A few months after finding myself single again I met Captain Climbaboard, who lived at an attractive address in Surrey, was separated in the established sense and had a nice big boat moored at Gosport (let’s not cloud the important facts with peripheral detail). Captain C worked in the city helping to finance large European business parks; he was charming, tall and fantastically good on paper. He invited me out on his boat after a couple of dates and although I was concerned that I knew nothing of seafaring ways save for how to shop on a cross-channel ferry, there was palpable excitement at the prospect of “letting slip” how I had spent the weekend to my cirque des amis. 

Having completed a lightening-quick sortie to Marks and Spencer to acquire the right style and colour bikini, a couple of casual sarongs and some food we could cook in the galley (this was one serious boat ..) I headed off for Gosport marina … or one of them, to be fair. 

Now, Captain C had made a great job of selling himself and his availability in terms of “dropping his relationship anchor” again sometime soon. He had spoken of the qualities he was attracted to in women and had even gone so far as to lean over the dinner table on the our first date and whisper “I think you could keep me occupied for a number of years …” The ocean looked settled and the forecast was fair to good.

We consequently spent a rather blissful weekend in an inlet on the Isle of Wight. The sun blazed down, the water lapped up the side of the boat and all that you could hear was the laughter of fellow sailors moored a few hundred yards away. So when he recounted in the middle of the Solent on our way back to Gosport the tale of how his affair with his wife’s best friend had led to the breakdown of his marriage and his subsequent questioning by police over allegations that he had attacked said best friend on his boat (yes, this very boat …) you can imagine my concern. To be fair, all charges were dropped in his case, but my jury was firmly out and out it stayed.

When I found myself  footloose and fancy-free a few years ago I was in a rather mixed state of mind. I should have whooped for joy at the prospect of the oncoming adventure that was “dating” given that I was older, wiser and now able to stay out after the eleven o’clock curfew. In practice I felt a sense of unease; I had anticipated pitfalls (the most obvious being that my son had to take priority in any future romantic pairing) but also there was a nagging concern that the years that had possibly not been kind to us newly appointed singletons in terms of  ”life lessons learnt”. Boy, was I right on that.

Captain C proceeded during drinks back at Gosport marina to talk of how ice-cold his wife had been and how even his soon-to be-ex father-in-law had spoken of how he understood Captain C’s motives as his daughter was as emotionally stunted as her mother. Cheers, Dad. 

At the end of the weekend I wondered who he had confused me for exactly. Admittedly the boat was a great hook, but the accompanying storyline would have needed more than Johnny Depp in the starring role to curry anything that even resembled sympathy. The truth was that he was nowhere near ready to date; you saw that from how quickly the memory of his last tempest bubbled to the surface.

Now, let’s be frank here. People go “a little bit crazy” when they come out of long-term relationships. I’m not sure whether it’s an exuberance brought on by what they deem as “freedom” or a desperate attempt to prove to themselves and their entire peer group that they can still attract the opposite sex without trying “too hard”. More often than not it’s both. 

Captain C  is sadly just one of a number of men who has displayed a common thread of behaviour when it comes to dating; they like the idea of relationships,  they even say they want “someone special” in their lives but when they spot land ahoy the truth is a relationship is the last thing they want or need. So they generally head back for the deep blue sea. The sea that has plenty more fish in it. 

Inevitably there is something still hovering from their past coupling that means they cannot commit to another voyage with you or anybody else.

I’ve espied this behaviour in men so many times now in the course of three years that not only do I account for it, I have erected a harbour wall so high around me that I doubt the most tidal of male waves wouldn’t penetrate.

Enough of this maritime talk; it’s left me contemplating Johnny Depp scaling my impenetrable wall.

Who says women can’t be shallow?

My friends, I stand before you today a woman concerned, nay, alarmed at the gradual disappearance of punctuation from this glorious language of ours. It appears that the comma, colon and semi-colon have reached the endangered species list, and the full stop isn’t too far behind them. Add to this the growing epidemic that is “text speak” and we are, I fear, witnessing the destruction of the written word as we know it. This of course is great news for people who never fared well in their English lessons, but those of us who bathed and luxuriated in the formation of our prose are appalled.

