Why do I get all the nutters?

Don’t ask me about men. Seriously. Don’t ask me about men, about blokes, about chaps or guys or gents or geeks nor even about the boy next door. I’m crap at them. Remarkably useless. Even a child with a taste for snot-flavoured jelly beans has better taste than me. My choices could be called idiosyncratic (and with my friends, that’s often the most diplomatic they can be). I’m regularly attracted to the ones so far from normal that you almost meet them coming back the other way. When a bunch of women get together for a girly gossip, I’m the one that the eye-rolling and embarrassed laughter is always about, the one with the best disaster stories, the one that makes everyone else think “thank heavens that’s not me,”, and feel just that little better about themselves I’m almost a public service. My history of men is disastrous, and I’m not really quite sure why.

My friends despair of me. They throw up their hands -politely of course, and almost always when the object of their derision isn’t there- when I show up with another man. The kind their mothers’ warned them about but on whom mine was remarkably, hopelessly silent. Think Mercutio not Romeo. Kenickie, not Danny. Richard the Third, not Henry the Fifth. Henry the Fifth? What a conformist. And they have all been relentlessly, irrevocably disastrous (though entertaining, and occasionally very loving). So I do ever-so-much hope that this one’s not.

Here I am, Evie Duchamp (not French, but a great name, eh?) sliding through the streets of town to try and make up some time. Late, again. I spent so long trying to work out what earrings to wear that I only left 20 minutes to get from Hamble into town. Of course I got stuck in traffic, and the lights must have been being controlled by the worst road-demon from hell as two out of three sets were red. And Southampton has traffic lights where other towns have litter bins - one on every corner. I’ve abandoned the car somewhere in the old town and now I’m sliding over the ancient paving on heels that are probably too high for speed and wishing I’d left my warm spring coat in the car. I’m half way up the high street, and you could plug me into the town’s geo-thermal heating system and get good value. Is it better to be sticky or late? Us Duchamps aren’t built for the heat - actually we’re built for heaving Breton fishing nets around the place (I have the shoulders and the cute sepia photos of my grandmaman to prove it). My not-too-tight-or-too-revealing-for-a-first-date top is becoming a little bit warm. My granddad had always said he liked grandmaman for her lobsters, but I’m not sure that channelling the cooked-seafood look is quite on the list of styles to have this season.

I decide that late is better than sticky and ease up a bit, which on these heels makes these cobbles just a little bit safer, even if I won’t be dead on time (“though I should be used to it,” jeers my friend Jess into my subconscious). I stop to check and inevitably flatten my hair in the window of the Body Shop, putting off the inevitable. First dates always terrify me. Steeling myself, I head down the steps to the restaurant, my hands shaking slightly and with my heart clanging in my throat.

I love this restaurant, under the cobbles in the heart of the town. I came here on my 21st birthday (too many years ago to remember clearly -though the haze could of course have been the 90’s cheap red wine) and I’ve been many times since. Its’ true that quite a lot of the dishes on the menu are pretty much the same - prawn cocktail, even snails; at least these days they don’t overcook the beef. A recent chef has anticipated a new millennium by introducing French-colonial cuisine to go with the classic Parisian dishes, and ginger rotisserie chicken will tempt those of us who aren’t completely addicted to moules. But you can still get chocolate mousse. Some of you might question the wisdom of re-visiting a well-loved restaurant filled with memories with a new date, but to me it’s a bit like the comfort of home, without the panic of cleaning or the inevitable embarrassment of passing off an M&S ready meal (however special) as my own. Or indeed having to do the washing up later, which is always so much more hard work if the evening’s been a bit of a trial.

By the way, I never have the snails, but it’s good fun watching someone else try to show off with them.

I’m going down the steps too quickly and almost fall off my heels, so I come to a stuttering stop and take a breath in the doorway. My guy’s already there - but only just. I’d seen him rushing in as I was topping up my mascara in the shop window, so my scrambled apology for being late was, thank heaven, less embarrassing than it so often is. Mind, what he might think of someone who is so disorganised as to be doing their make up in the reflected glare of a shop window doesn’t bear thinking about but I’m practised at managing my many doubts and hope that he didn’t think of it, or didn’t care. I smooth down my top, take a deep breath and (I imagine) compose myself like Dietrich entering the Blue Angel and step onto the stage of this date.

Inevitably I trip. So elegant.

I never know what to do when I meet someone on a blind date. Do you shake hands? (Seems too formal to me. Also, a male friend of mine reckons that guys make a pretty instant decision as to whether you’re mate- or date- material and shaking hands definitely reeks of the former). Fumbling kiss on the cheek (which side, who dips first - fraught with social dangers)? Or a generally embarrassed muttered and eyes down “Hi, nice to meet you.” You probably don’t need to guess which one I usually go for. Jess reckons the forward kiss on the cheek is by far the best option, but she’s three inches taller than me and therefore has less problems achieving it, even if I am in my heels. A straw poll of the (other three) mates who’ve done the blind/internet date thing gave a resounding 100% to the kiss on the cheek, but, when pushed further, a somewhat less impressive 2/3 majority own up to “embarrassed hi,” in reality. And the last one Susie kissed on the cheek turned out not only to be married but had another girlfriend too, so was a bit of a waste of lip gloss.

