You know when you wake up and it's one of those blank days? One you know you won't remember? A day without weather. Your shower not too hot, not too cold, but somehow not quite right either - you're denied the usual Goldilocksing with the temperature dial that at least fills five minutes if your morning. Your cup of tea tastes 'fine', but not delicious. Your commute unremarkable but not amazing either. Your lunch is just the usual - you can't even remember what you had by 3pm but answer robotically 'soup and salad from Pret' when your partner asks later because that's probably what you ate. Everything just kind of happens, under a sky without colour. A Tuesday, maybe, in the teens of the month. Created only to be forgotten.
Yeah, well, today's date is that Tuesday.
Oh, we cannot blame Alex, a 29-year-old accountant and Charlotte, 27, a teacher. They can't help not being compatible, and having all the chemistry of a set of spam emails offering you free cryptocurrency. But while we're here we might as well wring what we can out of our last nerve. Here they are in full:
Read the date in full on the Guardian website (please make sure you do this to ensure the continued survival of both the column and this 'companion') and then let's meet back here to stare into space as a wall painted with apple-blossom white dries in front of us.
Alex on Charlotte | Charlotte on Alex
A Toploader reference in the GBD in the year of our Lord (by which mean Her Holiness Beyoncé Knowles) 2020. Who'd have thought it? Truly we are witnessing two Ford Mondeos blink headlights at one another as they pass on a busy B-road. It's raining.
"I am looking for a nervy, socially awkward man in joke shop specs and an ill-fitting suit who dunks his head in Brylcreem every morning and wears tight spandex under his clothes."
One of my closest friends is a tall woman and it is truly wild how people react to her sometimes. Women can be tall, get over it.
As regular readers will know, I am a stickler for punctuality - three minutes 'early' is my optimum arrival time - but there is something unnerving about arriving so early that you are even earlier than the other person who is, themselves, insanely early. But at least nobody was waiting around, so they could get right on with the date without delay.
Non-tall people say this to tall people. I have witnessed it. Even more frequently, it's the more inelegant and nowhere near as creative, "Ooh aren't you tall?" like a toddler pointing in wonder at a plane in the sky and saying "look, birdy!".
How he's just started tap dancing, my work outside of teaching, his promotion of Norwich as a tourist destination, films v books.
Resolutions/dares/tap dancing - these must be related so I'm classing it as a ✅. The only dance I am interested in learning is the Charleston. Do other dances even exist? No idea. I do not pick up the phone to rhumbas or American smooths. (I do like the quickstep actually, but I'd only chat to it on main, never my alt.)
Films v books/film review blog - must be a ✅. I had a film review blog briefly in the early 10s, alongside this one, when I was trying to decide which one I liked best. I don't go to the cinema a lot anymore - the popcorn's not what it was and people don't take kindly to my deep-sighing after each uninspiring trailer these days - but I do enjoy reading film reviews. I would be keen to read Charlotte's film review blog but only if it were one of those really pompous ones that says the word 'auteur' a lot and spends three paragraphs kvetching about how the inadequate lighting on one inconsequential scene completely negates the film's message. The film being Weekend At Bernie's.
As for films 'v' books - does everything have to be a DEBATE, two things in permanent opposition whether they like it or not? Chairs v tables! Lamps v candles! My blog v your blog (I win)!
New Orleans/Norwich as a tourist destination - oh that is definitely a match ✅
Bad move. The best thing to do when you're in a strange, manufactured situation is refer to it as little as possible. You *think* it's a useful icebreaker but really you're distracting from actually getting to know each other, from moving things forward. It's like in soap operas when a character starts filling in another character on what's been happening and as they recount the show's recent plots in as natural manner as their three years at RADA can muster, you realise how absolutely ridiculous it all sounds when spoken out loud - "someone got shot, we spent six months arguing over who got a half-share in a perplexingly popular bistro, someone's identity got stolen, oh, yeah, another shooting, so-and-so has amnesia and we're all glossing over that I once went to prison for murder" - that you start to question what you are doing with your life. It's like having the coverlines of a Take A Break Christmas special read to you over and over.
