The rocky road to love.

I have now been officially single for one whole year. After celebrating with lots of yummy faux champagne (I am but a poor student and unable to afford the good stuff) I thought back over the last year. I realised that I have successfully become a singleton like Bridget Jones and am now very content to spend time by myself reading books and eating chocolate with a trusty glass of red wine by by side, I am even perfectly happy to go to the theatre and on trips by myself when no friends are available. This is all excellent stuff but I would now definitely like to start dating again.

In the last year I have only been on a handful of dates, something had to change and I realised that I could make resolution after resolution about being ready to date again and about seeking dates, but really that nothing whatsoever was happening. In the end I decided to dip my toe into the murky waters of internet dating.

Although feeling much too young and normal to consider such an alarming idea and being horrified about the thought of having to put a picture of myself on my profile last weekend I just went for it. So far in a mere matter of days I have had more interest than in the whole of the past year and tonight I have my first date through the medium of internet dating. Strangely enough I am not the least bit nervous... perhaps because I am so aware that if it doesn't go well then there seem to be lots of other men on the website all eager to take me out for drinks and so really I can just relax and be myself. It also probably helps that he doesn't know my real name, it just makes me feel more in control of the situation.

I am meeting him for drinks this evening and have organised to meet my flatmate a couple of hours later for dinner so that if it is dreadful I can leave easily and have someone to talk it over with (though needless to say I have not admitted to her or anyone else how I met the man in the first place) and if it goes well I can always see him again.

He sounds rather nice: he is doing a phd and seems to appreciate literature. Sounds perfectly nice in his messages and looks pretty good in his photographs.

The online dating thing is actually rather good fun and it takes up a surprising amount of one's time. You need to send a great many messages back and forth to lots of men until you work out which ones you favour, some start off well on their profile but then descend into dullness or you find out they didn't go to university (my major turn off).

So date number one... I do wonder what it will be like...

All By Myself.

I think I have found the reason that I am still single all these months after my split: I really enjoy my own company! I sometimes cancel nights out with friends simply to have a nice glass of wine and relax with a book or a movie on my own, I need at least a few hours of reading and/or cult tv or movie watching time or at the very least internet browsing time on my own every day and I much prefer taking holidays abroad by myself than with friends. Although I so love proper evenings of chat with good friends and going out drinking and clubbing with uni friends, what I enjoy most of all is a yummy meal, some really good wine and a splendid new book (by new I must clarify that I really mean old but as in new to me).

But having come to this conclusion I am trying to make myself go out more, for after all while one afternoon I may simply think I am going out to meet a friend and have a cup of coffee while on my way there I may well meet a wonderful man, and so I have vowed to accept every single social offer from now until the end of the summer. Hence my acceptance to lunch with a new work colleague on Monday even though he is at least 65 and likes to flirt for he may well have a cute grandson or the waiter might be hot... and also it is a free lunch!

Because the thing is that one can live one's life perfectly happily and continue hoping one will meet someone wonderful to date and yet never meet them because one only leaves the house to work, study, meet friends etc but each time only with a set purpose rather than with a more open minded looking about one for possibilities, and I need to try and do that.

Adrian Mole and Pandora.

Oh dear fate really can be rather cruel... I have been bemoaning my lack of male attention but then when one does suddenly get some it is always from entirely the wrong sources. My oldest male friend asked to plight my troth to his last week leaving my feeling unjustifiably betrayed and outraged. We have been friends for a very long time and although we indulge sometimes (him a lot more than me) in harmless flirting we have been such sound friends that there seemed to be no danger of such a ghastly development. I like my male friends to be safe and our relationships free from any sort of tension created by unrequited feelings of that nature. Yes flirting with them is lovely and I do enjoy them acting all protective and so on with me when I am fragile, but I never want or expect them to have deeper feelings than those of pure friendship.