Well, so far he looks more like James Bond than Ernst Blofeld but my friends would insist that that’s a good thing. Swift observation while negotiating the stairs and the heels saw him rubbing his hands on his chinos, staring wildly at a menu and looking charmingly and comfortingly nervous (so it’s not just me). He stands when he sees me (tick!) and jumps straight into Jess’s good books by at least aiming a kiss on my cheek. Of course we do the nodding woodpecker routine by misjudging noses and the English/French/Italian miscalculation of kisses, but still a good sign. My hands are itching to shake - this is after all, the first time we’ve met - but he jumps straight over the “my name is” and leaps for the “how was your journey?” conversation. Later when he goes to the loo I have a mild daydream that I’m actually having dinner with someone else’s date, but to be honest that’s not worrying me as I’m quite enjoying myself.

I sneak appraising glances at him while I talk. He’s got grey eyes in a slightly tanned, slightly lined face. Quite a square jaw. A hairline that’s proper for a 40- year old - a bit receded, but not disappeared into the distance. Brown hair flecked with a bit of grey and cut quite short. He’s shaved just before he came out - I can see a tiny tuft of tissue sticking to his face just below his side burns. (I can hear the girls giving another thumbs-up to this. Caro reckons if a guy can’t be bothered to shave specially for a date then he doesn’t think it’s special - not a good start for any kind of relationship). I reckon he’s around 6ft with quite broad shoulders (yum). Lean, not over muscly, and not overly aware of his physique (good). A little bit chubby in the middle - who isn’t? - but nothing unusual. Pretty normal really, and luckily - ’cause you can never tell before you meet, can you? - quite fanciable. Sexy even.

Susie has told me not to panic about how I’m looking, but that’s about as likely as Marilyn Monroe avoiding an air grating when wearing a flimsy pleated frock. So I hope that the subtle lighting isn’t making my nose look big and that he doesn’t loathe the smell of mouthwash. Well, you’ve got to worry about something.

I love the first conversations. There are no rules because you’ve got no history. You get to talk about wonderful things as far removed from the day to day as you like. Big picture stuff. Dreams. Broad brush politics. History. What you’d do if you never had to work again. Astrophysics or Soaps or both. Whether you hate your father, siblings or any other member of your estranged and slightly strange family. The only things off the menu are crushes and previous romances, if only to avoid inevitable comparisons - and judgments about how you are as a date. These other passions - the things that make us interesting (and probably get cited in divorce papers) are the bread and butter of first date talk. When else are you going to find out about an addiction to The Smiths or Charlie Chaplin films without it sounding odd or crazily out of context? You can be candid and lay it all out on the table - or instead present your best image of yourself (if you can think of it) to entice your date, smoothing the lumpy bits of your personality to what you guess is his taste, though I’ve never been very good at that. The only time I tried to be interesting, my date went off to the loo after the main course and didn’t come back - though to give him his due he paid the bill. Maybe the fine detail about the Damien Hirst exhibition over a seafood dinner wasn’t such a great idea. So these days I play it straight and to be honest, I can’t be doing with any other flummery. I know I should try to be a little compromising, and I’ve been told (too many times probably, at least by Jess) that I’m in danger of coming across maybe just a bit too mad. But Tom seems to be dealing quite well with myself as myself. Or maybe he’s as good at pretending as I am.

Over starters - a huge crudités plate with pate and fresh vegetables that look like they’ve been picked out of a Parisian market - we talk about our weekends and our weeks. Tom spent the rainy weekend dismantling and reassembling his mountain bike (I do like a man that’s good with a spanner) and then took the thing out and buried it - and himself it seems - in an excess of mud in the New Forest. I wasn’t quite sure if the point of fixing something up to shining perfection only to dunk it up to its axles in gunk again but Tom assured me that he at least found it fun. I’m sure I’ll take his word for it. In contrast, I’d been out on a boat with a friend on the Solent, Hamble being stacked full of people with too much fibreglass and not enough people to handle it.

Tom lives just over the railway in the close suburbs of Southampton in a house with the river at the bottom of the garden. The other side has the railway at the bottom of theirs. It’s a bit like “pick your obsession” down his road apparently, with water-nuts on one side and train spotters on the other. He’s got a small rigid inflatable boat that he generally uses for short trips to the restaurants in Ocean Village, or for Saints home games (the St Mary’s stadium being handily close to one of the Itchen River marinas) but as far as I can work out - I think he’s trying really quite hard not to come across as obsessed - he tends to go everywhere he can on one or other of his bikes. He works on the other side of the Bittern Traffic-Light nightmare that I’d got stuck in earlier which acts as the South Coast’s equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle, where traffic can get lost seemingly for days. The small electronics firm he works in is quite close to where I live in Hamble, apparently one of a number in the area, our town being a hotbed for very high tech electronics. Well, what do you know? I always thought Southampton was a very large dockside full (on occasion) of American tourists who’ve travelled here in order to go straight back to New York on a big boat; or an ugly fifties-built Brutalist concrete city that was full (on other occasions) with students travelling around in herds. And the headquarters of B&Q. Yeah, I know Shakespeare mentioned it in Henry V- the City Council are so proud of that that they’ve had the quote engraved on a flagstone outside The Red Lion pub - but medieval heritage doesn’t really employ that many people. To find out that I’ve been working in the pulsing centre of laser technology for the last five years is a little bit of a surprise. Tom grins when I tell him so, and says he’s been in the Southampton area for the last twenty or so years, ever since he came as a student and has never really been away.

