Have you ever been on a date with someone, only for them to deny it to your friends? I have.

If you are now cringing, thinking ‘that’s embarrassing’ and ‘why would anyone admit to something like that’, then that is fine. I am cringing ever so slightly too.

I recently went into a pub in the North Laines that I haven’t been to in years. You might know it now as The Foundry, but once upon a time it was called The Pedestrians and was the local of a guy that I had a few dates with.

His name was, hmm, let’s call him Dave, and we met through some mutual friends at their barbeque. I thought, ‘yeh, he seems nice’ and before I knew it my friend’s husband had passed on my number and Dave was calling to arrange a date.

He was very cute, blond, slightly scruffy and charming, with twinkly eyes and a gravelly voice.

When I say that his voice was gravelly, I thought that his voice was sexy, but my friend Sarah thought that he sounded more like he smoked too much. She was right.

On our first date I remember being really nervous. A friend’s girlfriend decided to help me get ready and calmed my nerves with a glass of wine, while she did my make-up (which I seemed to be incapable of doing myself). We met in The Great Eastern and ended the night with a stolen kiss on London Road, and I walked home with a grin on my face thinking that I had finally met someone really quite nice.

Later that week we planned another date. This time we went to a mate’s gig and what should have been a few leisurely Sunday drinks, turned into five pubs. This date ended rather differently to the first, with both of us pretty drunk. Again we had another kiss on London Road and as I started to sober up I realised that his hands were quite ‘wandery’. At this point I thought it best to explain that the kiss wasn’t going to going to lead to anything on this particular evening. After I had made this clear, let’s just say that it became apparent quite quickly that this was not what he had in mind and Dave made his feelings pretty obvious. This annoyed and infuriated me, so I told him I was going home and I suggested that he do the same. That night I deleted his number from my phone and went to sleep.

The next day I tactfully explained to my friend’s husband what had happened and that I thought that I would give it a miss. A couple of days later Chris, the matchmaker, bumped into Dave and asked him how the date with me had gone. Dave, instead of saying that it didn’t work out, or something to that effect, point blank denied ever going on a date with me saying that we just ‘never sorted it out in the end’. This left me rather confused and amused at the same time. It seemed that I had bruised Dave’s ego enough to make him want to forget the dates and in particular the one where I brutally rebuffed his advances. Needless to say, I was also embarrassed and so decided to permanently avoid The Foundry to minimise the possibility of running into him.

However, it has been around 5 years since those dates with Dave and so I have decided that I shall no longer avoid The Foundry. In fact I have decided that should I run into him, I shall be polite and pleasant and see how long it takes him to clock who I am, and then watch as he squirms.