Undercover Lovers

We sent two reporters to a speed dating event, read the hilarious results of their collision

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The Tab sent two reporters undercover to a charity Speed dating event at Hertford bar last week. Both reporters thought they were the only person writing, and they had a few things to say about each other…

 

Angus

 

Angus and his signet ring

I was a nervous wreck. I felt less like Flashheart (my speed dating login name) than Gary Glitter felt a champion of children’s rights. And with Raskolnikov-esque guilt weighing down on my shoulders I crept through Hertford’s gate, sighing. Creeping down to the bar, I peered to see what characters lay before me; what greeted me was a pastiche of the Beautiful and the Damned – Blues players, the President of the Union, the principal of Lincoln College; all the BNOCs from within a 2 mile radius had descended on Hertford Bar to revel in one-night-only of speed dating debauchery.

The room was rammed; love or lust or just excessive lynx heavily pervaded the air, and a few drinks helped loosen my tongue. I just had to make sure I didn’t come across as a psychotic hack. A crackle over the tinny speakers instructed us to our tables – I was a number on a table; this was it, I felt a surge of common feeling for Damian Lewis and Donnie Wahlberg about to be dropped with the 101st airborne over hostile Normandy.

An attractive girl sat down opposite me. My mouth moved before I could stop it: “So have you done this before?” No – Idiot! Of course she hadn’t – “Actually I got roped into doing this by my mate….” Ah excellent, we both don’t want to be here. It turned out that, let’s call her Ellie, was actually somewhat of an interesting character. She liked, as she put it, “to go large” – “I love Parkend and Bridge; I do geography so all that work and stuff is so boring…usually I can tell it’s been a good night when the scout peels me off the sofa of the JCR…I’m like oh God, not again! It’s so funny!” Funny indeed. Yes, this was going well.

In a moment of panic with my next date, I pushed the bowl of tangy cheese Doritos away from me lest the smell upset my notorious gag reflex. The busty blond opposite looked at me quizzically – was I making an innuendo? Was I suggesting she looked like she would like them? These thoughts threw me off and pretty soon I was talking about my historical interest in the siege of Stalingrad and the different theories about what tactics the Germans could have deployed to win; I wrestled my inner Alan Partridge back.

Meanwhile my friend Breddie Flowerman (name changed to protect his identity) was busy, in his words, “dominating”. I regularly heard his distinctive guffaw from the next room, but it seemed he’d met his match in the indomitable let’s call her Karina, whose opening few quips went like this:

“Mate I fucking cleaned up” – Breddie Flowerman

Karina: So what did you think of the last date?
Breddie: Yeah I thought she was fit.
Karina: Oh do you have an erection?
Breddie: No.
Karina: Oh, I’ve got a massive clit erection, can’t you feel it poking you in the face? [sic.]

My other chum Milo was delving into new territories of kink. The dominant voices on the telewaves asked us if we would “rather give up chocolate or sex?” Milo shouted “chocolate” whilst his opposite immediately shouted “sex”; it was obvious there was a grave mismatch here. Milo, in his characteristic awkward way, tried to save the situation by asking the lady in question if she would rather sleep with the Milky Bar kid, or a 7 year old Bob Marley? She instantly chose the 7 year old Bob Marley and the situation was redeemed.

A cute looking girl came and sat opposite me. Big Sister on the speaker system suggested we ask our partners which we liked more: cats or dogs…My new Aphrodite dived straight in with a three minute (date-long) anecdote about being chased around her house by a cat. The sexual tension was killing me.

The sexual tension was killing me

The awkward announcements from the tannoy system kept on coming; “Which is a better name, Mitt or Barack”; “Whose been your worst date tonight?”’ “Do you prefer crunchy peanut butter or smooth?”. But despite these, my nervous pre- and mid-date boozing combined to give yours truly a state of slight intoxication and euphoric joy that the problems of meeting nice girls had been solved by this brave new world of speed dating.

Others, however, were not sharing in my fervour, for it was now apparent that there had been a serious leakage of personnel, leaving gaps in the meticulously planned rotation system. This led to me being by myself for one round; but eager to get in the spirit of things I hunted around the room to find that the only other free person was a bloke. Why not? It’s the 21st century.

So I ended up having a speed date with John. He was a nice guy from Worcester and when I asked him what teams he played for he got very excited, almost too excited, leading me to ask – “are we talking about an actual team here or are we talking about a TEAM?”. He was equivocal. Some latent homoerotic tension had now been thrown into the mix of the fruity cocktail which speed dating at Hertford bar was turning out to be.

