Looks are everything

At 4am this morning, wide awake, I thought I'd see if anyone had been looking at my profile on the dating site since I last checked it several minutes earlier. To my surprise a little notification of an incoming message popped up from someone I've been chatting to for a few days.

"You woke me up," she said. "WTF are you doing up at 4am? :)" I said. "It was you," she replied. "You slammed the door and it reverberated down the M6".

A woman who didn't have any pictures on the site recently sent me a message saying that she fancied me. Giddy with delight over such a rarely expressed statement, I responded promptly, receiving by return her photographs. Crestfallen, I looked at a bottom of considerable substance crowding the frame. She was draped in drab clothes suitable for someone employed in manual handling at the dockside, before knocking off two hours early (following standard Liverpudlian labour practices).

It made me wonder whether her "I quite fancied you" line had been deployed as a rhetorical device. Beauty, as Naomi Wolf said, is an economy, and Stevedore4u hasn't got much capital within it. Neither do I understand how you can fancy someone without having met them. From now on I'm only contacting women whose photographic evidence provokes a lip-biting "phwoar" and a peeringly close perusal of their pictures.

NoIdeaWhatHerNameIs presents herself in a red scooped neck dress and a blonde bob. She lives reasonably near me in a genteel Victorian watering hole. She's got a funny, articulate profile. I wanted to meet her straight away.

...Maybe we should engineer bumping into each other in somewhere glamorous, like Preston (actually I'd prefer Southport). I know we should fence about each other for a while before this proposal is made but I can't think of anything else to say that would serve other than a disguised preamble to the suggestion. Could just be somewhere with lots of available exits and a time limit of an hour, regardless on how we're getting on. It's dreadfully previous, I know.

What often happens at this stage is that emails go on for weeks on end, containing vague references to a meeting that never acquires the solidity of a date, time and place. But NoIdeaWhatHerNameIs is of more adventurous stock, and next Tuesday we're off to see Antony Gormley's statues, iron casts of his own body planted into the wind-lashed post-industrial mudflats of Merseyside.

I must just add that I was last there four years ago with Beleagured Squirrel, who was patiently kind towards me during a difficult time which sometimes tipped me into an un-English tearfulness. Coming over all lachrymose is demanded as a token for emotional authenticity in an American, but it's unseemly behaviour in an Englishman. I've never thanked her enough for the artlessly understanding comments she left, which ended up with her suggesting a day out at the same place to which me and NoIdeaWhatHerNameIs will be going on Tuesday. If the former is reading this I want her to know how precious and re-read those comments were, how much she made me feel less alone, and how much she helped me by everything she said during a time I never want to go through again.

Stop press: Linda has just emailed, pointing out that today is the birthday of one of the most illustrious of the long line of outstanding Irish satirists, Flann O'Brien. Here is a fine rendition of his famous poem, A Pint of Plain Is Your Only Man, a message to live by if ever there was one. A glass will be raised in an Irish direction this evening in the great man's honour.