This Is This

Rivierawriter writes in the riviera and here http://rivierawriter.blogspot.com/ He also has the unique and bittersweet priviledge of being my dad, which had nothing to do with him getting this gig.

This feels like Stevie Wonder pinch hitting for Pete Rose, especially having looked down the list of suggested topics and found that all the inspirational ones had been bagseyed. So I picked this one – since ‘or something else’ is unbagseyable.

I seem to have done lots of things only once in my life, either because I didn’t mean to do them in the first place, (like taking the Sec-Gen. of the UN out of church when he had an attack of food poisoning, or having my luggage carried across Cincinnati by a Knight), or because the event was such a disaster that I swore never to try it again. This story is firmly in the latter category and tells of the only time I ever approached a dating bureau.

When a marriage is over – I mean really over – not just in renegotiation, if the kids are still kids, you’re too concerned about fatherhood to think of your own desires. But eventually – and usually long before you’ve realised it – they reach their own level of independence. You find a good laundry, hire a cleaner, put in more time at work, and try not to think of loneliness.

Middle-aged male divorcees can’t go to discos or singles groups without looking – or feeling – pathetic. (All right, better make that ‘Third-aged’.) It’s like a lumberjack with a hearing aid or airline pilot with a guide dog: it’s a public statement that you’re not quite up to the job. ‘I’m a failure, wanna try me?’

So you start to read Dateline ads. Then you fill in the form listing your characteristics - religious or other fixations which, if not shared, (like, say, post-1940s jazz or hatred of Tony Blair) would totally preclude any possibility of partnership.  It sounds a much more logical mate-finding system than the process you used first time around: being young and not yet wise, guys follow their parental genes and look for their mothers, and women pick someone they think they can live with while moulding him into something more appropriate to their needs. Surely, you think, electronics must provide a less haphazard, more scientific result? So you pay your £85 and wait.

You receive three names and phone numbers of women within a reasonable radius of your home. (Being a subjective word, ‘reasonable’ is construed in the same way that Estate Agents interpret price or location guidelines.) This is the moment when you realise (a) that you have to do something, and (b) that you are never going to call any of those numbers. Electronics is no help in this situation: you hide the list in case you have a cataclysmic change of character - and so the kids won’t see it.

But you do get calls, from others who have also paid £85. You’re polite. You arrange to pick her up – in Hampstead – not bad.

I had booked a table at a French bistro in St. John’s Wood and put on my best shirt. She was charming, mature, cultured; liked Shakespeare but not jazz, but hell, nobody’s perfect. The restaurant was good - not too fussy: red check tablecloths and candles stuck on wax-encrusted wine bottles. The food was French provincial and excellent. I am leaning forward because she speaks softly and I’m trying to conceal my partial deafness, when she looks into my eyes and says, with the faintest trace of an Eastern European accent, ‘Your shirt is on fire’.

I’ve kept that shirt, or what was left of it, as an icon. It is a metaphor for the hopes of conjugal happiness – and the 85 quid - that went up in smoke that night. I found it in the end, but not in a digital computer. That £85 lesson taught me that logic has no part in partner choice. The most reliable process is strictly analogue, and has been around for many thousands of years. Charles Darwin recognised it nearly 150 years ago. 

He called it Natural Selection.

Also on This Is This
Currently many people care to have discussions as if they have something to say but there is no sound when they move their lips, just a bunch of poppycock. The matriphiles behave as if they are ignorant of Dre.
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