So, single again, my mind went back to internet dating. This time I gave Friends Reunited Dating a go.
I soon came across Angie from Liverpool. I have friends in Liverpool, so the I know the name of the station is Lime Street and that it isn't Crime Street. I've been to the Grand National several times as well and I do appreciate Scouse cunning.
As an aside, a group of friends and I were at Aintree for the Grand National and the IRA decided it was good sport to tell everyone that there was a bomb there. It ruined my day. We were evacuated from the Champagne guzzling members area to the centre of the course. After an hour or so it became apparent that nothing was going to happen that day, so we headed back across the fields in to Liverpool. A couple of 8 or 9 year old scallies, as I believe they are referred to, approached us and said 'ay, ay mister, give us your badge'. They already had a handful of badges which they could hardly hold, there must have been hundreds of them. Without thinking, we gave up our badges for the cute kids. The following Monday I heard the following radio announcement 'Aintree Racecourse have confirmed that anyone with a badge for Saturday's Grand National can send it in for a full refund'. I actually found it very amusing, those kids must have bagged thousands, if not tens of thousands of pounds! I wouldn't say that this tainted my experience of people hailing from Liverpool, on the contrary, I rather admired their entrepreneurship.
So, back to Angie. We met for the first time and went to a restaurant near Newton le Willows. It was a very nice evening. Then we had a pleasant enough evening in Manchester, which lead to a kiss. She was very good at kissing. She then started to unravel what she had told me and started to put things in to two camps. Fiction and non-fiction. She was blonde with blue eyes. She wasn't 39 (any more) she was 42. She wasn't a beautician, she was on a course learning about painting nails. She hadn't been single for a long time, she'd been single for about two months after her boyfriend, who used to beat her up and anyone who looked at her too, finally went too far, leaving her with a mountain of debt.
I was starting to get cold feet. We had another lunchtime date in Liverpool, where we happened to bump in to cousins of hers. I did wonder if the meeting was manufactured, but didn't ask.
A couple of days later I was in a pub with a couple of friends. I had just taken a mouthful of drink, when I received a text. It was a short text, all it said was 'I love you'. Unfortunately for my friends, I couldn't keep my drink in my mouth and it ended up all over them!
This was still early days for me, so naively I suggested we meet up again. We met at the Albert Dock in Liverpool. I explained to her that things were moving way too fast for me. I kissed her on the cheek and left.
Nothing happened for a couple of hours. Then I received a text. It said 'Are you sure you've made the right decision'. I didn't reply. Then a couple of hours later I received the shocker 'You f***ing c***, you f***ing got me interested then just f***ing dumped me, I want to kill you, you c***' (I've given her the benefit of the doubt when it comes to grammar). Now, that scared the s*** out of me. Thankfully, she didn't know where I lived!
Panicking like mad, I didn't know what to do. Thankfully she came to her senses and sent me a really re-assuring text 'Sorry about that, I have some anger management issues, but they're getting sorted out, sorry again'. Phew, I thought, that's the last of that!
No! Then a few minutes later, a repeat of the 'are you sure text, followed by another 'f***ing c***' text, followed by another apology. After five days I counted over 500 texts from Angie. Then all of a sudden it stopped.
That scared me off internet dating for a while...