I ask you to take up arms and annihilate this silent enemy that resides amongst us, thanks to text messaging and the social networking revolution. Do not succomb to it’s seductive ways! Clasp your thesaurus close to your breasts and scream “get thee behind me!” to the phenomenon that lulls you into laziness and, quite frankly, makes you look a bit of a nerd unless you happen to be sixteen.

The capitalisation of letters is getting scarcer by the day and increasingly abbreviated “text-speak” seems to be the preferred mode of written communication. I can’t quite work out if people have grown so languid that they can’t be bothered to reach for the shift key, or maybe it’s related to self-esteem …. as in “i am not worthy, i am not the big ‘I am’ ”

“LMAO what causes this tirade?” I hear you cry …. (I have to confess I am quite prone to LOL, and quite frequently LMAO, too  ;-) )

Well, a few weeks ago I received an e-mail from a chap giving me a potted history of his relationships (and the chap concerned is divorced and in his mid-forties so let’s describe his history as “involved” … not unlike my own, in fact). The message in question measured fifteen centimetres on my screen so the fact that it was “involved” made it “lengthy”. 

At no point did said chap use a capital letter or any punctuation, nor did he pause to break his tale up into paragraphs. 

Consequently I believe I missed the detail of the last two significant relationships he’d endured through feeling compelled to speed to the end so that I could take a breath. I have to give him credit for the fact that he had skillfully injected pace into his story. I, on the other hand, felt like the oxygen had been mysteriously sucked out of my office.

When I mentioned some time ago to someone that good grammar and spelling were  of such important to me that I believed it made me incompatible with certain men, he replied “maybe you’d have better luck with men if you lowered your standards”. Once you see past the obvious hilarity of this statement the sad reality sets in that our standards are dropping so low that we will need to scoop them up out of the gutter at some point soon. If we can be bothered.

And if you use Twitter you are limited to one hundred and forty characters, so embarking on a roll about a particular subject isn’t an option. Don’t think of gathering pace and working up to a peak because ….. your text box will turn red to advise you that your Tweet is now a long-winded Twarble so you’d better cut it back. Consequently you see many brief messages like “ice cream, iPhone, iTweet” which are brief, punchy …. and totally banal. 

In conclusion, I suspect this all makes me quite anal …. but not in the way Madonna was. No wonder I’m single. LMAO.

I wonder how many column inches have been given over to this subject; what is it that women really look for in men, or more specifically, what sets a thoroughbred apart from the rest of the neddies? 

Over what seems like way too many years I’ve listened to men presupposing that the answer is always physical …. girls obviously go for a six-pack and toned, taut rear-ends, right? Along with …. now, how would Jane Austen phrase this …. an attribute of a certain proportion?  Not so. At least not so in this girl’s case. The truth of the matter is that we will always stare agog at the latest David Beckham underwear campaign, and we will continue to make much bawdiness on the subject of Johnny Depp, but that is simply because we enjoy cackling in our coven over such matters. We like to strengthen the ties that bind us in this lewd way. It’s a girl thing.

No. What really gets our frissons a-fizzing is a tad more subtle, but not too difficult to grasp thereon. Now I should hold my hand up and state for the record that this is just one female opinion in a myriad of oestrogen, but it is a toned, taut observation at that.

A woman on the brink of a bubbling surge wants a man who takes hold of the situation by the sphericals, not one who plays it safe with talk of tenderness and other such nonsense. A man like Malcolm Tucker.

Sadly Malcolm Tucker is but a fictional character, brought to life by Armando Iannucci in the BBC series The Thick of It; I would suggest typing his name into YouTube to appreciate the full impact of his unsympathetic prowess if you are unacquainted thus far. Be sure to gird your loins if you are of a sensitive nature, as Malcolm takes no prisoners when it comes to making full use of expletives wherever and whenever possible. 

