I am the gadfly of London. I interfere with the status quo. When I had matched with John on the app a few weeks before, he had been cheeky and funny. John seemed like a genuinely funny, intelligent man. So despite my general apprehensions about online dating and a series of previous mediocre experiences, I was excited to meet him.
Sign up to The Hook-Up and we'll slide into your inbox every week with all the latest sex and dating stories from Metro. We can't wait for you to join us! Granted, arranging our first date was a bit more challenging due to our conflicting schedules but eventually, we managed to pencil in a stroll around Hampstead Heath on a Saturday afternoon.
However, right from the get-go, all the awkwardness that we seemed to have skipped while texting hit us with both barrels when we met in person. We made some initial small talk β classic Britishisms, such as the weather, the lack of recycling bins, the screaming foxes in the neighbourhood. He did not.
Things only got worse when, about five minutes in, he revealed that he was a Just Stop Oil protestor. You do you, love. I asked him what drove him to Just Stop Oil, and he said it was all about challenging the status quo, leading us right into his modest Socrates comparison.
Throughout the walk β which lasted nearly two and a half hours β he asked me no questions about myself , and at points, it felt like I was listening to a podcast with no option to skip. Now that would have made the podcast analogy all too real.
