The last time a man chased me down the street, he took off with my bag. My friend Andrea, however, recently had a man run after her on the street, grab her hand and ask her for a date. She told me the story at Notting Hill’s Lazy Daisy Café.
“I was walking home wondering why I’m still single when this John Lewis delivery guy stopped me, held my hand and asked my name.”
I put down my forkful of broccoli and feta quiche. It looks like it has been nuked in the microwave, the natural bright green of the vegetable desaturated to a greyish gunk. I beg her to tell me more.
“Well, I asked him if he normally holds random women’s hands on the street.”
She’s over-analyzing him, I think, as I peer down at the lacklustre assortment of tinned beans they’ve thrown together with red-pepper flakes and called a salad.
“And he said no, that I was amazing and he couldn’t let me go. That he had to take me to dinner – if I wasn’t married, that is. He looked at my finger and said that if I was married he’d go away and be a gentleman, but that he couldn’t let me go without trying.”
This isn’t the first time this has happened to Andrea. She’s gorgeous, can easily get away with subtracting ten years and always looks like she lives in a fashion photo shoot, which is especially annoying when we’re at something like the Lazy Daisy Café and I’m in my standard can’t-cope-with-transitional-London-weather turtleneck, skinny jeans, furry boots and bike-helmet hair.
Anyway, you may have heard of cosmic ordering, a.k.a. “The Secret” a.k.a. the law of attraction. Same thing, different marketing spin. Andrea put out a simple-enough directive to the universe: I want to meet someone. And the universe delivered swiftly, with brilliant intentional comedy.
My friend rejected the dotting deliveryman, even though she admitted – more than twice – that he was quite good looking. Why did she say no? Because he didn’t really fit with her idea of how her man would show up. That’s the other thing to remember about this cosmic ordering business: focus on what you want, but leave the how to the powers that be. Otherwise you turn intention into control, and trying to meddle with Mother Nature always messes things up.
Bottom line: be specific about what you want; you’ll probably get exactly what you ask for. Now that's service.
Lazy Daisy Café is at 59a Portobello Road, W11 3DB. Now you know why they call it “lazy.”
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