Do you like trains?

Tonight, I had dinner with a guy (fairly cute, late twenties) whom I was briefly introduced to at a work networking do last week. Apparently he obtained my number from a list of participating organizations at the event and traced me from there. Talk about shoddy Data Protection! He rang me at work and I politely declined, but eventually consented to an early evening meal after work.

The guy was (is?) lovely and I'm sure he'd make some girl out there quite happy. Unfortunately, his choice of conversation for the night was "trains". He loves trains. Oh, yes... he loves steam trains, and bullet trains, anything from choo-choo trains (forgive me but my train jargon isn’t fantastic) to Virgin trains (no pun intended)... all kinds of trains. He talked about trains from the time I had my starter, through to the main course. No matter how I tried to steer the conversation to something else, he always linked it back to trains. I soon wised up to the fact that the topic for the night was SET and proceeded to wolf down my dinner in the hopes of getting home as quickly as I could. I nearly choked on an olive, but it wasn’t nearly as painful.

He said "would you like to come back to mine? I have a CD on different train sounds. 75 minutes of real train noises."

"You what?" I stared in disbelief, all my manners suddenly abandoning me, my mouth ajar in a slightly "you have got to be kidding" kind of way. (What a sexy idea! We can sit there all night listening to train sounds!! Brilliant! It's exactly how I like to spend my evening. I didn’t say a word.)

"Yes... it's amazing" he continued obliviously. "Live recorded sounds of trains pulling out of stations, various steam trains chugging – they make very specific and very different noises, you know. The CD plays the sounds and explains each one..." he said, nodding enthusiastically.

I said no, as nicely as I could and "oh! Is that the time!" came slipping out of my lips. "What a disaster," I thought. Is it me? Am I being extravagantly fussy here? Are my standards too high? Is this the norm these days? Is this what is to be expected out there in the world of single available men? If so, I'd rather not date.