Alas not the case with this friend, however. He did ask me out a few times way back in our long forgotten school days but I was as unattracted to him then as I am now (a lovely chap but physically not at all my type). We moved on and grew up and stayed in intermittent touch thanks to the joys of msn chat and now facebook. We only quite recently reconnected and it has been lovely and great fun to have him back in my life. He is very clever and we have terrific discussions about things, and because we are friends of such longstanding we trust each other and confide all sorts of things about relationships, friends and our love lives. He has always reminded me greatly of Adrian Mole due to the sort of way they live their lives, outlook and to my mind they look very similar also.

But if he is Adrian then that makes me Pandora. And he really should have worked out that they never get together. They are very good friends but she flits in and out of his life, their relationship is mainly based on a shared adolesence and that while sadly he, like Adrian, seems to continue the early feelings of love for Pandora, she never returns them and really lives in quite a different world to Adrian.

It all made me very sad and the email in which he asked me out was truly lovely. He said he knew he didn't have much to offer me but his small all was mine for the asking. I let him down as gently and quickly as I could the next time we spoke but he has clearly been avoiding me ever since.  I really wish all male friends were simply safe and that one could be quite happy knowing they would never suddenly ask one out. I suspect problems of that nature with another of my male friends from whom I also want only friendship. He has been distinctly odd with me ever since i became single last summer and when he gets drunk I try and avoid being alone with him in case he says or does something for which I would have to rebuff him.

Oh fate you are a cruel mistress. I long to be asked out only to have totally unsuitable men do the asking!

From Richard Yates to Lionel Shriver.

I firmly and without a shadow of a doubt believe Richard Yates to be one of the most skilled authors I have ever read. His novels paint pictures in your mind so finely tuned that afterwards the plots and characters feel more like memories you have lived through than mere words on a page. He wrote with a precision all too rarely seen and with not one superfluous word in hundreds of pages of text. He evoked such raw and tender feelings within one and seemed to understand his characters so perfectly and absolutely, with no holds barred. No character was perfect, and all were endowed the most human of flaws. It was not until I read the novels of Lionel Shriver that I felt Richard Yates' legacy had been continued.

Lionel Shriver's work, since the day I first turned the pages of her greatest novel 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' has strongly reminded me of Yates. To my mind she is the female, modern equivolent of the ultimate writers' writer. So it was with a rather smug feeling, as though I had proved my great insight into matters literary, that I heard her on the radio a few days ago naming Yates' 'Revolutionary Road' as her favourite book. 

When I said Shriver carried on the style of Yates I mean it only in the very purest sense. Their characters and plots are nothing alike, nor the settings or the ideas. However, the same tone emanates through the books of both and the same precision over the choice and placement of words. They are both pitch perfect with their characters and unflinching in depicting them in all their unflattering truth. One would never dream of living in a book by either in the same way that one might fantasise about living in the pages of 'Pride and Prejudice'.

'We Need to Talk About Kevin' is a magnum opus of a book, a complete and utter masterpiece. Shriver had written several books and been a writer for decades before it was published but it proved to be her breakthrough. If I were to tell the uninitiated that it is about a teenage boy who massacres several of his classmates then I make it sound like a trashy novel, but nothing could be further from the truth. The book is not the least bit sensational and is rather a character piece about the mother of the boy, her life and her relationship with her son. A wonderfully full and masterful book which succeeds in painting the picture of a woman, not merely a mother, a complicated individual and one who without intentional bias and with stark truths addresses her life.

Sadly Shriver's 'The Post-Birthday World' fails to work. The characterisations are all still there, though less effective than in her other books, and the tone remains beautifully pitched. However, the disgustingly clunky framework (two divergent lives using the same character are given chapters in turn which means the same events are gone over twice just in different ways) totally spoils it and really is unforgivable. You expect that sort of thing from less skilled authors and find it in popular crowd pleasers like the gruesomely boring but very popular 'One Day' by David Nicholls but not from writers of Shriver's capabilities.

