Dating must be God’s way of making you appreciate Gardeners’ Question Time. There is no other explanation for why it is so nerve-grindingly awful. I would rather do anything than go through this torture, including listening to people moan about the fact that the soil in their east-facing herbaceous border is too alkaline for an azalea.
As I sit here quietly buzzing with shock and awe from my latest outing, I cannot help but reflect on dating disasters past, if only to reassure myself that it could always be worse. There have been some real stinkers.
1) The man who pretended he couldn’t see me. My friend Janet set me up on a blind date with a guy she met while sitting outside a café. Apparently they got chatting and he vouchsafed that he was single and drove a blue convertible. Janet, irrepressible romantic that she is, said, ‘You must meet my friend Melissa. She’s single and drives a blue convertible.’ I know, hardly the stuff Relate guidelines are made of, but there we are.
I was duly instructed to present myself at a bar on Lavender Hill in a smart-casual-sexy outfit and to ‘for goodness sake, smile’, all of which I did.
OK, so I wore jeans and a scruffy T-shirt, arrived a bit early in a bid to get it over with, ordered a glass of water and stood at the bar looking grumpy. But as a natural pessimist I assumed I would be meeting Charles Manson. The place was completely empty, so when the lone male in his 30s walked in there really wasn’t much guesswork to be done. He was nice-looking if a little thin, not really my type. He looked at me, I looked at him. There was no spark of attraction but people are polite in these situations so he walked straight over, introduced himself and asked if he could buy me another glass of water, right? Wrong.
He began to scour the bar for alternatives. He walked from one end of the place to the other, searching every empty corner for a possible other lone female who might be hiding somewhere. He all but searched the ladies’ loo. Then he came back to the bar, stood right next to me and started looking around again. In the end, I could bear it no longer. ‘Ahem! Excuse me?’ I said. ‘Yes, I’m sorry but it’s definitely me.’ To which he crinkled his upper lip, sighed and said, ‘Oh.’ And, no, we did not then hit it off amazingly and later, over a tub of Haagen Dazs in bed, laugh about how inauspicious our first date had been. I bought him a drink because he looked so disappointed, we sat in virtual silence for 15 minutes, and then I sent him on his way.
2) The man who grilled me about my first holy communion. He was really nice, for about three minutes. He took me to a very elegant restaurant in Mayfair, pulled out my chair as I approached the table and proceeded to make charming conversation. I was just happily imagining our impending nuptials — would I go for the Ritva Westenius dress or the Vivienne Westwood? — when he offered the information, totally apropos of nothing, that he left his first wife because she refused to attend mass. ‘That woman,’ he spat venomously, ‘barely stepped foot in a church after we got married…’ There is only one response to such a statement. You wave at the waiter and shout, ‘Bill, please!’
3) The man who took me to an art gallery and a David Hare play in one afternoon. This was utterly horrific. Made worse by the fact that he fell asleep during the play and started snoring. Or maybe that was a blessing. Because at least I was able to creep out of the theatre, down two neat vodkas in the bar to rouse myself out of an oncoming coma and run away.
4) The Italian accountant who took me for pizza then moved into my home. One minute I was sitting in a village square in Italy with a chap who sufficed perfectly well as a holiday romance, the next minute I was picking him up from Gatwick airport and loading a bag containing all his worldly possessions into my blue convertible. In the end I had to take him back to the airport, tell him I would be on the next plane out as soon as I had sold the house so we could begin our new life in Naples together, blew kisses at him through the departure gate and then drove away at speed.
As to the latest dating fiasco? Let’s just say I’m taking soil samples with a view to planting two new azaleas.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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