I just went on the weirdest date. The guy was a nice enough chap, but he spent almost the entirety of dinner talking about feet. At first I was fine with it – I’ve got nothing against feet at all – but it got to the point where I had to question whether he was actually familiar with any other topics of conversation.
It started with an in-depth account of his uncle’s plantar fasciitis, before progressing into a lengthy comparison of various types of arch support insoles. That was where he started to lose me since I didn’t really have a whole lot to weight in with, aside from a rotation of ‘mm-hmm’ and ‘right, right’.
I did start to think, around that point, that the guy might be some kind of foot specialist. Cheltenham isn’t known for having a higher proportion per capita of podiatrists, as far as I know, but of course it’s still possible to end up on a date with one. Just as I was going down this train of thought, though, he dropped his only concession to having a life beyond feet by telling me that he worked in IT.
He promptly returned to his favoured topic by way of a fairly bold move: an explanation of how to treat toenail fungus. By this point, I’d completely written off the prospect of seeing this fellow again, and I wasn’t get the vibe that he was all that interested in me, either. I mean, he hadn’t asked a single thing about me, except whether I’d suffered ingrown toenails in my time (I haven’t).
So I was surprised when, as we were leaving, he told me with apparent sincerity that he’d had a really good time and would like to see me again. I decided to be forthright and asked him what had been good about our time together, to which he replied that we seemed to have a lot in common.
To his credit, he did agree to ‘foot’ the bill… there’ll be no further dates, though.