The party had been announced until 3 am, and in time the seeking became more active, conversation more animated. One gender was finding another, and keys padlocks. The faces said talk was moving from polite to probing. The young lady in the blue and white floral dress (she was doing the theme of the young lady of old) was speaking enthusiastically to a chap holding his beer like he might not need it any more. It was working to an extent for some, but perhaps not for most. A lone man still stuck to the bar was looking again and again at a group of girls a good deal younger than him, like he wished his parents had gone productively to bed much later.
A chap in studied casual stepped through to appear before the quite lovely girl in the black, what other women usually call, number. She was training to be a teacher, she said. And he had a job with a design company near Staines. And so they went on. It didn't really matter what got said; what does is who starts looking over the shoulder of the other first, and how soon. With so much to pick from you've got to shop around, the supermarket principle.
For the hosts, at £17.50 from each it wasn't a bad evening's business, not even after the bar and bouncers were paid for. But it needs to go on, and it does. There's a cousinly kind of D8 event every couple of weeks or so now, and Asian Speed D8 prepared for its fifth birthday party at the Gherkin Saturday April 26.
The business of course rests on enough people remaining single but hopeful. And passing the word round if only to complain, for others to try and retreat. There were some of those around. "I don't like it," said a girl all in red who had just retired to the sofa, padlock abandoned. "I just don't think this is the place where you can meet really nice guys."
It was a game where the men were at disadvantage from the start. Perhaps they had undone themselves simply by turning up. After all, what's a man without a context, what's a man without some reticence. And so the man who, key in hand, heads for a padlock on the woman's wrist as if that wasn't a silly thing to do is for that very reason the wrong guy.
But then, who cares. Coming from homes with traditional restrictions, young Asians step out with certain energy in search of the good life—which usually means an early boyfriend or girlfriend—and in the process discover the loneliness of living in the West.