I begin to wonder - as you do - about how the date is going. As far as I know I haven’t made any huge faux pas yet - at least not any that either Caro or Jess have enunciated carefully to me - or in Jess’s case to be honest, written down and made me learn by heart. It occurs to me that I’m actually having quite a nice time (while my subconscious is worrying about whether my feet are smelling now I’ve slipped off the stupidly twiddly shoes and whether the mascara I applied in that window is now half way down my cheeks. I don’t know how you’d gauge the progress of a date, but Jess - you might be surprised to find out - has a very fine-tuned first-date measurement system that has admittedly found her three husbands (and two divorces) but also a number of exciting and somewhat over-blown dates at places like the Ivy, Le Tour d’Argent and the coffee shop at Longleat. Her take goes something like this:

1) Greeting. (We covered this earlier. If they’re shaking hands, she heads for the cocktail bar and closes it off within an hour unless he redeems himself with either a) excellent conversation usually involving blue jokes or b) a good vintage champagne (see 5, below)

2) Do they know which fork to use? This one is a deal breaker for her. Jess is quite a flexible snob when it comes to men, though I have pointed out to her that it’s unlikely that a guy who takes her to the Ivy won’t know which fork is which. Her recent retort is that she’s been out with quite enough Americans for that not to be the case, and please, don’t mention the Aussies. To be honest, we often don’t on the grounds that the shouting usually gets us chucked out of the bar we’re in, and by the time we’re having this conversation, we’re mainly too comfortable to move, and also quite sloshed.

3) What colour socks have they got on? Apparently this is indicative of levels of either a) unsuitable humour or b) suitable passion; though Jess has yet to give me the lowdown on quite which socks mean what. For the record, Tom’s socks are bright blue.

4) Are they checking out other women - or men (Susie’s bloke Plu points out you could be a decoy for the guys down the pub) - while playing with their wine glass? This is a fundamental no-no to Jess though probably one introduced after husband number one began to dally with the barmaid. He said it was something about being less intellectually challenged, or just challenged overall, but no one likes a quitter - and we didn’t. Right from the start. Jess adds at this point if they are checking out other women, then make sure you accept their offer to pay - and make it obvious that you are in no way paying: “thank you so much for taking me out to dinner, it’s so kind of you.”

5) Jess also says that there is a relationship between the success of the date and the cost of the wine. She always lets him choose (she’s old-fashioned like that, though will have checked out the wine list and will pick her colour in order to steer away from truly terrible choices. Also, the tapas bar she often goes to after work now knows to up the choice of Rioja if her date plumps for the worst one). Given his choice, she will know just how much he wants to make a go of it by the level of option on the wine list. Apparently there’s a direct correlation, and she’s never been asked out again by a man that opted for the cheapest white, even though she may have been wined and dined in a Michelin-starred restaurant, where the cheapest white can start at £50 a bottle.

Caro, when asked her opinion, suggests that if he’s offered to grope your tits by the main course then it probably wasn’t going that well, but Jess did point out that it depends just quite what you’re up for. But they all agree that if the uncomfortable silence between the arrival of the main course and the point where you put your cutlery down is not that uncomfortable, then it’s probably going just about OK.

“So,” said Tom, as we waiting for the main course after the detritus of the crudités had been removed “how do you come to be here?”

I should probably admit that I’m here under orders. My friends have finally despaired of my being able to find a bloke for myself (“Yes, pick that one, the one with the nice smile, clean T-shirt and jean that just about fit. Not the one in the striped Moroccan Berber wool overcoat with the tasselled hood that still smells slightly of goat. No! NO! We give up. You’re not to be trusted.”) So they’ve decided to find one for me. I do trust them - albeit with an enormous amount of trepidation and quite a bit of complaint. I’m a bit worried that their choice might be a bit, well, boring for me.

Tom is the (second) result of a concerted and detailed process (not unlike that for recruiting staff Susie tells me) which has forensically evaluated all the single men that they know, are aware of, or have picked up in the wine aisle of the supermarket, and that have passed their “not a nutter” test. This specific, Evie-related, “really as your friends we can’t take it any longer”-test was drawn up in an old fashioned pub in the centre of our village where I was meeting up with (OK, let’s be honest - summoned to attend by) my best friends.

Friday evening, late March. Susie’s bloke Plu, who’d just arrived wandered over to the bar to chat to the newly arrived and very exotic (for Hamble) French barman in palatable Français, them having a mutual respect and enjoyment for wine and a shared interest in a good cellar. Caro, who was enjoying being out of her usual central London environment was already halfway through some of her favourite sparkling Sauvignon which looked extraordinarily appetising, her glass misting up to prove how perfectly chilled it was. She poured me some while Susie fetched some red for herself, having got bored waiting for the guys to come to a conclusion about a good year.

