violins, perhaps even a story we could one day tell at our wedding — “We only had five minutes, but that’s all true love ever needs.”
In reality, of course, I’m wedged into a sticky chair on an overheated balcony, praying my deodorant has more stamina than I do. But still—hope dies hard, and I came prepared to meet my Disney prince, even if the universe had only packed me ten dwarves.
I look over the edge of the balcony to the bar below. At least there’s a practical escape route if it all gets too uncomfortable, albeit slightly extreme.
My first date is an IT Consultant called Gareth, 37.
“So, what do you do?” Gareth asks, leaning forward with the enthusiasm of a man who probably has very strong opinions about HDMI cables.
Here it comes.
The part where I have to explain my life in thirty-second soundbites, as if condensing forty-two years of awkwardness and mild trauma into a LinkedIn summary.
“I, um, work in finance,” I say automatically, though that’s not true anymore. “Well, I did. Took a step back recently. Bit of time off.”
“Burnout?” Gareth asks.
“Death of my father, actually,” I reply. Because why not drop a conversational anvil in the first thirty seconds?
Gareth blinks. “Right. Sorry.”
I force a smile. “It’s fine. I’m doing the whole self-care thing. Yoga, journaling, trying to find love in a bar that smells faintly of Jägerbombs. You know. Wellness.”
Gareth nods politely.
“And do you like gerbils?” he asks, as if it’s a perfectly sensible segue from parental death response.
“Gerbils?” I ask, my forehead turning into a scrunchy.
“Well, I have gerbils,” Gareth says, with the expression of a serious gerbil owner.
“Gerbils? Like plural?” I ask, wondering why I need this clarity.
“Yes, I have fourteen of them. But they’re all very friendly.”
“Oh good,” I faux-engage.
“Apart from Betty, but she can get anxiety during the winter months.”
I consider the over-the-balcony escape route, settling for mentally scrubbing Gareth off the list with three and a half minutes left to go.
Date two is Marcus, a 40-year-old property developer, originally from Windsor. He spends at least four and a half minutes talking about his buy-to-let portfolio and how “Brexit was actually a good thing if you knew how to play it right.” I spend four and a half minutes imagining Marcus being chased through the streets of Stokes Croft by his tenants with rolling pins following the latest rent hike.
