Skip to main content

Dating was so much easier in my day

When I first courted Mrs W, the Internet was a strange thing that techie-type people connected to via a 28k modem. We met the old-fashioned kind of way and although we didn't know much about each other at first, we uncovered it gradually through romantic walks and candlelit dinners.

If I'm to believe the current match.com campaign on the London tube, serious research is now required before an initial date. Jon in Wimbledon listens to the favourite record of his potential future partner before he's even clapped eyes on her. That way, he'll understand why she likes the album so much.

What a smooth b*****d Jon is. He plans small talk about the girl's favourite band, probably giving the impression that he too is a fan. How dreamy, she thinks. I've met a guy who's perfectly matched to me. He even likes the same tunes!

Someone should tell this lady that Jon is just playing a game. And while they're at it, they should mention that he listened to the band on vinyl. So he's either a complete geek who thinks that digital music doesn't give an authentic sound or he's aged about 70.

Comments

  1. I hate those posters! They could not give a less realistic picture of internet dating if they tried. No one gets that excited about a first date with someone they met on the internet. They're more worried about whether the person looks anything like their photos in real life!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.

Buttahz

Belatedly made it to the excellent Evolving English exhibition at the British Library. When I arrived, I found a curator talking to a large group of inner-city London teenagers who'd come with their school. "How do you spell Butters ?" he was asking them. The kids volunteered different spellings of the slang term. Museum man then posed another question. "But you don't actually say it like that, do you?" He was referring, I think, to the glottal stop that replaces the t in London English, although phonetics isn't my strong point. The youth were sent off to record slang in a booth for posterity and my attention was drawn to another class. This group was much younger and seemed to attend an exclusive private school. "Joanna! Come over here and listen to a bit of Romeo and Juliet!" The precocious little kids ran hither and thither, listening to samples of regional dialects on a superb interactive display or speeches from statesmen such as JFK and ...

Captain Birdseye and other people of rank

Regular readers may recall that I once doubted the existence of Yeo Valley. I'd never heard of the Yeo mountain range and I therefore rated the likelihood of there being a valley at somewhere between 0 and 5%. Of course, I had yoghurt all over my face when I discovered that the place really does exist. Somewhere in Somerset, I seem to recall. Today, having read an article in the latest edition of The Marketer magazine, I'm astonished to discover that there really was a Captain Birdseye. Well, I need to qualify that just a little. There was a Mister Clarence Birdseye who invented the fish finger back in 1955. The avuncular, uniformed figure who dominated our TV screens for about thirty years may have been an invention of over-eager advertising creatives, but he didn't blow in on a trawler during a squall. There was actually some connection to a real human being. These revelations about fish and yoghurt are causing me considerable disquiet, because I'm wondering h...