“They’re just moving on to producers,” she said as she sat down. “They could be some time. Shift up a bit.”

On one side of the heavy oak table were pew-like benches with comfortable cushions arranged on them like hassocks, and heavy chairs were drawn up on the other side.

“What time’s Jess meant to be here?” asked Susie, pulling up a seat

“Six,” said Caro. “Which means it will either be about now, or closer to seven o clock.”

I looked at my watch - just past five o’clock and the late Friday afternoon switch over from locals leaving work and others coming down from town for the weekend has begun to make a tidal ripple in the street outside. Jess breezes in conveniently at the time that we’re all just draining the dregs the bottom of our glasses -

“Alcoholics all of you,” she said, adding that she’s left her car outside my cottage, and goes to the bar to retrieve the specific bottle of wine that Susie’s other half has finally selected. Plu was now propping up the bar with a pint in his hand, having sensibly decided that at least the first 20 minutes of girl-talk, could be safely avoided. Now Jess was here I knew that my lovely, caring, Amazonian, steel-souled friends would get -very quickly - down to business.

I truly believe that everyone should have at least one proper dysfunctional relationship (though it may well be that if you haven’t had one, then I’ve had it for you. Yes, it was my pleasure to help you out there). I’m sure it’s one of the ways you learn how to actually identify (and be sure about) the guy that you actually should keep, though of course I agree that it hasn’t actually improved my ability to choose a good one to start with. The archetypal dysfunctional relationship generally involves some complete disaster, a lot of laughs (quite often at your own expense, and mostly from your closest friends) and undoubtedly some quite severe heartache. My latest Disastrous Bloke had left me gobsmacked and friendless at the airport on the way to a week in the highlands that we’d only planned two weeks before. I say - “left me at the airport” but actually he just stopped answering my calls the day before we were due to go. I went to the airport anticipating some majestic romantic gesture. We were taxiing down the runway by the time I realised that he truly had bailed on me. I got to Scotland, stayed with a mate in Edinburgh for a couple of days (crying mostly but also being shown some fantastically atmospheric pubs) and then went to the cottage in the Highlands that the D-B and I had booked. I read papers and shiny magazines and threw stones at rocks. This was early autumn last year - when we had those few days of brilliant sunshine? Then. At least it was sunny. To be honest, the shiny magazines didn’t last very long as they all seemed to have pictures of smiling, skinny, beautiful, probably rich girls marrying the boy of (this weeks) dreams. In fact, I threw some rocks at the shiny pictures too. Caro had lent me the DVD of Withnail and I which was much more to my supremely-let-down taste at the time and I spent a couple of days wondering about how I was going to get the Disastrous Bloke well and truly sodden and ruin his life. Unfortunately for me I haven’t got an appropriately odd uncle to send him to like they do in the film. Pity. After a while I stopped wanting to throw rocks at his head, and retrieved the celeb magazines to laugh at the horoscopes and check out the shoes on the red carpets.

The girls must have decided that by now I’m over the DB enough to be mildly rational (“as rational as you ever are” - thank you Jess) and hence the summons to the King and Queen for this summit on my dating future.

“You’ve got to admit, some arranged marriages are brilliant,” starts Caro, pushing her sensibly cut red-gold hair behind her ears and leaning forward purposefully. I’ve seen this gesture many many times over the last twenty years - we were at Uni together - and it means that she’s absolutely in earnest. As the designated “most sensible” in the group (she’s got two kids and a solid bloke called David for a husband that I’ve known as long as she has) she’s obviously been nominated as Chief Usher in this kangaroo court. “It’s not all psychopaths from Bolton and the boy down the road with the worst acne. Look at Fiddler on the Roof. They made it happen.”

“You’re suggesting that a 60s musical plotline is more successful than my own real love life?,” I say, somewhat acidly. I am a little bit on the defensive, wondering really quite where she was going with this. There’s enough arranged-dating car- crash TV around to seriously put you off the idea, though if Cilla was still around I might consider it.

“You can say quite a lot for 60s musical plotlines,” says Jess demurely, folding her elegant long legs under the table. I shoot her a wicked look - I usually count on Jess to go along with my logic-less self-indulgences.

“Mind, I wouldn’t say no to Daniel Craig,” I say, trying it on a little.

“Too late, he’s taken.”

“And he could be another calamity as well,” continued Susie. “Fair enough he looks fantastic in an Armani suit and can abseil in a DJ without straining the seams on his trousers but there’s got to be something narcissistic about wanting to be shot at by everyone. And with all that film set food you’d balloon to the size of a house. No, you need - just for once - someone a bit more ordinary.”

“I thought the rest of what you call my “nutters CALAMITIES” were ordinary. Well mostly anyway”

The noisy babble of incredulity that meets this statement takes a bit of time to fade back to normal conversational levels. I suspect we’re beginning to sound more like a hen party than a council of war.

“We’re convinced you need someone else to pick for you.” Thank you so much, Susie.