Angus and Jess (right), the ‘Hertford Hopscotch girl’ collide

A big tune from Pitbull came on the speaker system and I knew that this was my time. It was the last date of the evening…And there she was: she strutted towards me, a self-confessed ladette from Hertford. A member of the infamous Hertford Hopscotch Ladies Drinking Society – only last week they had apparently had a deadly 90% hit rate with a specially hand-picked group of Hertford Fresher boys – and she demonstrated her attitude by putting her hand atop her forehead giving a “sharking” sign. As we compared times for downing a pint of ale, I knew I was on to a winner. But “all good things come to an end” as that poetic soul Nelly Furtado once mused and the evening was drawn to a close.

Chase and Anna, our lovely hosts for the evening, assured us that there would be an LGBTQ event coming soon, and when I quizzed whether this would be Christian friendly I was met with an affirmative. Thus with Milo and I satisfied at the possibility of more speed dating soon (though in somewhat of a different guise) we waltzed away, leaving Breddie, who was now so inebriated that he seemed to be having an extended speed date with a pot plant. A couple of days later and our statistics had come through. A fairly solid performance if I say so myself:

Flashheart: 
Circled: Four people
Was circled by: 11 people
Mutually compatible with: Four people

Breddie Flowerman 
Circled: Five people
Was circled by: 11 people
Mutually compatible with: Four people

Milo Lawton: 
Circled: 19 people
Was circled by: Nine people
Mutually compatible with: Nine people

Jess

 

‘Speed-dating’ – what does that phrase conjure up? Horrible visions of bouncing between a series of brow-wiping, collar-tugging mini dates as though we’ve had electrodes attached to our trousers in a comic dance. Thus the only reason that I could have possibly found myself sitting on a cold Tuesday evening in the murky sub-realms of the sweaty Hertford bar for such an event was that ever-enduring and bullet-proof reason for anything: charity. That same word that makes people heli-ski in fur bikinis off Mount Kilimanjaro and swim the Atlantic in a rubber ring dressed as Elmo. All I can say as we feverishly fell on our free drinks as though half-delirious with dehydration, Kilimanjaro was beginning to look like the lighter option.

We can only apologise for the quality of Jess’ photo

We were all named and numbered like cattle and given a sheet of paper with a series of corresponding digits on it and off we tramped to our tables like men on death row. We were given three minutes to chat to our companion, sitting around a series of wonderfully juvenile snacks – cookies and crisps on paper plates, like a children’s birthday party. There was an excellent array of Oxford characters – floppy haired thespies sporting round tortoise-shell frames, the ‘S.R.C’ (Signet Ring Crew), and twitching physicists, to name but a few. Once our time was up we had to circle the person’s number on our sheet if we wanted to see them again – the event quickly becoming a hybrid between supermarket sweep and bingo.

Desperately trying to scramble up with as much dignity and panache as possible, the ladies pretended not to notice as the boys coyly circled your name or fiddled determinedly with their hair/shirt/etc to try and mask an obvious lack of circle-action. Every woman’s nightmare and insecurity quickly became wrapped up into that single damn geometric shape-our seventh circle of hell, if you like. My strategy of waiting until the end of all the dates to circle back-fired badly- was number 12 the dashing blond guy in the cashmere jumper smiling roguishly or had it been number 21? Had number 12 in fact been that morose grad student with bad breath?

Angus leant languidly on the bar looking shamelessly pleased with himself

I was spared several awkward conversation starters by a reputation which seemed to be preceding me by about three seats – in the form of our friend Katie who was happily regaling horror-stories from our crew dating society ‘Hertford Hopscotch’. This perhaps damaged my final ‘circle count’, but such was our celebrity status that at the end ‘thespie Angus’, commanding officer of the S.R.C., requested a (deeply ironic?) photo with the Hopscotch ladies….thanks Angus? He asked (in what he clearly believed to be an appealing tone) if we would divulge a few of our sconces but struggled to keep the leer out of his voice.

However, we all agreed that ten o’clock was too early to reveal any smutty details, especially as no attempt had been made to buy us drinks. As he leant languidly on the bar looking shamelessly pleased with himself, we exchanged looks of sheer disbelief but the barrage of raised eyebrows did little to dent his confidence. With that irritating floppy hair that is constantly being teased into shape by its owner, my friend and I quickly asserted that he was ‘that sort of boy’ to spend large amounts of time inspecting himself in the mirror, possibly interspersed with short bursts of braying to his mates on his iPhone.

For a Charity event it had attitude, it had bite- there was none of this namby-pamby, wishy-washy ‘its all a bit of fun’. Our sheets were sombrely collected in at the endlike school exams and we were informed that if we had both circled one another then we would be ‘put in touch’. My nexus inbox is still empty but I hold out some vain hope…..bloody Katie….

Scores

Circled: One person
Was circled by: Seven people
Mutually compatible with: One person