Guide To Singles Parties

No-one looks this good at singles parties. Ever.

So you’ve decided that you will take the plunge and give a singles party a try. If you’re a lady, you’ll no doubt opt for the safety-in-numbers approach and ask (or beg, or possibly have to pay for) some of your closest friends (or anyone who you know that is female and single) to go along with you.

If you’re a bloke, then it’s more difficult. If you take a friend, then it has to be someone who is fairly normal, but not someone who can steal the attention of the nicest girls. Or maybe you should just go on your own and try not to give off the impression that you’re a loner who stays in on Saturday nights to watch the Twilight movies with his mother. Continue reading

My Girlfriend’s Gay Best Friend

100% gay. Quite possibly 100% stalker too

I’d been seeing my girlfriend for a few months and things were going okay. Nothing earth moving… but then if I wanted that I’d rent a small JCB. As I love travel, it seemed a great idea for me to suggest a holiday with my girlfriend, especially as we found it hard to spend enough quality time alone together. We opted for the sun, sea and superb nightlife of Ibiza, one of Spain’s Balearic islands.

The plans were left open. There was no reason why we couldn’t invite others. A group holiday would be fun. So I sent out some Facebook invites and left her to speak to her friends, whilst I went on a pre-planned trip to Iceland. She had some concerns about whether she could afford it, but I thought that wouldn’t be a problem. Continue reading

Stalk You Long Time

Hello! Me again.

We were a few drinks into a night out one balmy February evening, at a massive outside bar in Cha Weng, Koh Samui, one of Thailand’s southern islands. The music was pumping and the hordes of tourists were enjoying the best that Thailand’s nightlife has to offer. Which invariably for some, involves encounters with ladies of the night. But not me. That doesn’t float my boat and I consider if cheating.

So when I was approached by yet another local girl, I kept the conversation brief but civil. I wasn’t interested. She was just after my money, like all the others. I had no intention of spending much time feigning interest just for the sake of it, especially when her English was of the stereotypical south east Asian type. Continue reading

Foot In Mouth Disease

Before the more curious among you wonder if this is a post about a hideous growth deformity, have no fear; I assure you that it isn’t. It is merely social commentary on the unfortunate habit that many of us have experienced of saying the wrong thing in our myriad of social interactions.

As a single man negotiating the pitfalls of London’s dating and bar scene, I have learned that sometimes it’s better to say nothing at all, than feel obliged to say something to cover an uncomfortable silence. It isn’t necessary to chat constantly without pause. Unless perhaps you are a horse racing commentator.

My main ‘partner in pulling’ the ladies (or not)  is a mathematician, who by his own admittance spends his days in academic geekdom and is something like an uncaged Tasmanian devil when freed from the formulas, bouncing enthusiastically between girls with the impatience of a speed freak in the toilet queue; frequently to be heard saying: “I’m not getting anywhere, she’s hard to talk to”. After five minutes. Continue reading

Just Too Obvious

“Oh my God… he just asked me if I wanted to go for a drink. He’s just too obvious!” So says the excitable twentysomething to her closest friend. Well, the police didn’t like it when I waited outside your house to ‘accidentally’ bump into you. And you screamed when I sprang from the back seat of your car with a bottle of wine and two glasses. So what’s a guy got to do to get date these days?

Call me old-fashioned if you will, but what ever happened to the days of boy meets girl, boy likes girl, boy asks girl out to share a glass or three of bubbly alcoholic liquid? Am I now supposed to believe that this transparent declaration of interest belongs in a bygone era? If what this girl says is now the widely accepted belief, then I guess that I can stop wondering where I have been going wrong.

There will now follow a period of enlightenment. My behaviour will change from rational and logical interaction with the fairer sex to increasingly confusing and erratic interplay, as I seek to find ways to ask girls out without actually asking the question. Continue reading

Dating ‘Mother’

I know how you feel, little guy

Don’t worry, this isn’t one of those Oedipus Complexes that would make Sigmund Freud turn in his grave, twiddling his moustache quizically. It is the tale of another dating woe, from when I had recently moved to London.

There I was, a single man salivating at the thought of what seemed like an endless line of available women, all just a Tube ride away. The world, it seemed, was my oyster. I just had to search amongst the sea of opportunity and grab a shining pearl, whilst obviously avoiding the perils of any non-jewellery producing molluscs, if you catch my drift. But enough of the analogies…

Not knowing where to start, I signed up to Match.com and started the whole ‘getting to know you’ process with London’s finest. With little success. What was wrong with these career girls? Maybe they didn’t actually believe that I was a millionaire playboy with a very big house in the country, his own horse and an interest in polo. It wasn’t too big a lie, I thought. Well, I did sometimes eat mint flavoured polos. Continue reading

My First Stalker

You don't have to look quite
so surprised to see me

So, with a successful blog which is growing in popularity, was it inevitable that one fan would take things too far? ‘Man of the people’, ‘Studmuffin’ and ‘Leader of men’… these are just some of the descriptions that have never been used to describe me. So it was just a tad surprising to find myself the subject of one misguided bunny boiler’s attentions.

She wasn’t aware of this site; we had ‘met’ when I was new to London and had joined City Socialising, a social network for social misfits who no-one likes people who are looking to widen their circle of friends. She sent me a couple of messages which, although jangling my internal alarm bells, I replied to out of courtesy. I say courtesy, but her name was Ho, and I wasn’t sure if that was really her name or if it was actually a nickname based on her sexual promiscuity. So in reality, Little Stewie was doing the thinking, thereby overruling the more cautious thoughts that I should have paid more attention to. Continue reading