Hi Martha

Liked your profile. Basically I don't mind if you are tall/short/fat/thin/blond/brunette. The one thing I do like though is a lady with a cup size bigger than a D and preferably at least a 36. If you think you fit the bra - ooops Freudian petticoat haha - fit the bill, send me an email.

yours in anticipation

Trevor
ps I don't need to tell you I have a reallly great GSOH

Review of Week 2

The only progress I have made this week is signing up again for the dating site. I have recieved no messages and have sent only one myself to a person who looks slightly less like someone who works in IT than any of the other men on the site. Also only did it so I would have something to write in this review.

I did no interesting things where I could possibly have met someone.

So really abject failure all round. Will need to review usefulness of writing a blog about nothing. Although as 98% of blogs are on this very subject perhaps should not give up immediately. Also should enjoy freedom of writing blog that no-one else reads. Can write anything I like. This freedom is very much like the freedom of bing single and just as enjoyable i.e. not very enjoyable at all.

Oh well onwards and upwards.

Rankings

A friend of mine who is male and gay, claims that he is irresistable to certain kinds of sentient beings while others are almost completely indifferent to him.

He says that he can that he can rank them as follows:

1. Elderly African women
2. Veiled women
3. Straight men
4. All other women
5. Cats
6. Teenagers
   
7. Gay men over 70 with mobility problems
   
8. Gay men over 70.
9. Gay men.
10. Small children

I don't know why small children don't like him.

I have been thinking about my own list. It's quite difficult to do and probably needs some work but it would go something like this.

1. Cats
2. Married men with addiction problems
3. Men in longterm relationships with addiction problems
4. Men who are pathologically incapable of honesty
5. Lesbians
6. Straight women who think they might be turning a bit lesbian
7. Teenagers (with spots)
   
8. Dogs
9. Small children
10. Suitable men

I don't know what it is with cats but I can't bear them..

Weekly Review 1

Having decided a week ago to become more proactive in my approach to finding a relationship I can say, quite honestly, that I have done feck all this week towards achieving my goal.

I had some hopes of a seminar I went to on Wednesday as the topic was Climate Change And Its Impact on Construction and anything with the word "construction" in it generally means a lot of men will be present. This seminar was no exception. Unfortunately all the men there were either academics with food down their fronts or urban designers with frightening glasses and an inability to laugh at themselves.

One of the principal speakers had a hairstyle which, if adopted by all men, would be reason enough to welcome global warming on a catastrophic scale, as any species which thinks it's OK to leave the house with grey wire wool hair plastered across a bald patch, deserves to die out.

What I find really surprising is that these kind of people generally have wives who allow them to be seen in public looking like this. I once knew a librarian who was the spitting image of a leprechaun - short and squat with ruddy cheeks and a liking for tweedy clothes. So what does he do? Go to Selfridges and ask for a makeover? No, he decides to grow one of those beards that fringe the entire face and join up with the hair line. In the name of God why?

I have done nothing about re-registering on the Dating Site.

Aunt Aileen's Beau

A few months ago I went on holiday to Australia where I spent some time visiting my aunts. The youngest of them, Aileen, is in her late 60s and is quite an attractive woman. She is being pursued by one of her neighbours who is in his mid 50s.

I think Aileen is flattered by the attention of a younger man but is also quite disapproving of her suitor. She thinks he is bit mean and perhaps not totally honest.

"I don't know whether to believe a thing he says or not. He told me this big yarn about how he met a woman. Met her on the internet, if you don't mind, and we all know what that means."

Aileen gives us all a knowing look. I stare at my shoes and decide not to mention that almost everyone I know who has started a relationship in the last 3 years has done it via the internet - including me.

Aileen continues:

"So he arranges to meet your one and, as she lives really far away and as they were going to spend the day together, he leaves in the middle of the night to get there by breakfast time. When he finally arrives he asks if he can take a shower as he's all sticky from driving and she says yes and shows him where to go - and you'll never believe what happens next so you won't."

By this stage my cousin and I are shuffling in our seats not quite able to comprehend that it is our aunt telling this story.

"Well your man's in the shower and the next thing the hussy is in there with him and her only having met him 10 minutes before! 'What do you think you're doing?' he says and she replies 'Oh I just wanted to feel a man's body'."

