Lena Who?

I was recently armtwisted into writing up one of those ‘get to know you’ things for our bureau at work. While I love these when my friends email them to me, I’m not so sure about sharing my favourite colour [blue. Shh!] etc with colleagues. It threatens a breach in my work/life divide [yes I know I have really good friends at work. I decide where the divide is, ok?].

Well, one of the questions on the survey was “what’s your most embarrassing moment that you’d be willing to share?” My original answer was along the lines of “I don’t embarrass easily.” I may have to change that after Saturday night.

My friend tricia and I hosted a bunch of people for some British food (she’s a Scot). It was fun, and it was wildly amusing to see people examining mundane food items like pineapple and cheese on sticks, sausage rolls, and Eccles cakes as if they were extremely exotic fare. Imagine someone looking at chips and salsa as if it was monkey brains a la mode. However, people were very brave, and seconds were eaten, including of the marmite and cheese pinwheels (once Trish had labelled it ‘savoury’ after a couple of people had had traumatic experiences mistaking them for chocolate pastries (my poor friend R. accidentally tried one raw).

But to the embarrassment. I was chatting with friends, and a guy came over and introduced himself to our group: “Hi, I’m Peregrine.” [I have decided that hereon, I shall use aliases for everyone. Let me know if you have a request. Marie, you’re going to be “Erlene.”]

I said to Peregrine, “you look really familiar.”
He said “I should, we dated.”
Me “ha ha!”
Him, “No, really, we went out like four times.”

It was so awkward. I had absolutely no memory of this. I tried asking him questions to jog my memory, and no luck. My friend Arthur started giving him the third degree to prove him as an imposter, but no luck.

I tried to change the subject, “so, where do you work…er, these days…?”
He started telling me, then broke off after a minute or two: “You still have that look on your face, like ‘who IS this guy?’”
[self immediately attempted to rearrange expression to more polite one.]

Arthur: “Do you really date that much?”
Me: “No!”
Arthur: “Seems like you might not remember if you did.”