Let me paint a picture … you’re at the check-in desk for your flight to New York, the gateway to a weekend break for the two of you when the check-in clerk tells you the flight is double-booked and you’re going to have to wait three hours until the next one. Not only would Malcolm strike terror so deep into the heart of clerk that she will probably need three months of counselling afterwards, but he would get you both upgraded. Such is the impact of the Malcolm Tucker factor. 

Now he may on occasion turn these explosive tirades on his woman, but I only see that as a plus. Personally I would welcome the gilt-edged opportunity to wrestle him to the floor and secure a capitulation. Deep down he would be so shocked at my unbeknown and concealed power that I would catch him completely off balance. Men like Malcolm Tucker need to be caught off balance once in a while. As a child he put the “Tuf” into the Tufty Club so pulling the rug is entirely acceptable.

And so from “tuf” to tender… I’ve already made mention of talk of tenderness. Again, it is strictly one woman’s opinion but the only time I want to use the word tender is when discussing aspragus and the cooking thereof, it’s not something I want to read in a text message …. “I want to give you the tenderest of kisses” …. I’m sorry, but that’s just straight out of the Blue Peter School of Seduction handbook.

I suppose my yearning for a little of the laconic stuff stems from the fact that practically all the men from my past could not have come up with one well-formed backbone between them. One in particular had the confrontational ability of a stick of candy-floss, a 6ft4 stick of candy-floss to be exact.

Admittedly it’s a fine line between desire and disdain, and of course Malcolm Tucker is as an extreme example of forthrightness as you could wish to find (but let’s not forget he is only fictional… sadly)

When all is said and done there’s more to the ritual of sexual enticement than a well-timed bluster, but it makes for a great opening yelp.

The day I became a mother was without a doubt the happiest of my life. Seeing my newborn son’s eyes stare so intensely into mine told me unequivocally that life as I had known it had ceased. A new era was born, along with Benjamin Lee, 7lbs 4.5ozs; an era of responsibility, of caring and of waiting to scoop him up after his numerous falls and scrapes to kiss him better. Tending and nurturing …. tending and nurturing.

The tending and the nurturing comes easily to most women of course; the need to pick up a crying baby and soothe it better is innate. What isn’t quite so natural is knowing that the time is right to stand back and let our children fall over, scrape their knees and learn from the experience. Or to tell your five year old son that he really should now be wiping his own behind ……..  ”but mummyyyyyyyy …..”

For the most part I’ve relented ….”oh bless his heart  …. he needs his mama to do it ….”, and then today – bang!! – it hit me. I am potentially rearing a man who will suck the lifeblood out of his future partner just like most of my ex’s did with me, preferring to let her wipe his behind whilst he carries on reading the paper …. “oh come on darling, I know you have to pop off to work … (which FTSE100 company is it you’re in charge of  now?)…. but you do it sooo much better than me …” I have grown visibly ashen just typing out the words. 

And I am reasonably sure I’ve played the role of WOB (Wiper of the Behind ) so well that I’ve attracted men who could not exist without a woman around to W their B’s, metaphorically speaking. Their tiny little worlds are hanging on the most fragile of threads most of the time …. and yes, you may be performing the role of some latter day superheroine holding down a job, rearing a child and running a house, but surely you can sit and listen to their latest boring lament of political in-fighting at work? You know the one? You’ve heard it a thousand times before ….. and it never gets any more interesting. 

Now … I should stop there. For the moment. 

I’m starting to sound unsympathetic, which of course I’m not …. but someone kicked over my sandcastle earlier today and it sent me into a turbo-charged rage. The poor, poor mite had sent me a text to say he was having to fly off for the weekend to see his mates in Bucharest because he was “fed up” …. and he then went on to infer that it was because I had cancelled a date with him earlier this week (this is a man I haven’t even met face to face , and now I’m thinking that isn’t going to change …) Let’s call him Mr FU …. Mr Fed Up. 

At this juncture I’m also reminded of a man who I conversed with briefly having “met” him via Facebook, who professed love for me after six e-mail exchanges. In fact it may have been only five …. or four …

He was American (still is as far as I know), an actor (not a household name …) and playwright (I love a man who uses his words better than his hands). What can I say? I was charmed. Actually to be exact, I was stupid and charmed.

