Poppin' Cherries

I met another blogger for tea last week, a charming fellow who was stuck for neither words nor wit. Manners maketh the man, as he says himself; I got a mail from him the following afternoon to thank me for bringing him out on his first foray into meeting fellow bloggers and to say that he might now have the courage to do it more often.

He seemed so at ease and self assured that he had me well fooled. I still get butterflies pigeons every time I go to meet someone new. As I walked towards the gallery last Thursday evening, lost in reverie and cigarettes, I was suddenly overcome by a wave of nausea, of pure what the fuck am I doing? Not that I was doing anything even remotely untoward, but sometimes I step back from this blog and wonder how I ended up here. I came perilously close to texting him (the ultimate in passive-aggressive communication, no?) and giving some lame excuse. Worse still, I contemplated telling him the truth - that I just couldn't go through with meeting yet another stranger. What a shitheaded solution that would have been - it would have made him feel that there was something untoward about meeting another blogger for a coffee on a damp Thursday evening. But I had forgotten to bring his number. I wandered through from Clare Street to Merrion Square, trying to look breezily unconcerned at the marked lack of friendly stranger at the entrance (had he stood me up?) until I spotted a likely candidate waiting outside on the steps.

He was lovely. Warm and friendly and funny. Had I not met him I would have been going home to an empty flat, in a bad mood, with a guilty conscience. His mail the next day credited me with breaking him in, but really all of these folk I've met in the last few months are breaking me in, and doing it gently. They have convinced me that this blog might well be a thing worth keeping.