But my favourite of her novels has to be the wonderful 'Double Fault'. It depicts the relationship of a tennis professional with her partner and with the game itself. That is the book that makes me most strongly, and flatteringly, liken Shriver's style to that of Yates for just like him she perfectly paints the picture of her protagonist as a fully rounded and often rather unlikeable figure and is able to define and show her feelings with what feels like true and steady accuracy. With both authors one never feels that they have shirked away from mentioning the more real and unpleasant aspects of their characters and so one is left not necessarily liking the characters but certainly believing in them as true depictions.

After 'When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit'.

As a child I adored books about children in the World War II. I loved reading about children evacuees and those escaping from the Nazis. The very best were by Joan Lingard and Michelle Magorian, the former telling the tale of a family from Lativia, in a series of books, who ended up in America and the latter in 'Goodnight Mister Tom' and 'Back Home' writing of different child evacuees both before and after the war. But perhaps the very best book of all was 'When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit' by Judith Kerr.

Kerr's book was magically evocative to me as a child and was so pitch perfect for me as a little ten year old who was both fascinated by the history of the war and intrigued by the lives of children other than myself. It told of Anna whose father was a prolific anti-Nazi writer in Germany before the war and who was blacklisted by the Nazis. The family managed to escape, leaving her pink rabbit behind en-route, and their attempts to create a life for themselves elsewhere. When I was about 15 or so I suddenly discovered that Anna's story was continued over another two books and eagerly rushed to buy them only to be horribly and crushingly disappointed. The second book depicts a young adult Anna who is in her late teens and sadly she has totally lost her sparkle just as the author has lost her flair. The book is deeply depressing in tone and although I can now (I am re-reading the second two out of nostalgia and also to give them a fairer read than previously) see that Kerr was attempting to write of Anna in a different style and one more befitting a young adult audience I still think she failed. The book is set during WWII, however, it could still have had cheerful overtones, or indeed have depicted young love in a more convincing and enjoyable way. I don't think it works as a book for young adults quite apart from the heroine losing all her panache.

The third book is the very worst of the lot. Horribly dull and depressing I am skimming through it quickly. Poor Anna... she was so very vibrant and fun and cheerfully delightful in the first book which is of course what made it so special. Hitler and the war crush all the fun and life out of her. Had the second book truly been written for young adults and the third for adults (it really doesn't work for young adults given its sombre tone) the trilogy would have been jolly interesting for I have never come across a series that did that. But the first is brilliant and the second two almost crush the memories one has of it for one grows up to find out that Anna has rather a ghastly life in the end, and that that wonderful joyeous girl grows up rather boring and dull. I really wish she had stopped after writing the first book.

Ultimately we don't want our heroine children to grow up, get married and become boring. Rather we want to remember them as the wonderful and interesting children they were, and also most importantly to believe that when they do grow up they will do amazing things with their lives. It reminds me so much of 'Anne of Green Gables' by L.M. Montgomery. She started off as a young girl and although the books continued and took her into adulthood they still worked, until the fateful day on which she got married. For poor old Anne didn't continue to delight all around her and enrich the lives of many by continuing to be a schoolteacher, oh no she stopped working as soon as she got that ring on her finger and then went on to have about six children. She got old and worn down and dull, a far cry from the intelligently precocious firey red-headed young girl whose future was filled with endless possibilities.

I suppose I related to both Anne and Anna as a child and so anticipated relating to their futures also, only to be sadly disappointed in the banality of their grown up lives. Child heroes should never grow up, but should remain like the little Fossil sisters in 'Ballet Shoes' with strong hints about incredible futures yet to come.

The long wait of Lady Sybil Vimes.

Alas he said no... or rather he was probably saying no. Very odd reply which I originally took to mean he was turning me down, but has been interpreted by several friends as meaning that he didn't realise I was asking him out. But although I like this ego comforting theory I suspect said friends are just being nice and the delicious lecturer was trying to let me down nicely. Jolly embarrassing either way and I have found out how truly horrible it is to ask someone out and have them say no... actually this is the first time I ever have. Nasty stuff it turns out but I can at least console myself with the thought that I am jolly unlikely to ever see him again which is wonderfully good at overcoming my total sense of embarrassment and sorrow.