Our relationship did not evolve past a few telephone calls that made it quite evident that “conformity” was not a word he would ever associate to bedroom activities. I feel I want to christen him Cat in the Hat …. I’m not too sure why.

If I give the impression that I’m ridiculing these men then please let me reassure you …. absolutely I am! But I am ridiculing myself more, because I allowed it to happen, and I attracted “the type” over and over and over … Yes, rather incredibly I am still hopeful that a balanced, emotionally-mature and secure man is out there somewhere thinking “where is she??”

But for now I have to work on making sure my son knows his behind is his responsibility. You can’t possibly leave the weight of that to a woman.

A friend commented the other day that although my posts were well-written, they were perhaps a tad long; this immediately sent me into a state of perplexed anxiety given my aptitude for gathering observational momentum after around eight hundred words, before I soar into my all-knowing, “moral-of-this-tale” closing paragraph. Doug (said friend) comes from a position of knowledge (he’s an editor), so I would be foolish to not take on board his words of wisdom …..OK …  Hmmm… Edit? Keep it brief? Me? Seriously ….?

It did lead me to thinking about the point at which a reader goes from being satisfyingly entertained to yawning and flipping back onto Facebook, Twitter or whatever their particular addiction is. Or perhaps they keep on reading in the hope that it’s going to get better, a little bit like the film I watched on Saturday night (which didn’t, incidentally …. “The Illusionist” with Edward Norton … ejected after thirty minutes)

So, clearly the knack is to seize the imagination quickly, decisively and without mercy. A bit like circling romantic prey. A lot like it, actually.

I’m not talking about the meandering little foray you both take initially, where furtive glances are exchanged and mildly suggestive language is toyed with; it’s the point at which you see the green light well and truly illuminated. It’s time to strike. Going back over this passage I’m more than a little concerned that I’m using hunting and war-like metaphors in association with relationships; this is something I need to address with professional help at some point, I fear.

I suspect a seasoned and skilled journalist will tell you a good headline will grab quicker than anything, so with my usual limited ability to get beyond the obvious I go with something provocative or suggestive (ideally both); it’s cheap and it works (unlike our parliamentary system, it seems).

Who is great at maintaining an audience? Well, I’d have to say none surpass Barack Obama at the moment. Even black and white images of the man mesmerise me. He dresses well, he has an air of composed self-belief, and as soon as he ventures to open his mouth to speak you know you will be tuned in until he desists. He is, I believe, the greatest orator of my lifetime. Even my mother can forgive the fact that he smokes ….. and that is no mean feat, I assure you.

It appears it’s not the initial gripping that’s the real challenge here, but the maintenance of said grip.

Like I said … just like relationships.

Those who know me well will confirm that I tend to notice patterns arising … not of the paisley or floral variety, but via occurrences in everyday life. I see it as a process designed to awaken my spiritual awareness and this week the topic of “telling it as it is” has been bothering me …. not sugaring the pill … spitting it out …. and so forth. Interesting that we use metaphors associated with taste, the mouth or the ejection of it’s contents in connection with efforts to say what we’re thinking, ask what we really want to know or impart sensitive information. Our feelings and thoughts originate in our hearts, our minds, our souls …. and yet there is the impression that the mouth is the holding bay until we give voice to them. 

I read only this morning that in order to speak your absolute truth you have to be entirely disinterested with the ensuing opinions of others …. how true. 

Some years ago I worked as a sales account manager in London for a reasonably prestigious company, and my direct report was to a man who legitimately prefixed his name with “The Right Honourable” ….I kid you not. Picture the scene, girl from the north with table manners and plenty of sales experience is working for well-educated, terribly well-spoken public school chap (let’s call him the RH for the mildly comedic purpose).

I suspected from the off that my relationship with the RH was destined to have an air of unease about it; I could never put my finger on it (nor did I particularly want to, if I’m honest) but there was a sense of twitching discomfort whenever we were in the same room together. This was possibly borne out of the fact that the RH was told to employ me by his direct superior, an old sales director of mine. I don’t think RH’s take too kindly to being told to take on a filly they’ve not had some hand in selecting; certainly this one didn’t.

