Another date with a younger man is not ideal. But as I only get asked out by men in their 20s nowadays — something to do with evolution, no doubt — I have decided to go with it. So, to drinks and dinner with a very handsome 26-year-old student. Actually, he is retraining to be something artistic after leaving banking, so he is not really a student. More a conscientious objector. But he is still very young. Technically, if I had had a baby at the same age my best friend at school did, I could be his mother.
Perhaps I have been watching too much Cougar Town but I thought this might be fashionable, that I would draw admiring gazes as I paraded around town with my young beau. Not exactly. At the first bar we went to, the maître d’ announced that it was ‘members only tonight because we are full’. This seemed a bit odd. But I laughed it off and we walked over the road to somewhere less posh.
‘Why don’t you sit down and I’ll get the drinks,’ said my polite young date. So I sat at an empty table by the door. Within minutes of him joining me, a flushed-looking waiter rushed over: ‘You can’t sit there.’ ‘Really?’ I said, because there was no reserved sign. ‘Yes. Other people have been waiting a long time for that table.’ And he practically threw us out of our seats. We slunk back to the bar where we huddled in a tiny space as revellers pushed past us, knocking us mercilessly around. I watched the table we had been moved from and no one was brought to sit down at it for a good ten minutes. We sipped our drinks nervously for a while before deciding to move on to the restaurant, where I hoped things would look up.
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