Mistaken meeting

Eventually I left the cold of Pacific Coffee, and walked up to Elgin Street. The club was shut and I'd drunk too much water, so I crossed over and was dithering about ducking into a bar to use the toilet when I felt someone looking at me. Over the street, a tall girl in a very short dress was looking at me. She smiled, and then spoiled the effect by tripping as one of her heels got stuck in a gap in the pavement.

I guessed she was smiling at somebody else, so I started blowing on my hands to warm them up - it's greviously cold out, or the icy wind from the Pacific is still cutting through me, and then the lady walked up to me and asked if I was Jason.

The only Jason I know is thousands of miles away, and probably at this point is swearing at a recalcitrant piece of a bicycle, or singing an off-colour song, off-key, so I had to reply in the negative, and off she went again. I had to admire that spirit: if I was going to meet a man I didn't know outside a horrendous faux-Italian diner, and I'd almost fallen flat on my face in front of him, I'd probably hide away for a bit.

Not that I go to meet strange men outside bars, you understand. If my wife-to-be got wind of that, there'd be hell to pay. If I was meeting strange men outside bars, that is.

Er.

After a few minutes, she must have found Jason, or at least a chap more broadshouldered than me and capable of lying about his name, or maybe it was Jason. I'm not going to call him a liar, whoever he is. It did feel odd for a moment for the two of them to go past me, as I realised that both "Jason" and me were dressed almost identically - dark trousers, pink shirt, scruffy hair - and that meant that I was busily checking him out while trying not to check him out.

Er.

Not that I was checking him out. I was just looking at his clothes. Honest.

Anyway, if there's one thing this has taught me, it's that if you stand outside a bar long enough wearing a pink shirt, a woman will appear and ask you your name. A more cold-blooded man than I would set about sabotaging blind dates.