Then after a sales appointment one day he came out with it ….. “you can be so direct on occasion …. it’s so harsh …..”   I think the fact that as a sales person you were actually supposed at some point to be direct and close the deal had escaped him …. but there you have it. And over the years a couple of other male colleagues made the same comment about me.

I have to hold my hand up and say I see it as a compliment; there seems to be so many people who fiddle around the outskirts of a topic and never really cut to the chase. For some reason they cannot bring themselves to ask the question or say what is really on their minds … Maybe because if they raise their heads above the parapet someone will take a shot at them; of  course that’s a risk …. but surely we should all be prepared to take a critical bullet if something needs saying?

Mr Distant Cynic was always superbly direct … for the most part. We would often drag ourselves wearily through a communication drought when he needed to ask a sensitive question, I guess in the hope that I would volunteer the information up front. I never did, because ballsy and gutsy as I may have been in a professional environment, I can vacillate with the best of them when it comes to personal relationships. On the other hand, when I wanted to know something from him, he would answer my question as quick as a shot, often fatally wounding my sensitivity in the process.

A phrase that he used with remarkable regularity was “if you don’t want to hear the answer, don’t ask the question” Oh, how I loved that one …. interestingly enough he usually delivered it on the telephone.

Last week we arranged to meet up briefly before he left for five days away on a cycling tour, four hundred and fifty kilometres and most of it uphill;  I still have no idea why ….

As we sat and drank our afternoon tea he joked that my style of communication with him had grown unquestionably brusque, and with that he pulled out his mobile phone …”let me tell you how you responded to my text asking if you fancied meeting up …. ah yes … here we go ….. ‘yes I bloody do, but we need to be done and dusted by 3.40pm’ …”

Mr Perfect (the perfect surgeon) was another man direct in nature, but with a bedside manner that necessitated immediate forgiveness. 

On the day after my procedure, he visited my room to check on my progress and asked if I had managed to get up and take a brief stroll. When I answered that I hadn’t due to the searing pain, he replied “well you should have; a bed is for sleeping in, nothing more.” Had I not been horizontal, without lipgloss and half-bandaged like a mummy, I would have told him that was not strictly true, as badinage to disarm his steely countenance.

There is just something about a man who wears those little half-glasses, has Mozart’s Serenade No.13 in G minor as his ringtone and scrawls all over you with a marker pen in preparation for his imminent masterpiece that makes it acceptable for him to be as direct as he wants …. I had, after all, consented to being laid unconscious and half-naked on a table before the man …. and with a scalpel in his hand I wanted him to be as decisive, swift and to the point as he liked.

Often I close my eyes to daydream and he is peering at me over the top of those glasses, taking a break from perusing the Times at our breakfast table. I tentatively ask about the dinner we’re attending on Friday evening … I’m just not sure my black Karen Millen number is right for it …. 

“Deborah, if you need to buy something new then just say so. My card is upstairs on the dresser”. And with that, he goes back to the Times.

Let’s face it, a man with a penchant for being direct would always get his just reward ….

As a woman of a certain age I lose count of the number of debates I have listened to and sometimes participated in about stockings, cinched waists, and the associated betrayal of the sisterhood. Apparently there are some people who believe that a woman is to be pitied if she feels compelled to apply mascara and eyeliner  of a morning … because in doing so she is enslaved to the evil desires of men, no more than the cherry on the top of a cheap tart.

It should come as no surprise that the exponents of this doctrine in my experience tend to be other women, of the barefaced variety. Rarely have I heard a man decry a female’s accoutrements and decorations in favour of a sexless option; sadly it seems it is only women who tend to have a problem with other women. Twas ever thus.