“Your track record is abominable and we’re fed up of having to follow conversations with the loonies, geeks and intriguing nutcases that you are in the habit of finding attractive,” added Jess. This was uncharacteristically generous for her. She’d often told me in much more uncertain words just quite how much of a ******** my boyfriend of the time had been.

“But I quite like being single,” I say, in defence. Of what I’m not sure. I don’t really like being single at all. No one to holiday with, no one to cook dinner for, no one to throw cushions at in the middle of a storming row. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a paranoid homemaker with my biological clock banging loudly in my ears all day long, but they were right as they jeered at this. I’m good at being single (better maybe than being in a relationship) but that really doesn’t mean I like it much.

“We’ve come up with a plan to arrange something for you,” continued Caro

“What is this, some kind of 21st Century debutante advertising scheme?”

“Well, you’re not good at online dating.” (This is a tad of an understatement. I tend to be terribly nice to everyone, go out on a couple of (always) dreadful dates, then get annoyed by how idiotic some of the men are, shout at them online and cancel my account in a fit of pique. You could call that “not good”).

“And speed dating is not an option,” added Jess (again, I tend to make better friends with the other girls that are there than the guys. So far, three speed dating evenings all of them in Jess’ company and none of my ticks have ever ticked me. Maybe it’s something I say. Jess has picked up at least three while not trying, each of which she put back, to her credit).

“So we’re left with blind dates.”

“You’re going to choose for me?” I ask, wincing.

“Yes!” they chorus, looking extremely pleased with themselves. Oh dear.

I suppose they had a point. My track record was possibly the worst in our circle of friends. Even Stephen Smith, expert in the sub-ten minute pickup had managed at least one 10 year relationship in the last 25 years. Although I had been out with a few guys for a reasonably long length of time (and one of our friends had been dated, married and divorced in the time I’d spent with one non-committing boyfriend), None of the relationships were likely to be written up as a documented success, and to be honest, I’d stumbled into so many dodgy relationships accidentally that letting them pick a couple of dates for me could be OK. It would certainly stress me out less, and they looked like they were warming up to the idea being a whole load of fun. And who was I to stop my best friends having fun?

Susie’s bloke, Plu, finally joined us at the table just as David tapped on the window, mobile pressed to his ear. You could see he was frustrated. He made tipping gestures which Plu immediately understood and waved a bottle of Stella in a lazy way at the window which brought thumbs- up from David and a big grin. Plu poured us more of the lovely wine that his mate the French barman had produced from an old box in the back of the cellar.

“So how are you going to do this then?” asked Plu, obviously filled in way before I was. I’m sure I pouted.

“We,” corrected Susie. “You’re in this too.”

“I’m not good at this.”

“You know loads of people. You even set me up with some of them before you got round to asking me out yourself,” retorted Susie.

“We need some kind of reference point,” said David, finally closing down his mobile phone with a last frustrated gesture of his hands and reaching for his beer with the sigh of one in love. Blast, another conspirator. David was also struck off my list of potential defenders. Damn. No one left.

“A nutter list,” said Jess.

“Probably ‘Not-a-nutter’ list to be fair,” said Caro, drawing a large grin from Jess, who pulled out a notepad from her capacious (but beautifully stylish) leather tote bag.

“Right,” she said, looking around at her audience like an actress just about to take command of the whole stage (or maybe a Brown Owl at a Brownie meeting. I wasn’t feeling generous) “Where shall we start?”

Tom is one of Susie’s finds. Apparently they ran into each other some years ago (so he tells her - though she’s damned if she can remember) and he’s been in and around her community of colleagues, friends and acquaintances for some years. Tom shares an office with one of Susie’s previous squeezes and while he’s not strictly her type, he’s apparently far enough from my normal type of nutter (Jess’s words) to be a perfect example of the kind of guy my friends think I should go out with. The fact that he’s based somewhere near Southampton and we might have some interests in common is just a bit of icing on their particular choice of cake.

We’re on the main course, and I’m gratified that we both chose steak. Although this may be more to do with it being probably the less embarrassing dish to eat (how are you supposed to bone a skate’s wing?) than any immediate meeting of minds. Tom is talking self-deprecatingly about a project he’s been working on with one of the larger techie companies in the area. He said it was doing something interesting for dentists: he’d consoled himself that while the project was by no means as sexy the ones that involved as getting a satellite to talk to another one using microwaves bouncing around on the International Space Station, the dentist project might have a more global appeal, or at least application. Apparently there’s been a big growth in laser type work for dental treatment and someone needs to make the electronics that ensure the lasers fix your teeth rather than draw a big grinning emoticon on your forehead. I tell him I’ll take it as read, at which he gives me a huge and, for the first time, quite relaxed smile which transforms his slightly angular face into one with the potential for a lot of fun.

