You’re Making Me Feel Old

It’s always nice to receive a “wink” from someone on Match.com. I know it’s a bit of a kop out on their behalf, but it’s made all the better when their profile contains more than one sentence, has a profile picture - and a rather nice picture too. I know that’s being a little superficial, but I’m finally beginning to learn that in the cutthroat world of Internet dating you need to be more ruthless in your approach to such things.

Anyway, I’ve yet again spruced up my profile by rewording most of my overview sections and added and removed a few sentences from my main profile description. I’ve even added a few extras pictures too – including removing a couple of ropey looking ones. It appears to be working – for the moment at least – as my profile view counter is quite busy and I’ve received a few winks too.

One of the winks came for a rather attractive woman with a good profile, but I couldn't help noticing that she was two years younger than me, recently divorced and with two teenage children. Two teenage children, and younger than me!? I’m sure the music suddenly got louder and my arthritis started to kick in. There’s certainly no better way of telling you that you’re getting old by announcing you’ve got teenage children.

Whilst I have no issue with women already having children, I guess it can make a relationship difficult – especially with teenagers who decide that any argument can be settled with “you’re not my father”, but it also tends to mean that they don’t want to have any more. I don’t know if men are suppose to have such feelings, but I do get quite broody at times and I often think that it would be nice to have children of my own. Perhaps it’s my hormones trying one last desperate throw of the dice.

Still, it’s quite remarkable how even that thought has changed, and if you’d asked me a few years ago I would have laughed in your face at idea of ever wanting children. But that all changed when I was working away with a colleague who had young children of his own. One of his offspring was a shy little girl who’d hide from me and not speak to me at all. Then one day she suddenly came out of her shell and, for the next few months, chattered to me constantly. I actually got quite attached to her, but it was when she accidentally called me “daddy” that I got a lump in my throat and had to fight back a tear. It’s quite amazing that it was a small two-year that finally managed to melt my heart.

Unfortunately, I’m now coming to that point in my life where I’m starting to question that, at 37 years old, it’s now fairly unlikely to ever happen. It’s a pity really because I’ve been told by various people that I’d make a good father. Still, it’s amazing what doctors can do these days...

Painfully Floored

My body is like a temple – it’s old and falling apart. A good, and rather painful, example of this would be an event that happened in the middle of last night. It’s also something that should probably hasten my quest to find my soul mate.

You see, I was alone in bed – as usual – with my only company being a snoring cat at the end of the bed. I’m not really a very good sleeper and rarely get into a deep sleep, tending to be somewhere in the middle where I know I’m asleep but also aware of my surroundings. It was during one of these slumbering moments that I decided to get comfortable and stretch a little.

Now, for some odd reason, my legs occasionally suffer from cramp. I’ve still not pinpointed why – perhaps it’s from having too much or too little salt, or that I’d been down at the gym the day before, but my body decided that it was time to tell me just who was in charge of things. Perhaps it was a little miffed at not being asleep too.

So, when I did my little stretch, I “tweaked” something in my left calf muscle and, like turning up the volume on a radio, an excruciating pain appeared and got steadily worse. Naturally, this woke me up with a start and had me diving out of bed and hopping around the room in agony. This also managed to wake the cat up who then proceeded to demand to be fussed. From the outside it must have looked like some sort of comedy sketch.

However, it’s not really advisable to dive out of bed whilst in pain and still half asleep because your body tends to get very confused, and feeling dizzy and sick with a pain that simply won’t go away, it tends to take the easy way out and go for a simple “reboot” operation. Unfortunately, Mother Nature – bless her soul – didn’t really think this one through very well.

When I came around, the cramp in my calf muscle had fortunately gone – although my leg still felt very raw indeed – but I had now acquired a really deep and long scratch on my arm where it had caught the side of my desk as I collapsed in a big heap.

I guess I should be really thankful that it was only a scratch, but if it had been something more serious – such as a heavy blow to the head – I could have been laying there for days. After all, without a girlfriend to check whether I was OK – or ring for an ambulance for that matter – I could have been in a right old mess.

I’ve had this sort of cramp before, but this time it really frightened me. Perhaps it was a painful way of telling me not to give up.

Total Fruit Cakes

You really have wonder if the lunatics have finally taken over the asylum that is known as the United Kingdom.

Why? Well, for over fifteen years bakery owner Val Temple has been baking and selling jam and cream cakes in homage to Kermit the frogs nephew Robin – and calling her green frog topped cakes “Robin Tarts”. That was until good old Trading Standard came a calling.

You see, in the UK, the jack booted group known as Trading Standards are on hand to enforce legislation controlling the quantity, quality, price, description, and safety of most goods and services.

Naturally, this now includes plenty of crazy directives from our masters in Brussels (to which most other countries – except us – ignore). So it made perfect sense that they should go knocking at Val’s bakery door and demanding access to her cakes.

But in spite of having a green and sugary blob in the shape of a frog adorning the top of the cake, Trading Standards were concerned that the consumer might be confused into thinking that the cake actually contained robin meat – and that’s robin as in the red breasted garden bird variety. They even objected to her Miss Piggy cakes as they didn’t contain any pork.

The bonkers officials from Dorset County council have now forced Mrs. Temple to change the name of her cakes because they gave a “misleading impression of the cakes’ ingredients”.

