A brief history of Professional Protege

(cont from yesterday…) And so to the pub. There I bumped into a bloke I hadn’t seen in several months. To be completely transparent with you, I hadn’t seen this particular Professional Protégé of my mother since she’d corralled me into a disastrous double date with him last year.

There is neither space nor time, tonight, to take you through the chequered history of my mother’s (attempted) involvement in my romantic life. This particular case, however, was a beauty. I’d initially met Professional Protégé – my mother has many – a year or two earlier, when she insisted I take him to lunch on the grounds that he had just moved to London and had no friends. I was not surprised at all to discover, at our lunch, that he was in fact going to an extremely friendly church with a wonderful support network and a much-envied social calendar.

He was a very nice guy, but the lunch wasn’t interesting enough for either of us to attempt to stay in touch. So it was pretty weird when, almost a year later, my mother told me she’d invited him to my birthday party. And even weirder when he came. He actually brought a friend too, and I think I must have been secretly impressed by the sheer bravado with which he approached the situation because I somehow ended up agreeing to my mother’s next diktat, which was that I go out for drinks with the two of them.

What happened that evening, I’ve never been able to satisfactorily explain. As we know, I’m not the shy retiring sort, and my lovely childhood friend Josie, who had agreed, enthusiastically, to come along on this curious double date, can usually talk me under the table. But nothing had trained either of us for the verbal blitzkrieg Professional Protégé and his friend had in store.

These guys were conversational muggers. What seemed, at the start of the evening, to be a charming, post-work ebullience turned out to be all-out assault and battery. They talked to each other, for each other, over each other. They talked fast, loud and without pause for breath, let alone inconvenient interruptions from their dates. When I finally crowbarred in a question around the 51^st minute my voice sounded like someone else’s – as for Josie, the words “G&T” were the last I heard her speak all night.

By halfway through the evening it was evident that both gentlemen had forgotten all about our presence at the table, and were now engaged in some sort of ritual talk-to-the-death. I was mortified for Josie, who had travelled a considerable way for what must have been one of the worst evenings of her life.

So if I looked twitchy when I met Professional Protégé in the pub, it was because I was still suffering PTSD flashbacks. But he’s a nice guy, and you can’t fault his enthusiasm, and before long he had invited me over to his table. And introduced me to Boot Boy… (cont. tomorrow)