What do you talk about on a first date? I’m interested. And what do you actually want to know? I can almost hear Susie and Jess sitting on my shoulders and whispering topics of conversation into my ears. Problem is, most of the questions that spring to mind are the ones they want to know about, not anything that might be right for in that slightly awkward moment between the removal of the detritus of the crudités and the taste of the overcooked steak. (Susie tells me that it’s worth being conservative with the food as a date might not think the fact that you’re wearing your Singapore noodles is that appealing). Jess would be asking about which city break he would choose for a second date. No, you’re right, she has no shame. She’s pulled off Prague, Paris (inevitably - her first husband had no imagination) and, most recently New York for the weekend- this one is truly besotted. Mind you, her second husband took her at her word and whipped her off to the wildest of West Wales and the smallest city in the UK. I think she was so surprised at being in a Welsh village with no Starbucks that when he asked her to marry him she said yes.

Part of Susie’s first date routine would be to check out his shoes. Apparently this is a good indicator of commitment (are they clean - he’s therefore made some kind of effort) and lifestyle (brogues for her on a date are a no-no unless he’s come straight from the office).

Caro says that she might be too busy concentrating on the food (she herself is a lousy cook) and to be honest, she and David got together at a university party which was so abundant in dodgy sangria that none of us can remember any conversation whatsoever. David says that all he remembers is that she was excellent with a bucket and didn’t talk too loudly in the morning. Not really a lot to go on there, when we are all grown up and supposedly civilised.

Jess’s “Not-a-nutter-list”, when finally written, edited, tested for appropriateness and actually the realistic chance that there was a guy out there that might meet all of its criteria, was actually quite short. I wondered how they had measured Tom up against it. I had been allowed to put in some criteria of my own, but they had whittled my longish list down to only two. I thought that including “interesting hobbies” was fair enough, but Susie said it was up to me to adapt to believing his hobbies were interesting, or to become elegantly supportive. It therefore was of no consequence that someone who liked “watching cricket” was “too boring for words.” This was apparently indicative of my bad approach to finding the right guy. Thanks, I said. By the way, the two that they did let me have were “broad shoulders”, and “own teeth”, though we had had a bit of a fight about the latter and agreed that “teeth that had originally been made in a dentists lab but were attached as though they were original would be OK . The final list, edited by Jess, looked like this:

Essential:

Must be holding down a “normal” job (as agreed by David who understands normal and is an un-biased observer)

Ideally has some education

Mustn’t have too much education

Ideally isn’t divorced more than once

Spends 90% of his time living in his own home (i.e. not abroad or around the country)

But not with his mum or his ex-wife

Is not more than five years younger or five years older than Evie

Is solvent

Is straight

Lives within 30 miles of Southampton

Non-essential (but we had to put them in for Evie):

Broad Shoulders

Own teeth

I harrumphed a bit (I wasn’t sure that David was as unbiased as all that) but as there wasn’t anything that I could really complain about I let it stand. Having thought a bit about some of my previous liaisons, I did wonder if they had a point - but I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of actually saying that.

The first date that they had organised - a friend of Plu’s whom he’d come across at work - was very nice but we didn’t hit it off. He’d taken me for a drink at the Jolly Sailor in Bursledon, a bit of a risk as I was always likely to see someone I knew. Although we’d had a very pleasant evening (and he’d had broad-ish shoulders - though I can’t now stop thinking that they weren’t anything like as nice as Tom’s) that frisson of attraction hadn’t been there, I think for either of us.

But they had really been rather persistent about Tom. Feeling slightly bruised after the let-down of the first date I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go out quite so soon on another - after all it was me that was doing all the heavy lifting by having to go on the dates in the first place - but they persuaded me. Characteristically, Caro was loving about it and played the emotional blackmail card at the same time “Oh but Susie’s done all this work to get the guy to believe it’s a good idea;” Susie just looked hurt and Jess told me to buck my ideas up and get on with it. Of course, I had been excited before I got here - once I’d got my head around the idea - and just a little bit anxious. And now I had a bit more anxiety because Tom was, as they’d insisted, a really nice guy.

The steak is surprisingly good and also makes me think that Tom does, indeed, have mostly his own teeth, which is a bonus. Tom is a bit of a connoisseur of good meat. Apparently his best friend from school was brought up on a dairy farm and they regularly ate locally butchered beef from cows he’d spent a much of his early childhood poking with a stick. Tom’s from an urbanised village outside Bristol, one of those that in the ’70s was almost isolated from the city, with a village shop and a pub and a post office. Since then, urban sprawl in the ’80s and ’90s implanted new developments so that the bus route out to Churchill now has no definable distinction between the suburbs of Bristol and the villages of North Somerset. Tom’s sister lives in Portishead close to the marina and he and his brother in law often cycle on the back routes to the Crown Inn for a good pint of bitter and a girl-free chat. I admit that all I know about Portishead is that there was a band from the town in the 90s who specialised in teenage-angst-thrash (apparently now known as trip-hop. Who knew?), and I continually get them muddled up with Radiohead. Tom laughs and we acknowledge we share a school-disco nostalgia for 80s pop; but Tom admits to a recent but committed passion to J.S. Bach and waxes lyrical on Yo-Yo Ma’s recording of the six solo cello suites. I tell him my knowledge of classical music runs to “Here comes the Bride” and the track that’s used for the Hovis advert, but I’m willing to learn.

“But what are you into?” he asks.