Sounds like a riot. I have, before, leaned over to a date and said, "I'm not feeling this; shall we just call it a night" and sprinted off to freedom, so I get this. Important to be honest rather than leave someone dangling.
Impeccable.
It's at this point you would kind of wish for a chopsticks malfunction or one of them vomiting into their soup, wouldn't you? Like digging a fingernail into the back of your hand during a conference call just to FEEL something.
A 'connection'. Maybe you should have called a telephone engineer.
The best thing about her was "she wanted to leave as soon as possible"? We have to stan this unbridled efficiency. Alex and Charlotte have never licked a butterknife clean after spreading Lurpak on their toast, have they?
"Very nice" - good news everyone, your dear old granny isn't dead! She's possessed Charlotte for the evening. Can anyone else smell boiled sweets and feel a sudden urge to push a cotton handkerchief up the sleeve of a a cardigan you're not actually wearing?
Then why the hell are you friends with them?
Ooh here's a head-to-head I would like to see: coffee evangelists v Star Wars throbbers.
Coffee. I mean, it's fine. But to some people it is... everything. And I don't just mean those people who claim they "can't start the day without my caffeine injection" or the ones who wear "Busy mom running on love, caffeine, and Prosecco" T shirts and post long threads on [BLANK] about how childless people should be conscripted into being nursery nurses. But those who try to force their coffee worship onto others, whose noses crease in displeasure at the mention of Starbucks or Costa, who will queue for hours in the cold for a thimble full of something that tastes like the bottom of an ashtray after a hen night, who will tell you that "decaf is a waste of time" and will bang on and on and on about coffee until it turns from something you never really cared that much about into your greatest nemesis - you want to see coffee banned at all costs, cringe at the mention of "Colombian roast", and purposefully mispronounce "espresso" just because you know it will make three streets' worth of people in West Hampstead spontaneously combust. You become, somehow, so extreme in your views that every other beverage you drink feels like a political act.
Or perhaps, like me, rather than allow yourself to be radicalised and turned into a keyboard warrior intent on the dismantling of the coffee industry, you just turn to Ben, or Matt, or Ollie, or whoever, and say: "Oh shut the fuck up; I'll drink what I like" and lose their phone number for ever.
Can you be assertive and mild-mannered?! Is, after all that, Charlotte herself Clark Kent?!
You could've just said "fine" and saved your other two adjectives for a game of Scrabble on your phone on the way home, Charl.
How deep "in there somewhere" do you reckon the better date was? Are we talking middle of a laundry pile deep, or Earth's core?
I would say "personalities" is a stretch here.
(JUST KIDDING.)
Eleven.
I got out of bed so sit at my desk. My hands are freezing. I have to write 5,000 words later today. And you give me this, a joint eleven. A five and a six. Two digestive biscuits. A jotter with paper too rough for a fountain pen. A corrupted .jpg. A free sample of aftershave in your magazine - it's not the one you like, it's the other one. Waiting at a roundabout for the traffic to clear. Chewing gum, two months past its sell-by.
Thanks.
Well, I'd maybe shout it over your shoulder as you pass - let's not waste any more of each other's time.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall. And then squashed.
* Alex and Charlotte ate at Pasta Nostra, London EC1. Fancy a blind date? Email blind.date@theguardian.com. If you're looking to meet someone likeminded, visit soulmates.theguardian.com. Liked this and want to make a one-off contribution to the blog's upkeep and also my spiralling heating bills? Consider supporting me on Ko-fi.My second novel The Magnificent Sons is out in May and I rely on preorders to make it successful. Find out how to do that and, then, please do so.
Or share the blog and get other people to do it. About the review and the daters: The comments I make are based on the answers given by the participants. The Guardian chooses what to publish and usually edits answers to make the column work better on the page. Most of the things I say are merely riffing on the answers given and not judgements about the daters themselves, so please be kind to them in comments or replies. If you're one of the daters, get in touch if you want to give me your side of the story; I'll happily publish whatever you say. Thank you taking part at least; I couldn't do it without you.