Worst Date Topics 2

My Accusers

My criminal record is fairly beige. By that I mean that I don't have one, despite a brief and wholly unoriginal foray into stealing road signs when under the influence back at University.

I therefore generally expect the same from those around me. I don't tend to hang around in crack dens or forge meaningful penpal relationships with convicted killers so expect a uniformity of good behaviour from my friends. This rule also applies when enduring a first date with a newbie.

A while back, I went on a date with a seemingly normal, albeit slightly irritating, guy who didn't seem to show any signs of a criminal past. He didn't carry around the carcass of a recently slaughtered kitten and neither did he offer me heroin at any point in the evening.

It was a pretty uneventful date. He was a nice enough guy but had the habit of speaking as if he were scripting some piss-poor ITV documentary about the decaying state of modern society (e.g. 'We're living in an increasingly fast society so these days people want everything fast. Fast food, fast news and even fast relationships...yawn).

Oh and plus he wore an earring.

Anyway it wasn't awful enough for me to totally hate him plus I wasn't sober enough to not end the date with a brief, unsatisfactory kiss goodnight.

The day after, he invited me to go away with him and his friends to Brighton for the weekend. Now I'm not known for my slow pace when it comes to this sort of thing but even this was deemed as too fast in my books. Friends, weekend away, already? Really?

I politely declined and it wasn't until a month or so later that I agreed to go on a second date. It was a mistake. All of the things which had annoyed me before were amplified this time. The general, unnecessary comments on 'current affairs' ('I just think the media doesn't always show us the full picture at times') or the weird transatlantic accent that made him sound like Mark Ronson's even more obnoxious younger brother. It was all wrong.

The date ended luckily, as at one point I feared it never would, and a request for a third followed soon after. I sent a polite, if slightly wimpish, 'I don't think so' sort of text back. What I received in return was a bizarre 7-message long diatribe that I sadly deleted. I can therefore only remember portions.

It was fairly insane, which is the main thing you need to know. There were lots of badly worded Hallmark statements about how important love and trust was in this day and age and other hugely unwarranted remarks about disappointment and expectations (after 2 bad dates!).

But then things got really weird.

He started to say that he wasn't on his best lately so feared I hadn't seen the full picture. The reason for this was down to the crime he had been falsely accused of. He spoke of it in such an off-hand manner. As if he might have forgotten to wear his watch one day and blamed it on, oh you know, that crime he was falsely accused of.

He went on to say about how his life had been disrupted by the 'accusers' who had plagued him of late. My mind was obviously racing at the possibilities. He didn't go into any description of what the crime actually was which was infuriating.

Intending to ignore the sheer insanity of the text novel he had sent I couldn't resist the chance to find out more.

I believe I texted something back as plain and lazy as 'what crime?' but he sent back another diatribe, refusing to go into description.

What had I kissed? A paedophile? A rapist? A child murderer? A zoophile?

If there were a group of accusers it must mean he had done it more than once or done it to a group of people. All of these questions only served to frustrate me even more. How dare he dangle something as tantalising as this in front of me and then refuse to divulge the juicy bits?

Anyway, I'd not thought of him for a while until one day, while walking down Tottenham Court Road I heard my name called. He was standing behind me, eating a pizza slice. I only mention this fact as a clump of said slice was stuck to his teeth for the entire conversation, making it hard for me to concentrate on anything but that.

We shared a short, inane catch-up which was only cut short by me semi-pleading for him to let me go to whatever plans I had made. It happened once more, a while after. He was moonlighting at a bar and we bumped into each other outside. He suggested we go for a drink at another time and a part of me, the horribly curious part that once stuck a button up my nose as a child to see if it would fit, wanted desperately to say yes.

If we started dating for real I could finally broach the subject with relative ease. Christ, I could even ransack his flat for proof. But I declined the offer. I also physically restrained myself from shouting 'But what did you do??' as he walked away.

I'll never know what the crime was or even if he got away with it. If you're reading this possible criminal, please just leave a comment with some details. They allow some Internet access in prison these days right?