“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.” - 1 Corinthians 13:1-3
And so we have done it – you and I, my dear reader. We are coming to the climax of the story now, and what a climax! Some of the biggest twists and turns in our story are still to come. You may already guess from St Paul’s wonderful introduction that the theme of this chapter will be love. As long as humanity has existed, it has been searching for love. From time to time, some of us even manage to find it. As I sat in Andy’s garden on a peaceful day in July, my eyes slowly filling with tears when Matthew and Molly said “I do”, I began to feel that the time had come for me to find my own love.
Several months of lockdown had passed by the time that July day came around. The restrictions were easing week by week, although our gathering the night before the marriage ceremony, a sort of impromptu stag night, was still technically illegal. I remember how awkward and tentative it was when we first sat around the table in Ben’s garden, estimating the distance in our heads. Was it 1.5m? Was it 2m? I had my mask on to begin with, and only when I realised nobody else had theirs that I took it off, with a little bit of embarrassment. A couple of hours and beers later, when we decided it was a bit too chilly to stay outside, we conveniently overlooked the fact that there were more of us than was permitted by the restrictions at the time. We didn’t care. We had not all seen each other in the flesh since Andrew’s birthday party some four months earlier. It felt like four years.
Now I’m sitting in the garden of one of the Greenview pastors as the music begins to play and Matthew and Molly do a little dance down the “aisle”, meaning the space between the rows of garden chairs. They are now husband and wife. This moment had seemed all but impossible in the months after they had first met, when their relationship was so fragile and tempestuous. How could something so flawed and flimsy now seem rock solid? The answer is painfully simple: with man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.
I’d already had a Tinder account for a while by this point, and all my adventures with it had been entirely fruitless. Now I returned to the endeavour with renewed enthusiasm. It wasn’t only the edifying and inspiring effect of Matthew and Molly’s wedding that drove my effort. The all-persvasive atmosphere of global catastrophe which governed everyone’s mood in the summer of 2020 also played its part. I thought to myself that the end of western civilisation might a bit more bearable if at least I wasn’t alone. But there was one more star in this constellation of factors. After three consecutive months of playing with resistance bands for one hour daily, I had developed a bit of muscle. Now I caught myself from time to time coming in or out of the shower – a bit of chest, a bit of shoulder, a bit of back? When I weighed myself at the end of the first lockdown, I’d put on almost 5kg of beef. I had never looked or felt so good before in my life. With all of the above driving me forward, I got to work. Almost as if to signal divine approval, the matches suddenly started coming in thick and fast. By early September I already had my first date arranged – Sophia, the urban planning masters student from Washington DC. I took her to Brel. It was too busy and too short notice to get a table in the garden but they still gave us a beautiful spot. We had a beer each, took a food menu and decided not to get anything. I told her I would take her to an ice cream place afterwards. This was my trump card - remembering the gelatto parlour that Steve worked in on Great Western Road. I fumbled things a bit because I couldn’t figure out the way inside, but she didn’t mind. I had paid for the drinks in Brel so she decided to pay for our ice cream. We had already spoken so much about politics by that point – it was 2020 and I wanted to know her opinions about the presidential election that year – but I could not help wading in deeper. As we discussed our ice cream flavours I decided to mention Boris Johnson’s gag about Tim Tams, because I could not think of anything more interesting. I took her to the Kelvin Walkway, the section that goes from Kelvin Bridge subway station to the back of the Botanic Gardens. We spoke about Spanish, and then Mexican immigrants. I asked her if it was true that the USA did not have an official language, and she said yes. By the time we came out of the Botanic gardens at the top of Byres Road – we had already done a loop through most of the West End – I asked her if she wanted another beer. She said no. The conversation was starting to dry up and I was tired. I told her that I would need a coffee, and so we stopped off in Tinderbox on the corner of University Avenue. From Tinderbox we walked to Kelvingrove Park, up the hill to the big statue of that old general whose name nobody knows – he fought in Egypt or whatever. By this point we have both entirely ran out of things to say. We sat on the bench, looking out at the sunset. She complained that she was cold, and eventually we started making our way home. We parted at the bus stop, and she told me that she wants to plan the next date – perhaps sometime in the middle of next week. The day came, I followed up, and she told me that she doesn’t really want to see anyone because she will be too busy with her masters. I didn’t know if she was lying or not, but I tried not to take it personally regardless. That’s the first date.
Shortly after there was the Turkish-Cypriot. I told her that I loved her chunky legs, and she agreed to meet that very same day. This was a terrible mistake, for we very soon discovered that we had nothing else to talk about. She told me that she was doing a master’s in gender studies. I asked what her dissertation would be about.
“I’ll be writing about internalised misogyny,” she replied, but because of her strong accent I couldn’t understand what she was saying at first. I simply stared at her blankly.
“Do you know what that is?”
“Do I know what is what?”
“Internalised misogyny.”
I paused, and thought very hard about how to answer this question, not having the slightest clue what she was actually saying.
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“You’ve never heard of internalised misogyny?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
The encounter went entirely downhill from there, and I soon found myself, in desperation at the silence between us, asking her what she knew about the civil war in Cyprus. I don’t remember what she said, or anything else that we said for we remainder of the date, until our last words to each other.
“If you don’t want to do this again...that’s okay, I won’t take it personally.”
“That’s okay, me neither.”
