The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase

I'd prefer not to bother with internet dating. I'd rather bump into someone in a pub, make some remark about how busy it is, perhaps get her a drink, then hopefully but adeptly give her my number afterwards. I've tried it and I often embarrass myself, the more sensitive of the women showing only small traces of the effort with which they're controlling their faces as I declare my motives; the viscous slowing of time as I leave with a pretended nonchalence, feeling conscious of my bottom.

But self-awareness is permanently ex post facto, and I made a bit of a tit of myself at a jazz night on Sunday. There's a chemical imbalance in my loins at the moment, and I was eyeing someone up a little on the other side of the room. With what may well have been an over-interpretation of her returned glances, I went up to her at the end, and said that if she's at a loose end any time, to ring that number.

What a tarty way of chatting someone up. She doesn't know a thing about me. Well, apart from my real name, my mobile number and my email address.

Yesterday, I was shown how to do it. I went to a reading of T S Eliot's poetry. It was held in the redecorated Storey Institute, a once beautiful Victorian building, the old Mechanics Institute, which has been bleached and painted over with yellow and black flames going up the stairs, an Athena poster-standard faux-Blakean mural, and poetry on the walls (a recent decorative rash in arts centre décor I dislike). The bar, with its stools in clashing secondary colours, plays tinny canned music. In a part of the country with a cornucopia of locally brewed real ale, it serves Japanese lager.

In the few minutes as we settled down, I could feel myself rising with jealousy at the voice of the man behind me. He asked "is this seat free?" and they started chatting amiably, him asking her questions but without making it sound like an interrogation.

Ian Seed, who translates from Italian and French, read The Love Song of J. Arthur Prufrock in its entirety, reading the Dante epigrams in the original and English, and throughout the reading, helping us with the quotations from L'Inferno. I'd forgotten how apposite the word "song" is for this lovely poem. He also read extracts from Eliot's letters: "Oxford is pretty, but I don't like to be dead."

The reading ended; I turned round and things got worse when I saw her pretty black hair falling over her shoulders.