Hot Date: Reporting In
So Friday afternoon, Miss Mussel announced that she was going on a date. It seems only fair then to report on what happened.
He was nice enough but there was something about his conversation skills that left a little to be desired.
The most noticeable thing was his peculiar habit of waiting until I was halfway through a sentence and then repeating what I said exactly while I was still talking. As you can imagine, this go old quickly and as we were only on appetizers, I told him so.
Things proceeded on fairly normally until he pulled out what he clearly thought was his next party trick. He would wait until I had finished the sentence, feign deafness and then ask me to repeat it. When I started in on the sentence again, he would start talking at the same time with a bunch of nonsense, or at least I thought it was nonsense. Eventually I worked out that he was saying the sentence I just said but backwards. I have to say, I’ve never encountered anything quite like it.
He seemed to enjoy the game but could see that my attention was flagging. Concerned that I would remember him an old fuddy-duddy obsessed with patterns and numbers, he gamely launched into an anecdote about an incident at work involving a subordinate.
Apparently, he was once reprimanded by the city council for his role in a dispute with a bassoonist who, it turns out was extraordinarily sensitive and reacted to his playing being likened to a bleating goat in quite an ungentlemanly manner. A short stick and an ornamental dagger were mentioned and it seems the altercation escalated in to a full scale brawl. They were pulled off each other by friends but not before someone tattled the council. Someone suggested he take a walk to cool off so he set off. He must have some sort of repressed rage issues because he said next thing he knew was Lübeck, 200 miles away.
A bit of a funny duck but not without his charms. I’d see him again.
