Was woken up by a phone call from my Dad this morning. Why does he always call first thing in the morning? He knows I'm not a morning person (walking home from a club in the summer when it's light doesn't count). It's always the same, "Oh, have I woken you?" in a tone halfway between surprised and delighted. It's my own fault for answering the phone in the first place I suppose, as it's only my parents or elderly relatives who call me on my landline anyway.
The upshot of it is that he's taking my Mum off for some winter sunshine next week, so he's going to miss the Bolton and Prague games. The hurricane season in the Caribbean usually runs from June to October, so my Dad is chancing it a little bit going this early, but he doesn't want to miss the Man Utd game on November 3rd. My Dad dances around the subject for a couple of minutes then suggests as casually as he can that that it's probably not worth mentioning this salient little fact to my Mum. Sorely tempted to reply that if he promises to stop calling me before lunch, I'll keep mum about telling Mum. But then I wondered what would happen if I did tell her and it then it pisses down with rain for two weeks. Doesn't bear thinking about. I don't think my Dad would cope well with being forced to eke out a living selling pineapples to ungrateful English tourists for the rest of his days.
So the big question is, who am I going to invite to the Emirates?
I have three choices at the moment.
Helen, my best mate, has been quietly badgering me for a while now to take her along to a game. Now, she's a great laugh, and she is my partner-in-crime of choice, but football definitely isn't one of our things. She knows nothing about the game, cares even less, and I suspect only wants to go because she thinks she'll be surrounded by loads of gorgeous blokes who'll spend the whole game trying to chat her up. Ha!
Charlie, on the other hand, is a long-time Arsenal fan. A few seasons ago he got so fed up of not being able to get tickets for Highbury (he's disorganised enough that he let his season ticket application lapse and he could never quite manage the whole ticket registration scheme thing). So he got himself a season ticket at Craven Cottage. He invites me every year to the Fulham away game, so I really do owe him a trip to Dubaibury. I should mention, by the way, that we're Just Good Friends.
And then there's this guy. I've met him a couple of times now through friends of friends when we're all out and about, yadda, yadda. He's a Forest fan (poor lad, but you can't help where you're born) so let's call him Big Ed. Anyway, he fits the bill nicely, what with him being extremely cute and a proper football fan and everything, but there are a couple of slight problems.
I don't have his contact details - and worse, when he called a friend of mine asking her for my msn, I misguidedly told her not to give it to him (well, he should have made more of an effort to ask me himself.) I regretted it instantly, of course. But still, one has standards.
So I'm going to have to rely on that old standby, the casually arranged accidental-bumping-into-his-group-of-friends trick. Now, if your Thursday, Friday or Saturday nights out are anything like mine, I'd be surprised if you were able to get any of your friends to arrive in the same postcode of London within several hours (or days) of the appointed rendezvous. Never mind a specific place at a specific time, even assuming you knew when and where he's going to be. Still, feelers have been put out, and plans have been put in motion, so I'll keep you posted.
But the other thought that worries me is that even if I manage to get hold of him, would he think I was asking him out on a date (as in date) or a non-date date (what I call a jeremy date)? Some years ago, this guy called Jeremy, whom I initially quite fancied, asked me out to a philately exhibition, which was weird enough in itself, but he also pointed out rather too insistently for my liking, that we weren't actually on a romantic date. I think he was just going for low key, casual, no expectations kind of thing. But after inviting me to several more of these bizarre trysts (including a sci-fi movie, would you believe), by the time he'd plucked up the courage to ask me out to dinner (as in soft candlelight, French wine, Italian waiters) I'd completely lost interest in him.
So if Big Ed thinks I'm asking him out on a jeremy date, I'm worried he might reciprocate with one of his own and then we'll get stuck in a rut and the relationship might just fizzle out before it's begun.
But if he thinks it's a proper date, would he think I was being too forward? And anyway, I don't want to be the one to make the first move (sue me, modern women can have old-fashioned views on certain subjects if they like).
Decisions, decisions. Still, it's not as if we'll be staring longingly into each others' eyes for 90 minutes (unless the match is exceptionally turgid), so I think I'll chance it and hope to steer a middle course between the two.