In my hedonistic days working in central London I was surrounded by females who sneered at the sight of a pencil skirt and who would become positively apoplectic if they thought you might have been wearing a push-up bra …What sane woman would possibly want to dress like that? So much more acceptable to join the clan who drowned themselves in shapeless, colourless garb in an attempt to look like a man and, in many cases, succeeding. Of course, if you wore clothing that accentuated your female form, you had to be sleeping your way to the top … 

Now it would be positively churlish of me to suggest that our gender should all be donning a boned corset and six-inch stilettos on a daily basis, but what is wrong with wanting to look like a woman? I can say hand on heart that I don’t apply make-up for a man’s benefit, I wear it for me. I work at home on my own most days, so when I start talking to myself in the mirror in attempt to break the solitude, it’s nice to see a half-decent face looking back  (sadly, I have done that …) There is no escaping the fact that I feel uncomfortable in leggings and a T-shirt, yet I’m ready to take make short shrift of any charlatan that crosses me when I’ve got my lipstick and heels on. 

I see no good reason why we need to turn ourselves into androgynous beings who wear brogues and pretend we like football to succeed in our chosen professions, although an understanding of the offside rule does tend to impress when you nonchalantly drop it into a conversation over a business lunch. Without a doubt, this touchline extends way beyond hemlines and hairspray.

There is of course, always someone who cries “foul” when they push their femininity to the point that it has perceived to have overtaken their ability. Caroline Flint made comment in her resignation letter to Gordon Brown that he saw her as little more than window dressing. All I might add on the subject is that if you type “Caroline Flint” into Google and hit “images”, you could see why GB might be forgiven if he occasionally looked at her  …. in the way a man might look at a woman. If you wear black leather boots and a thigh-high split in your pencil skirt, you have to expect that a man will try and look up it whilst he pretends to listen to what you have to say. Similarly, appearing in glossy magazines in slinky red satin numbers does tend to deflect from any other agenda you might have that is drab in comparison.

The moral to my story is this: ladies, let us by all means adorn, decorate and celebrate our womanly forms publicly and without shame, but let us ensure our heads drive our curvaceous vehicles, not the other way round.

Like many people I lead a reasonably straightforward and simple day-to-day existence that is fashioned that way mainly to cater for the needs of a growing five year old. I am not entirely certain I would be applying for a role within the secret service had I not had Ben, but I possibly would be imbibing in a little more of a rock and roll-type lifestyle that I know I would have been so good at.

Instead I prefer to decorate my days with the deeper hues of my imagination … the rich, lustrous and intoxicating shades of embroidered observation that would simply be overkill in a real-life airing.

I paint myself as the tragically misunderstood heroine, who has touched the source of true knowledge and yet cannot share the experience with anyone. The truly woeful element of the heroine’s plight is that she is not simply misconstrued in matters of romance, but in all other conceivable aspects too. People do not understand her willingness to end relationships because they fulfill neither party, nor do they fully comprehend her outlook and long-term hopes for the future.

She roams the earth in her dreams, walking aimlessly for the most part. People come in and out of her life and mutual peripheral friendship is exchanged, but what this woman really wants is someone who is not scared to take the unprecedented route, unexplored, and therefore limitless in potential and danger at the same time.

For the most part the alarm will sound at 6.00am and the roaming drama queen reaches for the off switch. Real life resumes and the pageant that exists in my head exits stage left for the time being.

Usually on commencement of the school run, the cerebral storyteller resumes. Pulling out of the drive way, the desolate raven haired woman at number one transports her son to school … what is it that she does for gainful employment? What brought her to this quiet Lincolnshire backwater? What sorrow lies beneath the polite and enquiring smile that she has for her neighbours?

Then onto the schoolyard … the disapproving looks from fellow mothers … who is this woman, seemingly fixated with her iPhone and never without lipgloss? 

This is the colourful spectacle I have created based on my unconcealed life. A life pleasant enough yet made ordinary by circumstance rather than choice. Without hue or significant event.

Until someone emanates from the mist who negates the need to embroider on the banal any longer. A man who is mindful of the words he selects, of the mood he conjures with those words and is seemingly unaware of the immeasurable appeal that he radiates.