Naturally, these over zealous idiots will now be moving onto their local branches of Tesco where they’ll discover other highly misleading products on sale. These include products such as Cottage Pie without pieces of cottage, Shepherd’s Pie without any shepherd, Rock Cakes without any rock and a Fisherman’s Pie lacking that distinct flavour of fisherman.

Chatterbox

So yet another exciting week in my life comes to a close, and along with it comes yet another failed dating attempt on Match.com.

As usual, everything started out with much promise – with someone I least expected to respond to my message surprising me by doing just that, whilst every one else I contacted ignored me. Slightly older than myself, and initially without a profile picture, we appeared to have much in common - with matching goals and honest aspirations on what we wanted out of Match.com.

So after a few emails she gave me her phone number but she was a tough cookie to get hold of. She did admit that she was busy at work at the moment and we had a number of missed calls – with me calling her to say “hello” only for her not to answer, phoning me back later only for me to then miss her return call too. Never the less, we sent a few text messages and finally managed to chat.

However, after following up our chat with a text to she if she fancied meeting up over the weekend she replied that there was “no spark” in the conversation and she was sorry, but didn’t want to bother. Still, I do find that I little odd as our e-mails didn’t suggest this, nor did I manage to get much of a word in during our conversion to put across anything negative!

She’s in sales and marketing and she was either extremely nervous or extremely confident. I expect the later because I’m sure I’ve just signed up to a new kitchen, a supply of disposable nappies and an encyclopaedia Britannica. And as hard as I tried to get what few sentences I could into the conversion, I’m sure she was trying to be the chatterbox champion 2007. And she couldn’t understand why she was single.

So, here I am again, back to square one with yet another challenge to find another five ladies to contact over the coming month. I thought that this Internet dating lark was going to be easier than more traditional methods of dating. Oh, how wrong I was.

Normal Service With Be Resumed Shortly

Groan. It’s come around to that time of year that I hate so much. No it’s not tax return time again, but the annual occurrence of my birthday.

The year 2007 sees me advance my presence on planet earth to 37 years and yet another step closer to that truly awful of birthdays – the big four-o. I’m already starting to get scared about that one as there’s still so much I want to do with my life before I’m rounded up and sent to the nursing home to wallow in my own filth and shout obscenities at imaginary people.

Although my quest for a soul mate remains painfully unfulfilled, my body is continuing to fall apart at an alarming rate. I’ve discovered yet more grey hairs – even my impressive facial stubble has started sprouting grey bits – and my nose hair appears to be growing faster than your average crop of bamboo.

I’m also pretty sure that the music is getting louder, the police are getting younger, the cardigans at Marks and Spencer are starting to look quite fashionable and Radio Four has started to broadcast some good plays in the evening.

However, all of this pales into insignificance when you consider that my Match.com profile is now reporting me as being the grand old age of 37 - making me even less attractive to the ladies in their early thirties than I apparently already am.

Right. You must excuse me – I need to go and put on my flame retardant suit. I have some candles on a birthday cake that need blowing out and they’ve already started to singe the wallpaper...

Me New Theef!

Well, I’ve had my new crowns fitted and I have to say that they are worth every penny of the rather large amount of money I’ve just parted with.

Even my dentist was impressed on how they looked, blending in perfectly with my other teeth and not at all obvious that they are porcelain crowns. The only minor annoying thing with them is that they are so smooth and unblemished that my tongue is constantly playing with them, plus they feel rather weird compared with the original teeth. Still, I’ll get use to them.

So with new nashers, hung like a donkey and six foot in height, the ladies aren’t going to know what’s hit them. Well, I guess two out of three can’t be too bad...

Nerves of Steel

I’ll tell you something about this Match.com lark – it certainly separates the men from the boys. You also need to have nerves of steel and a mighty determination not to have your hopes and dreams destroyed by the vicious jostling that goes on.

I usually only contact one person at a time on Match.com so that if they respond in a positive manner I can concentrate my efforts on the one person – plus I won’t get their names mixed up. I can only assume that the ladies don’t adhere to this rule – plus they can cherry pick from the many hundreds of blokes that must contact them.

So, breaking my own golden rule I decided to contact five people in one go. Mind you, there was another reason for this - I need to contact five people a month in order to qualify for the additional six months free membership if I don't succeed after the six-month subscription (and I fear I’m going to need them too!).

As usual, I spent an absolute age searching through the members in my area and finding five people of interest – two of them without pictures. So, I duly sent off some carefully crafted messages and then waited with crossed fingers for my inbox to be flooded with replies from the ladies in question.

Alas, I fell at the first fence with two of them – with no response received – whilst the other three did actually respond with a few brief sentences (experience has now told me that this is always a bad sign) wanting to know a bit more about me.

I felt pretty awkward talking to three people at once, but I needn’t have worried, as two out of three never bothered responding back to my replies. That left one person – and someone without a picture too - but by not having a picture it meant that rather than having pre-judged someone on their appearance, I could instead concentrate on their personality.

Fortunately, they offered to send some pictures – of which they are very nice – with the promise to email again later, sighting some computer problems, and supposedly using a friends PC until hers was fixed. However, with no reply or email after three days, and yet with activity on Match.com, it looks like I’ve failed that ultimate of judgement tests - the “friends test”.

Ordinarily, I’d be patient and wait – after all there’s always an explanation, but Match.com is increasingly hardening my attitude to such things and I fear I’m starting to lose my “nice guy” personality and outlook. However, I can’t help wondering whether this is actually going to be more help than hindrance. After all, nice guys always seem to finish last.