Bumping Uglies

Chapter One

 There comes a time in a man's life when he realises that despite living well; trying to make good decisions, largely forgoing pornography and eating five portions of fruit and vegetables per day, that something, somewhere, seemed to have gone terribly wrong.

I was in a tired school hall, attending a speed-dating event on a bleak Thursday night in the heart of the Black Country, when this realisation first struck me. Quite what it was that had gone wrong escaped me.

Some private detective I must have been.

The miserable collection of humanity shambling around the rows of school desks on that evening should have been the biggest hint.

The finest examples of manhood that Bostin' Beau (Wednesfield) could muster resembled lumbering Neanderthals crammed into market-stall Romanian designer shirts, the packet creases still standing proud. Mixed-in were smatterings of forty-something lank-haired virgins who smelled vaguely of sour milk and looked distressed to be missing Star Trek repeats on the TV. Perhaps in some of their minds, they were Kirk; boldly going to a distant school hall in the vain hopes of impregnating an alien species.

For their part, the women sat at the desks waiting for their five minutes to find The One, or at least Any One.

Make-up had been slathered liberally across tired faces, seemingly by a chimp with a plasterer's trowel and a night school diploma in bricklaying. The majority were shoe-horned into clothing whose structural integrity seemed on the cusp of violent and catastrophic failure. The women's eyes darted around the hall like a colony of praying mantis; alight with a hunger that was tinged at the edges with the fear of perhaps never finding another meal.

Of course, the female praying mantis decapitates the male and eats him post coitus. Looking at some of the women lying in wait at the desks, I reckoned that fate was a distinct possibility in some quarters.

The air in the hall was thick with desperation and eau de Car Boot Sale cologne.

I sighed and realised that, for as superior as I might feel, something must have gone badly wrong for me to have ended up right there, right then.

I should have been drinking red wine over candlelight with a love-struck Swedish former gymnast. We should be laughing at my witty bon mot whilst walking hand-in-hand in the park, discussing poetry and sharing an umbrella in the rain...

I arrived at the next desk, still lost in thought and wallowing in self-pity. It was not an attractive combination.

I sat at the table, stared absently into the distance and mused on the injustice of things. All around me came the forlorn shuffling and creaking sound of chair legs being dragged sullenly into place across the parquet floor. I barely even noticed the woman sitting opposite me.

She looked up at me; she had been fiddling with her fingers, picking absently at nothing whilst lost in a thought, many miles away.

"Hi," I said.

"Hi," she replied. I involuntarily sighed slightly.

"What's wrong?" she asked. "Have you put a cross already?" she tried to make it sound like a joke. The way people do when they really mean something.

"Not at all," I said softly. "It's just that I've had an identical conversation about a dozen times, and I don't think I can do it again."

"Oh..." she said. Her voice was neutral, and I made eye contact for the first time.

"It's not like I came with a script or anything," I said. "Something just happens though. It starts with Hi then goes on to So, what do you do? Really! Oh how Interesting." I moved my arms exaggeratedly, acting out both sides of the conversation.