Now, here’s a true challenge. Do I tell him what I’m really into (old re-runs of 80s drama series, leaping off cliffs only attached to an 8mm rope and ridiculously high-heeled shoes) or something that might sound a bit less mad? Susie and Caro have been very strict on this point

“You can tell him about messing around in boats,” Susie said, “but don’t tell him about every boat you’ve been on. You’ll not be in Hamble and anywhere else it smacks of obsession.”

“And don’t tell him you bought your favourite shoes from a fetish shop,” warns Caro.

“It was a dare,” I say, reasonably, “one of yours.”

“They didn’t need to be that high,” sniffs Caro, still smarting at having lost that one. I made her try on some latex as a forfeit.

I grin. “So what can I tell him about?”

“Tell him you like travel and reading,” says Susie, thinking back to the last time she helped me put my CV together and we were trying to find something that sounded interesting but not like a mad adrenaline junkie. Susie thinks that applying for jobs requires the same sort of cautious approach as first dates. I worry that Tom will think I’m interviewing for middle management.

“The last time I went on holiday I walked up a mountain in the Himalayas with Jess. How do I make that sound normal?”

“Well, you did go with Jess,” says Caro reasonably. “You were hardly camping out in bivvy bags in the wide open spaces.”

I nod - while we had flown to Pokhara in a wobbly 14 seater, marvelling at the mountains of the Annapurna range out of the windows, the spa and glacier-water pool at the Himalayan Hilton had been surrounded with bougainvillea and Nepalese honeysuckle. Jess never stayed down market if she could possibly avoid it.

So we talk about places we’d visited. Tom’s recently been cycling around the South of France, which sounds terribly energetic until he reveals that the main goal of the trip was to fit in as many of the vineyards of Burgundy as possible. Even I’ve heard of Chateauneuf du Pape (I’ve read a lot of wine lists) and Tom’s description of his two mates and him wobbling down the centre of a French road after a particularly good session of “wine tasting” while a local shepherd was driving his flock in the other direction made me giggle. I tried not to snort (not a good look). I tell him about the ex-Gurkha Nepalese we met half way up a mountain who spoke fluent Glaswegian and the miracle of the view when you stagger up the last steps in Ghorepani to see the Himalaya suddenly in front of you. We talk about altitude sickness - he in the middle of the Atlas Mountains slightly affected with a crashing headache, and I, at sunrise on Poon Hill (don’t be misled - it’s twice the height of Ben Nevis. It’s just small in comparison with Annapurna) where I danced and sang like a kid and giggled all the way down until we reached about 2500 metres when I suddenly sobered up, mildly embarrassed. I told him about the magical time I’d first seen dolphins playing on the bow of a yacht, but admittedly not about the many other trips when I’d sat on the side of a boat in the rain for the benefit of just an hour in a real Cherbourg bistro before the 15 hour trip back again. Anyway, I’d stopped doing that now.

Over pudding (something gooey and rhubarb-y and delicious) he tells me about his colleagues at work. Their office sounds like a bit of a blast. Inevitably it’s mostly men - my feminist indignation about the overabundance of men in electronic companies is always tempered by my own personal inability to understand any kind of physics or engineering whatsoever. I can barely wire a plug. Their office environment sounds like a cross between a cageful of NASA wannabes and the design shop for a model railway company, and more the latter than the first. Tom loses me in a slightly detailed (for me - more than “we’ve switched it on” is detailed) description of some control electronics they’d designed but has my full attention when he explains that they tested it by rigging a double-O gauge railway around the shelving of the office (putting up shelves as required) and running it through the air vent in and out of the kitchen area. God knows what it was actually eventually for - it’s now used for delivering coffee apparently, and I wonder if Caro and Jess knew about that before certified him as having passed their “not-a-nutter” test. I’m inclined to think not.

Susie tells me that the company is well thought of in the industry, which doesn’t surprise me. They’re a bunch of enthusiastic kids and a saleswoman’s dream. Susie says that they come across as the most disorganised - albeit lively- bunch that she works with. But that when it comes to getting things done, they’re way ahead of the competition. Last time she was working with them and they got stuck on a problem they couldn’t’ solve they all shipped out on to the company rigid inflatable boat and drove around the Solent (Susie and boss in tow) until they came up with an idea to fix it. The RIB even had a mini whiteboard on it. I got the feeling from Susie that Tom was the one who kept the more loony of his colleagues in some kind of check, though it was a close run thing.

“So how do you know Susie?” asked Tom.

How indeed.

Some projects seem blessed from the beginning - a good natured team, a client that knows what they want and is happy to pay for it, a budget that can realistically deliver all you need it to deliver, and a timescale that is firm but sensible (and not whimsically based on the date of the client’s wife’s birthday - and I’m not joking about that - that one was a disaster). Some projects have a few niggles, a crotchety customer or a stupid deadline that you just might be able to meet if everything else goes perfectly right. Sometimes it does.