Next came Amelia, the angry Polish biochemist. She was very self conscious about her weight – she insisted that I needed to know that she was a bit fatter in real life than in her pictures and she needed to be sure that I still wanted to see her knowing this. She wanted to go to the Necropolis, and this was very appriopriate as the mood of our date was like two cousins visiting the grave of a deceased relative. There was a kind of impenetrable bitterness simmering through her whole conversation, until it finally boiled over.
“I have a question...”
“Yes?”
“That thing on your profile about Jesus...”
I thought I was being very witty with the Tom Petty reference, joking that I was looking for a “good girl who loves Jesus, horses, and America too”. It wasn’t overtly evangelical, but a nice conversation starter. Well now the conversation had started.
“...yes?”
“Are you some kind of religious freak?”
I was positively speechless. It wasn’t just what she said, but the venom and the hatred seeping from her voice when she said it. The date was over in that moment – there was really no coming back from this, and thankfully we were almost back at her house anyway. Out of sheer politeness, I held out the olive branch in the end when I offered to meet again. Unsurprisingly, she declined.
My next encounter was with Jocelyn, the Canadian librarian. A vicious and unstoppable torrent descended on the city just before we met, and when she showed up at our agreed spot, in front of the City Chambers, her hair was dripping and her leather jacket glistened with drops of rain. It was a dramatic introduction but it made for an easy conversation starter. We headed down towards Glasgow Green. I think I had wanted to take her to the People’s Palace without realising that it was still closed due to Covid restrictions. Instead, we walked through the Green. When we came to the giant obelisk in the centre, she asked me what it was. In a brief moment, images of the George Floyd riots from earlier that summer flashed before my eyes, with the spillover that came to these shores and the consequent discussions about decolonisation and historical justice – Rhodes, Nelson, Colston. Millions of people cooped up in their houses staring at screens all day, all primed and ready for a spark – three months of boredom, then three months of rage.
“I don’t know. It was probably built for some dead white racist. Most of the statues in this city were.”
I don’t know why those words came out, but I often found myself woke-fishing my dates like this. Why? Because it’s a first date, not Question Time. I want to have fun, I don’t want to have to compare you to ISIS because you want to destroy historical monuments.
The conversation flows rather smoothly, more than any of the previous ones. She’s easy going and gregarious, but with a darker edge that’s hard to define – a bit grungy? The time comes for a second coffee and I threaten to take her to Tim Horton’s as a joke. We go to Café Nero instead and the plan starts taking shape for a second date. Success at last! She wants to go and see Tenet, the new Christopher Nolan film. The one positive memory I have from what is about to unfold is another one of those unexpected blessings of the pandemic which will likely never come around again – cinema tickets for a fiver. I was such a fool to not make the most of this once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.
The film is probably the worst that Christopher Nolan has ever made: too complicated to be enjoyed as an action film, and too fast-paced to be enjoyed as sci-fi; the lunch scene where Michael Caine explains the mission to the protagonist is so comically convoluted that it could be an SNL parody. The most interesting moment comes when Kenneth Brannagh pulls out his belt as if to hit Elizabeth Debicki. Jocelyn rapidly leaves her seat, and pretends that she needs to use the bathroom. While she’s away, the scene de-escalates and in the end nothing violent actually happens on screen, but the moment has already happened. At the time I found the gesture mildly endearing, a moment of vulnerability. What happened afterwards suggests the opposite: she was fleeing from the possibility of appearing weak. She could not permit herself to be seen showing emotion, and it was this fake strength and hardness that she had to make use of when she dumped me 48 hours later. In the grand scheme of things, this was a rather insignificant moment, but it really bummed me out. I didn’t have the chance to find out how long it would take me to get over Jocelyn because larger forces were at play.
In the summer, while the easing of restrictions was being announced, Chancellor Rishi Sunak unveiled his disastrous Eat Out to Help Out policy, which almost single handedly triggered the second wave of the pandemic. To have worked in hospitality during the month of September is to have witnessed an unforgettable sociological phenomenon. The bodies of the first wave of Covid victims were not cold in their graves when millions of people crowded into cafes and restaurants on select days of the week, all for a £10 discount on their bill. A large portion of whatever faith in humanity I still had by September 2020 was washed away by that terrible month. As the weeks passed, the case numbers ticked up and up and up until new restrictions seemed all but inevitable.
The return to lockdown did not just have an impact on my dating life. At some point in those hopeful summer months, when it briefly seemed as if we had already defeated Covid by simply sitting at home for a few months, I emailed the priest at Holy Cross parish to ask if I could sign up for RCIA. Messaging girls on Tinder might be complicated and daunting if you’ve never done it before – messaging a priest is a completely different game.
How do I even start? Dear...Father? Dear Father? Why does that sound so Victorian? I know that in Poland priests have a real stick up their butt about honorifics, but maybe here they’re more relaxed about it. How about the good old “to whom it may concern”. Yes. Maybe the priest doesn’t read the emails, maybe he has a secretary.
All in all, I spend a good half hour staring at my screen, reading and rereading everything over and over again until I’m sick of looking at it, and I finally hit send.
Later in the evening, the reply comes:
Dear Jan,
It’s wonderful to hear from you. I will have a word with my RCIA team.
God bless,
Monsignor Bradley
Sent from iPhone.
Of course, almost immediately after this exchange we are plunged back into lockdown and nothing more can happen. Though I have no idea, the long wait is only beginning.
This is a serial fiction project, published with Ross Anderson at the Broken Quill. I’m just going to stop pretending that it’s published fortnightly - you know that it’s not.
Peace xox