My cousin and I are aghast.

"So!" says Aileen "Do you think your man was telling the truth?"

There is something very unseemly about having an Australian man's sexual fantasy relayed to you by an aunt who is soon to be 70.

I am not making a great deal of progress in following my friend's advice to do more interesting things and which might, just maybe, also lead to meeting someone. While I did find it interesting spending Saturday afternoon in John Lewis the only people I was likely to meet there were gay shop assistants and couples compiling wedding lists. The latter seem to spend an inordinate amount of time in the kitchen department close to the bit where they display the knives or else bouncing up and down on mattresses in a revoltingly smug way.

I was invited to a party at the weekend which I didn't go to because a) the person holding it is superficial beyond belief and, despite knowing me for six years, still thinks I'm Scottish rather than Irish and b) someone would have been there who I'd had a very unfortunate encounter with some years ago and I couldn't bear to see him.
I appreciate that both of these excuses are pathetic but I am still not feeling very robust.

I suppose eventually I am going to have to re-register with the Dating Site but not yet. I am allowing myself some recovery time.

We all know now that the misquote attributed to Susan Faludi that a woman over 40 is as likely to get killed by a terrorist as she is to get married, wasn’t ever statistically accurate and still isn’t despite George Bush and Blair’s international policy and war on terror. Although personally having been on the tube last summer when the London bombs were going off it seems less farfetched to me than it might have done a few years ago. I also now think my chances of meeting someone seem unbelievably remote.

I am over 40 – actually well into my late 40s – unmarried, childless, educated to degree level and with a reasonably good job. I’m not hideous, I’m not a bankrupt, I don’t have a criminal record and I don’t have a bed covered in soft toys. I can be amusing and I’m capable of holding a conversation. I’m kind to children and animals and I like most of my family. On the negative side I’m a stranger to the hair straighteners and can be a little bit acidic at times. Men always describe me as “intelligent” which I think is shorthand for "wears glasses".

For the past three years I have been Internet dating. To say that it has been a difficult experience is something of an understatement. Recently I have found it so painful I’ve taken my profile down and allowed my subscription to run out.

A few weeks ago I was contacted by a guy called Greg. I didn’t hold out much hope about him as he lives in a city that is as far away from London as it is almost possible to be, while still being in England. We exchanged a few emails and arranged to meet at the beginning of August. He told me he was in London quite a lot because of work and the fact that he supported a London based football team.

So at the beginning of August I met Greg outside a tube station in Islington. We went for coffee and chatted easily for the hour, which we’d agreed we would limit our first meeting to, before going our separate ways. I liked him. I found him attractive. My instincts told me he was a person worth getting to know. I really hoped he felt the same way about me. I felt an unfamiliar stirring. It wasn’t lust though, it was hope.

The following day he emailed to say that he had liked me and I texted him and he texted me back and for the next two weeks we were in constant contact. He was more forthcoming than me but then I’m generally too reticent. I allowed myself to believe that something very good was about to happen to me. We agreed that we would meet up again this weekend, which was the first weekend he could come to London as he was going to Paris over the August bank holiday and was away at a film festival the following week.

The Tuesday after the bank holiday Greg emailed me to tell me about his weekend in Paris which was “interesting” and involved various mishaps on the journey but on the “upside” he went to a party on the Saturday night where he met a person he really liked and had sex with the person and he wondered if I would still want to speak to him?

I was devastated and fired off an email without really thinking about what I was saying. The following day I sent a more measured email which he replied to and I replied to his email saying that I would still like to meet up and that was the last I heard of him.

For the past 10 days I have been utterly miserable. One friend suggested anti-depressants, another recommended therapy and one, whose advice I’m taking, suggested doing lots of nice things where I might incidentally meet someone in a sort of random way.

(The reason that I was so upset with Greg is not because he had sex with someone but the fact that he told me about it and made me responsible for deciding whether or not I would still speak to him. Oh and that he destroyed my fantasy. My right to occupy the moral high ground was also somewhat compromised by the fact that I had sex with someone else that weekend as well but that’s another post).

The outcome of this sorry saga is not to point out what a complete shit Greg is because really I think he isn’t a shit – just insensitive, clumsy and cowardly – but the realisation that I really do genuinely want to be in a relationship.

The question is what to do now?