Sadly I did like him rather an awful lot, and although I had no reason to think he wanted to go out with me he definitely did enjoy my company. Gosh I miss him now... I really do feel a sense of loss, almost as though I have lost a good friend, for I am one of those people who likes to have a backup daydream, a storyline of sorts one can tune into when needed, like when waiting for a bus or during a dull lecture. And for the last two months or so he has been part of my daydreams. But now all of that is no more and though I am, or rather will be when I can stop cringing at the memory of asking him out, glad that I had the guts to ask him out (after all it was worth a shot and was the only way I could have ended up dating him), I still miss his presence in my life. It reminds me of the scene in 'Love in a Cold Climate' by Nancy Mitford where Fanny is asked if she is in love and replies in the affirmative. Her questioner answers that of course she is, for otherwise what on earth would she think about when alone?

I have not had much luck with men since splitting up with my ex and it makes me rather sad sometimes. I am attractive, slim and rather pretty, clever and interested in lots of things, but although men do seem to like me they don't ask me out... Apart from a boring tory boy only my cute friend in London has asked me out since last summer. Actually the latter is lovely but rather a flirt and though we could have some fun together, and indeed might well do over the summer, that will be all and no relationship or even real dating will come out of that. Meanwhile my flatmate is practically living at her boyfriend's house and my best friend's married lover has told her he is leaving his wife for her... Plus I did like the lecturer chap so very much...

I have several times expressed my desire to be like Lady Sybil and find my Sam Vimes, but I have just realised that Sybil lived alone and without love until her 40s (or possibly late 30s) before suddenly meeting Vimes. While their relationship is jolly romantic and certainly worth waiting for, all of a sudden I don't like the notion that I might have to sacrifice myself to a similar fate of being dateless and without a love life until I hit 40... Not a happy thought but not at all sure what to do to avert it. After all the only thing one can really suggest to combat that is not to wait for men to ask you out but to do the asking, and as I have just demonstrated that does not help things as the horrid men say no! Perhaps turning to the example of Becky Sharp really is the way to go... at least she didn't mind not being in love but focused instead on herself and having a wonderful time...

My Benedick or Much Ado About Nothing?

I decided just to go for it and ask him out... He is my lecturer but we are reasonably close in age (I am not an undergraduate) and he is not going to be marking any of my work and the lectures have finished. I was planning to wait until after the exam but after my last lecture with him we had a long chat and he was so nice and seemed genuinely happy and interested in talking to me too so although I didn't have the nerve to ask him out then and there, which would have been the best thing to do, I emailed him shortly afterwards. The email was succinct and cute, and I just asked him out for coffee. It has been over a day now and I keep checking my email account but he has not yet been in touch... Have asked various people and they seem to all agree that there is a three day rule for this sort of thing and if he hasn't replied after three days then he is either jolly rude or is saying no without replying... I feel sick and very nervous which seems ridiculous!

I have never asked a chap out before and can now understand why more boys don't ask me out: it is terrifying and horrible! I am v nervous that he will say no because I like him so much and over the last few months he has rather become my fall back day dream man which has been lovely and totally made me move on from my ex. So I dread losing that which I will have to if he says no. I am also rather nervous about him saying yes as I think I will be sick with nerves before meeting up with him, silly but true! Also bit embarrassed at the thought that he might feel the need to check with his head of department that it is okay to date me, or even just tell him about it if he says no, that would be embarrassing... However, I am v pleased that I have done it and really I have nothing to lose as he won't be around next year so I wouldn't have to keep running into him or anything if he declines.

Dating is so difficult and I really feel like the world of fiction has not prepared me for it. If only I could be a glorious heroine and have men fall at my feet. Shakespeare though had rather a good line on it, I have been thinking especially of 'Much Ado About Nothing' recently for as he there showed there is nothing like finding out someone likes you to make you instantly find them much more attractive and like them back. Oh wonderfully handsome and horribly intellectual lecturer, are you going to be my Benedick?