And then there are the troll projects. You know you’re doomed from the start. The one where the client resembles Voldemort. The deadline is like the first day of the Athens Olympics and the team have been gathered together (in the most part) from the Millwall Supporters Club circa 1980 or the foot soldiers of Mordor; or both. I even forget what we were trying to do. Perhaps it’s like childbirth when (so Caro tells me, unconvincingly) the pain is so bad your subconscious wipes away a whole part of your memory so you can stomach doing it again. All I have is flashbacks; some kind of Post-Development Stress Disorder: Susie and I, software developers so geeky they could have been used as integral parts of the system themselves, working late into the night in Portsmouth on a Thursday when one of HM Ships had just come in. Our team had decanted from the office to an unusually trendy Belgian beer bar in Southsea and while they scratched their beardy growths over a Duvel, Tripal or Orval, Susie and I decided that in order to (further) blot out the torture that was this computer project we would go to a dive just off the Clarence Parade that was heaving with 20-something straight-off-the-warship sailors.

I’m not really quite sure why we went there. I’m sure we thought it was a good idea at the time. You know the kind of place - condensation dripping from the ceiling, mostly dressed local girls shuffling around on the dance floor ignoring the blokes around the edges who were pretending to ignore the girls. Ten minutes after arriving we realised with relief that there was a tiny balcony out the back which had a couple of teenagers eating each other’s faces in the corner who disappeared somewhat sheepishly after we brazenly (I’m sure that’s how they saw it) plonked our thirty-something selves down at the only table and gasped in the slightly cleaner, less fetid air. Evenings like that tend to cement acquaintances into friendships, and so it was with Susie and I. After difficult days on the project we’d grab a glass of wine in the local wine bar and after some time she invited me to come down to stay in her fascinating little village of Hamble when on one breezy Saturday she’d inadvertently got me hooked on sailing as I tagged along on a sail-powered trip for a beach barbecue.

Susie had dirty-blonde hair that seemed continually tousled though occasionally she would put it up. Apparently one of her clients always booked more work if she hoisted it into a chignon and plastered it down with mouse. She tended to do that towards the end of the quarter, but only if she was close to her bonus targets as she said it was such a hassle. She was tall and slim - a touch taller than me and much more slight. She complained that she was gangly (no woman is ever happy). She always had a nightmare trying to find jeans and trousers to fit, even with her perfect size 12 everything else. It was one of the things I loved about her and it made me feel slightly less self-conscious about my incredible hulk - sorry, Jess would be on my case for that - my broad shoulders. Some people might think she was a bit staid, in the same way that they assumed Jess was a bit posh, but I’d seen her ruthlessly carving a sailing boat through a fleet of less determined skippers and I remembered that sweaty nightclub in Southsea and her terrible, gigglesome 80s dancing in front of those oh-so-impressionable 20year old ratings.

Some time ago, before Plu appeared, at least as a boyfriend, Susie had been out with a guy called Martin who worked with Tom in the electronics firm. They’d stayed pretty good friends - it had only been brief - and over a conspiratorial beer in the Rising Sun in Warsash with Martin that they’d hatched the plan to get me and Tom to this restaurant.

Jess asserts that guys are less likely to talk their friends into blind dates. When they met up for what David calls their “Fix Evie Summit”, Caro disputed this, as her teacher friends are continually trying to set people up; at least they say they are. David looked somewhat shocked when it was suggested that he fix up blind dates, though I’m not sure whether that was because he was worried about the blind date thing or that he was worried that the blind date thing would be with me. However, that conversation prepped Susie for her approach. She later admitted that she and Martin and a couple of others in his team had spent an entertaining and not entirely unboozy evening I suspect, strategising as to how they might get Tom to come out on a date. They reckoned he was probably the shyest person in the office and they’d never seen him with anyone. I think they’d come up with some kind of sweepstake cum peer pressure in cahoots with the rest of the team: a tombola draw or some such. Yes, I was truly flattered when I found out. The draw was so transparently fixed that Tom went along with it on the basis that it he couldn’t think of a good reason to do otherwise: they were so obviously convinced it was a good idea he couldn’t - or wouldn’t argue. I was heartily hoping that he wasn’t regretting it, as I did, despite myself, find I really quite liked him.

We had coffee (he’s a cappuccino man) which came with some delicious looking dark chocolate truffles. I don’t much like truffles. You know the gooey bit inside, which Caro tells me, is really the best bit? For some reason it reminds me of snails. No, don’t ask me why. I know that’s revolting. But I find them really slimy. Truffles are these gooey bits surrounded often by the best Belgian chocolate which is terribly yummy and if I was alone then I would eat the outside of the truffle and leave the snail from the inside. But I’m trying to make a good impression here. Tom can’t believe that I don’t like truffles (I really don’t want to explain about the snails. Not on a first date. Would you?) but seems overjoyed to have two. I love the way his face lights up - he’s actually quite a smiler and that’s a really nice thing. I hope I’m making a good impression but he may just be very, very polite.

The end of a first dinner is really difficult if you don’t have a train to catch or a deadline for anything. I don’t know how long we talked over coffee but at the point when it seemed likely that the restaurant would quite like to pack up and go home (they offered us the bill - ever so politely) we split the money and left. He insisted on walking me to my car (he also insisted it was on his way) and refused a lift home - it was a beautiful clear night and I could see the attraction of a late night pedal through town. I gave him my number (he asked - hurray!) and drove home, all the way feeling the imprint of the kiss that he’d given me on my cheek.