Of course people like this rarely appear from nowhere; they were most probably present for a short time, but for some inexplicable reason one day a conversation starts that sets off an inner tidal wave. The isolated mind and all that sails in her is no longer on a deserted sea. Suddenly there is a ship with familiar livery on the horizon sending out messages that I don’t need to decipher.

It’s always a dangerously good sign when you’re ravenously hungry to hear from someone … when literally every letter of every word, every accent is pored over, often acutely.

Let me assure you, dear reader, this is no ordinary man. No ordinary mind.

Recently someone rather clumsily accused me of being self-absorbed.

So let me introduce you to someone who is altogether a more enticing prospect.

It is a sad indictment on my single status that whenever I mention the M word (men) or the R word (relationships) friends jump up and down shouting “Debsy you MUST stop looking for this man … when you do, he will appear … you’re trying too hard”. The notion that I could ever have tried too hard at anything will amuse some of my former school teachers I suspect.

What I surmise I am not doing a very good job at is letting it be known that I’m not trying to find him at all. Granted, it would be nice if he pitched up tonight with a bottle of chablis and two tickets to Paris, but I haven’t made my plans for this evening on the tentative basis that this will happen. I actually quite like being single. I do. 

Let me etch out an example … last year in December Mr Distant Cynic went emotionally and physically AWOL on me for what turned out to be the third and final time. The first time I was devastated, the second time mildly upset and on the third I vowed to patch my heart back up and never let him venture anywhere close to it again. Ever. I believe you might have described my mood as defiant on this last occasion.

Slightly embittered by my latest disastrous dalliance with the opposite sex I pulled the emotional shutters down. 

One sunny Saturday morning, right in the middle of  this emotional-shuttering defiance, I’d agreed that a photographer could call to take some shots of my family and I for a magazine feature (not as glamorous as it sounds). So, we sat waiting … my Dad grumbling about how long it was going to take and my Mum tutting that the guy was five minutes late. To top it all I had a cold, puffy eyes and a bit of a hangover, so I wasn’t as aesthetically pleasing as I’d hoped I would be.

The doorbell rang, and there he stood. Mr Snapper. 

Now many serious photographers get quite upset when you mention the word ’snaps’ …”Do you mind?? They are NOT snaps… or pics….!!!” And almost certainly if I’d called any of the photographers I’d met previously “snappers” openly to their faces, I doubt I would have survived the conversation without their palms meeting my face at some point. But Mr Snapper snaps for the press …. any press, when it boils down to it. Even for those dreadful magazines that sport headlines like “My Boyfriend Turned out to be my Sister” and “I Became a Stripper and now I’m Allergic to Clothes”.  So, Mr Snapper has no issue being called a snapper; you can see why that would be the case.

So Mr Snapper set about getting the shots he needed, and then set about trying to get me to go out for a drink with him. 

Now, he’s an amusing chap with plenty of chat, not necessarily the type you would imagine uses the phrase “long term” very often, but nice enough all the same.

My long-winded point is this; I didn’t look for Mr Snapper. He ended up knocking on my door. I learned a long time ago that opportunities are around you all the time; it’s whether you notice them or not that’s the question, although you’d have to be sensorially impaired to not notice Mr Snapper. 

So really, I’m not looking …. although I may leer inappropriately on occasion (questionable attempt at humour; please move on)

And the middle of not looking, I’ve come up with the what I believe could be the Next Big Thing for the machine that is reality TV ….. “Britain’s Got No Morals”

Basically, lots of discredited contestants (or ex MPs, if you will) battle it out to not be villified on national TV. I’m wondering what form the villification should take … perhaps a year performing some menial job where (and this is the killer punch) … expenses cannot be claimed …. I hope nobody is tempted to vote based on political persuasion; the outcome needs to be decided rationally and honourably, but then seeing as we would be writing the rules of the game, I guess we can forget that bit.

Et voila, another ratings topper made on a shoestring budget. 

I’ve not even seen it yet but I’m hoping Geoff Hoon gets to do something connected with sewerage.

Crikey, is that the time?  I really must take my leave and get back to not looking for a man …