Blanket Dating: Wave One.

Posted by Katy Regan at 11:11 on 25 Jun 2010

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Friends, there's something I haven't told you.

I have been terribly bold and as a result, the last few weeks have been interesting (if not somewhat depressing. I sit here with a heavy heart.) And have resulted in me coming to the conclusion that I'd be much better off spending the rest of my years in my pyjamas eating custard creams.

However, like I say, that's only the conclusion I've come to. Before that is a tale, which I think is worth telling. Think of this as PART ONE...

To cut a very long and involved story short, since finishing the second book and having a million more hours in my day and a million more square miles in my head to ponder the point of my life/ the future / my general levels of happiness (as you can see, I should probably stick to writing books with NO gap) I came to the conclusion that I must find a boyfriend.

This began to feel as necessary and elemental as say, buying knickers if you got to your holiday destination to find that your suitcase had been lost. You wouldn't spend even twenty-four hours of a holiday without pants, would you? They'd be first on the list. Well, a boyfriend in my life had begun to feel like that too, like I needed a gusset beneath me in order to carry on. You know what I'm saying?

Things had come to a crisis point in my mind, basically. I began to look into the future at 40 (four years off I might add, a mere blink of an eye!) and see this woman I used to work with when I was twenty-six. She was called Wendy, was forty-two (only years from death as far  as I was concerned), wore badly fitted suits, probably from Wallis, had hair like a man and a thirty-a-day Rothmans habit.  I remember thinking how very sad it was that she went home on her own every night and had to fill her weekends with other peoples' families. Or Sudoku. Or drinking alone in her Wallis lounge suit.

At the time, I was twenty-six, in my height of crazilondonness (all people who have lived in London for more than five years know what the crazilondoness years mean): night after night on the lash, no sleep, millions of people to go out with before everyone ruins it all by having children and moving to places like Bekhamsted, no ties, a lot of naps taken in the toilets at work, waking up with randoms and walks of shame to the tube station and so on and so forth AND because you are twenty-six, you still look pretty good on it.

Not Wendy. Wendy's crazilondonness years were long gone and all that was left were a lot of premature wrinkles from all that partying, skin like papier mache from all that fagging, no mates and no boyfriend, since all her mates had found boyfriends and moved to places like Berkhamsted.

I looked at her with pity and, I am afraid to admit, a little disdain - how COULD she have let that happen?  And yet, here I am at thirty-six, forty fast approaching and feeling like Wendy and I have more in common than well... we used to back then in the offices of some magazine or other.Is it only a matter of time before I get into Sudoku?No, no, nooooo! 

This could not go on, I decided. It really could not. I don't want to wind up at forty spending my weekends or holidays with other single people or other peoples' families. I want my own. I do not  want to wind up like Wendy with only a packet of Rothmans as my crutch.

So I wrote an email to my friends - surely amongst them they must know SOMEONE I could go on a date with? When I say ‘friends,' I mean general friends, friends of friends, people I met on a press trip to Torquay seven years ago and their friends. I was casting my net wide.

My close friends, God love them, either got married to people they have known for getting on twenty years (I'm not joking) or have ‘inter-married' with friends from university. In short, they must have met about two new people amongst them in the last decade. They are no use to me.

So, I branched out and I was bold, I was really bold.  In fact I subject headed my ‘find Katy a date' email with "I am now going to be terribly bold...".

Now, I am notoriously useless at this sort of thing, I hate filling in those bloody online dating profiles and always come across (entirely unintentionally I might add)  as either mad / desperate / so annoyingly self-deprecating it's any wonder how I get up in the morning or on Prozac.

So I got my brilliant ex-TV presenter friend to help. She is used to doing upbeat pieces to camera without looking unhinged / desperate / depressed / annoyingly self-deprecating and has a good line in feisty casualness, something I don't seem to excel in when it comes to writing this sort of thing.

We put something together that we felt was humorous (oh yes, hilarious! There were jokes about not being fussy except where colostomy bags were involved. It went something like this:

I don't have a long checklist: Must be tall, SHSOH (shit hot sense of humour), no secret colostomy bags (Ones I know about beforehand aren't that great either) that's it really.

Funny ha? Clever. In fact, this foray into toilet humour backfired, big time but you shall have to read my next blog to find out  why.

So it was humorous, it was upbeat, the tone was sort of: hey, your luck is in. If you play your cards right, you could win a date with this witty, gorgeous, hottie (needless to say the people I sent it to who really know me  said it sounded nothing like me and someone else must have written it. Thanks!)

Anyway, I sent off the email, I waited with baited breath and a slight, creeping feeling of regret: Shit, what if people actually replied?? What if I then had to go on actual dates with them? This was not supposed to happen!

Still, I made a pact with myself that I would go on a date with every single man that did. Blanket dating, you see. Got to kiss lots of frogs to find your prince. It's a numbers game and all that jazz.  

 I should point out here that I have done this before. Around two years ago I had another 'single' crisis and sent an email to friends. Only two dates came of that - one who was as grumpy as Jack Dee and didn't cheer up all night and one who suggested we go home to his for sex within about half an hour of meeting - SO I wasn't expecting anything big. I am realistic about these things. Anyway, four people replied. ALL of whom thought at first it was spam or a journalistic experiment.

Unlike most things in my life, this was not a journalistic experiment. This, I pointed out to one particular man, was completely serious and  all my very own work. Four men replied. I went on three dates. None of them turned into a second. There was poo, ex-wives, and James Joyce's Ulysses involved  but you're going to have to read my next blog to find out how they went and why I didn't go on the fourth date.

Mwah, mwah, mwah! she laughed like a witch.

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