I'm working at a café and a guy on the next table is having the weirdest conversation about women he likes to kiss and have sex with

So far he's said he likes them moody and intriguing

The woman he's talking to has responded only with ‘mm’ for as long as I've been here

I’m fascinated by this. I cannot stop listening. The woman has not said a single word except ‘mm’ and ‘yes’ and he doesn't seem to have noticed this fact at all. He just keeps talking and talking

Is this a date? Is it a meeting? I have no idea

He was just comparing himself to his cousin who can apparently melt people just by smiling and saying ‘good morning’ to them. His cousin has the edge. He has the wit. He has the looks.

His cousin sounds like a catch, to be fair

STOP TALKING. This is not a conversation, it’s a speech about his life

The coffee machine keeps drowning out parts of the conversation and I’m slightly too far away to eavesdrop properly, but when I tuned back in I just heard ‘steak knife, all the way through’

The woman just contributed a sentence for the first time but she has a very soft voice and the ambient noise makes it impossible to make her out. He said ‘yes, exactly’ and then carried on

He's talking about his mother's cooking a lot.

I can appreciate this guy’s love of food. He’s actually gesticulating in passion as he recounts his first time ever making fish curry

He just explained to the woman, without prompting, what a snapper was – ‘a big red fish, like salmon, but not’

‘So I left it to marinade, right, but I didn’t want it breaking up’

God, the granular, loving detail of this fish curry story. He has memorised every single stage of making this curry. This must have been one of the defining events of his life

Finally he said, ‘We’d better go, you’ve got to go swimming’

Then he went straight back into talking about someone’s cooking (his mother’s again, I think). After another few minutes of that, they went their separate ways.

What a rollercoaster. The cousin, the curry, all of it

This has cemented my certainty that I will never be able to date anyone. Unfortunately I have zero control over my facial expressions or my sarcasm, so I would have fired him up with ‘Please, tell me more about the curry, this is fascinating. Can you also explain what chicken is’

I want to love anything as much as your man at the next table loved that fish curry