Cocktail sausage Miss?

Last week I began a little series about online dating, which I ‘researched’ over the last year – for the purposes of social science you understand. Turns out that it’s totally mainstream these days. Whether it’s via Facebook, Skype or one of any number of dating sites, the kids are hooking up online, viruses are electronic, monochrome makes everyone hot, and you can even block your mum.

Think of a dating site as a bar. There’s one to suit every taste, from your comfy local like The Dorset, to hipster hangouts like The Green Door Store, to alternative and fetish clubs like TG, to shi-shi Havana Spoon-style affairs, and of course heinous West Street dregs which I won’t give an example, but I’m sure you can fill in the blank.

So, your first job is to decide who you want and then identify which ‘venue’ they’re likely to be in. I’ve sampled a good cross-section – all in the name of research of course – and this week I’m going to tell you about the most depressing yet strangely hilarious Valentine’s Day of my life, courtesy of Encounters Dating.

Encounters Dating is The Times’ online dating effort and its patrons are generally lawyers, doctors and financial professionals with a concentration in London. Late thirties to sixties. Solid, stable types with good jobs and moderate to right politics. Lots of divorcees forward slash mid-life crises.

“In the bar were about 195 ladies, all looking like they were on the verge of a collective meltdown”

This time last year I was on a mission to find a sensible man after a string of mayhem with a variety of incredible but utterly bonkers actors, artists and musicians. A friend of mine was using Encounters and had won a pair of tickets for a Valentine’s Day event hosted by the site at BAFTA. The idea of the evening was that you’d go along, all dressed up, they’d provide champagne and canapé and members of the opposite sex looking for love – or at least a Valentine’s shag – you’d chit-chat and network and then pair-off to watch a romantic film. I waded through my Valentine’s offers and found that I had nothing better to do.

Well, we arrived in our gladrags and were met at the door by two red-faced young event organisers with the kind of strained smiles I am only too familiar with. They said ‘killmekillmekillme’. Beyond them, in the bar were about 195 ladies of a certain age, all dressed in their best, looking like they were on the verge of a collective meltdown. I scanned the room and spotted about five gentlemen, also of a certain age, huddled in one corner of the room with what I can only describe as abject terror inscribed across their frozen faces.

While my friend made a beeline for the bar to get us two much-needed glasses of fizz, I asked the organiser what had gone wrong. He informed me – trying to maintain his professional lacquer, while dying inside – that equal opportunities policy had meant that they could only run the competition to win tickets to the event on a first-come first-served basis, rather than on a gender basis, which meant that the ladies – ever organised and romantically pro-active – had swiped the first 190-odd tickets within a couple of hours.

Just then a waiter came by with a tray of canapé and said – I kid you not – cocktail sausage Miss? Well, that finished me off and I cracked up very loudly causing the herd of steaming women to shift their attention off the hapless males for a minute and onto this young upstart who was apparently mocking their Bridget Jones-style Valentine’s disaster.

I pulled it together and decided to make the best of it – i.e. knock back as much free champers as I could and enjoy George Clooney – he’s always good for a laugh right? Wrong. The film that BAFTA in association with Encounters Dating had chosen to lubricate their lucky winners’ Valentine’s evening with was a two-hour masterpiece in which George sits in a hospital room and watches his wife slowly die.

I got chatting to several groups of charming ladies throughout the course of the evening who were equally amused by the disastrous evening, and we all ended up heading off to The Hospital Club together, where some of my very dashing actor, artist, muso boys were only too delighted to spoil us rotten for the rest of the evening – because their barman mates let them drink for free, naturally. They do have their uses sometimes.

Here’s hoping that your Valentine’s Day is better than mine, and Encounters sorted out their competition strategy this year.