First date

"Fancy meetin at 7ish at...Hotel?"

Sarah's text arrived while I was busy on a call with the estate agent, and it was a while before I noticed it. It did give me a little lift, however.

For the rest of the afternoon, I kept looking at the time, trying to estimate how long it would take me to drive all the way out there. Too long, I reckoned, to allow me sufficient time to go home, shower and change, and still get there by 7. So I left work not too early and drove straight there. The trip took just on two hours, including a quick stop at the motorway services.

I arrived 20 minutes early and went immediately to the bar and sat down. Realising it would be rude of me to interrupt our date later to phone my son to wish him good night, I called him while I waited. He's fine. They were at N's parents place. They're moving quickly, I thought - he's already taking her home to meet his parents!

At 5 to 7, another text arrived. "Where r u?" She was prompt. A good sign.
"In the bar"
"Well I am in car park, sorry I don't do walkin in star on my own an thought we were meetin in car park?"
What, I wondered, made her prefer to meet me in the car park, rather than just walk in to the bar and meet me there. But I walked out and met her at her car. We hugged like old friends and walked back into the bar.

Sarah is heavier than I imagined from her pictures. More generous in the hips and thighs. And she knows it because she wears a huge ankle-length brown skirt over a pair of high-heeled boots, and a white long-sleeve woollen jumper. If this was her dating outfit, I wasn't impressed. She ordered coffee, me a J2O. I paid and we sat down to chat. Mostly we spoke about her job. She briefly asked about mine, but only for a couple of minutes. I asked about her daughter, and for most of the rest of the evening, that was the subject of conversation.

After about an hour we got a table in the restaurant, and while I picked at a passable lasagne, she went for a second helping at the carvery. Still the conversation drifted around her family, and her job. She appeared to be uncomfortable talking about her ex, or her feelings. I briefly probed at her reasons for joining an internet dating site, and discovered that she knows two people who have met long-term partners through the site, and decided to give it a go.

We left just before 10, and hugged again in the parking lot. I made no attempt to kiss her, and neither did she. We went our separate ways. On the way home I filled the fuel tank, bought a wank mag and put a Gary Moore CD on. Loud. Once in bed, tiredness overcame any thoughts of unrequited lust, and I fell asleep quickly.

On reflection, Sarah and I will, I realise, never be more than friends, if that. There is no spark whatsoever. Neither of us cracked a joke the entire evening; we barely even smiled. An observer might have thought we had just come from a funeral. I think she is too wrapped up in her own fierce independence and her need to care for her family. That is, rightly, her priority, but it consumes her to the point that she leaves precious little time or energy for herself. She has not dated in a long time, and I think she has forgotten how to enjoy herself. We have little in common, and even when I made an attempt to start a subject she knew something about, she interrupted, saying that she didn't have time to keep up to date.

She admitted to being scared, but could not describe why. I get the feeling that, even if we both wanted to take things further, it would take months before she pushed the fear back far enough to let me into her personal space, before we became lovers.

Oh well. C'est la vie. It's a shame. She's a nice person, but it wouldn't work.