Climb Ev'ry Mountain

Exciting news from Purple Towers: I have a DATE. I know! Who'd have thought, eh? And done the old fashioned way: through meeting at a party. Yes, after a full two years of saying, 'I'm going to try internet dating, just so that I can amuse all my friends with terrible stories about how badly said dates have gone', I am no closer to advertising my wares on the interwebs. I have a couple of semi-passable photos (this has rarely happened). Whenever I'm drunk, I formulate a profile. I've had friends write one for me. At one stage, when out with a group of excitable lady chums, I even had an offer from one of them that she'd raise me an ISBN and I could then have appeared on Amazon. This seemed like a terrific situationist dating prank at the time, the like of which Chris Morris would have devised if he'd been a single lady of a certain age. Thankfully, I woke up the next day and through the haze of a hangover thought, 'Um, that could go quite badly wrong in all sorts of ways - not least the 'user review' section.'

So old skool, in-the-kitchen-at-parties-and-then-segueing-neatly-into-a-chat-on-a-sofa it was. It's good to know that's still an option in these tech-saturated times.

However, as we all know, when faced with any sort of romantic approach, it is as though I am a starfish on the bottom of the ocean floor, being overtaken by a brincicle (that's for Frozen Planet fans - how bloody astounding has that series been? Penguins pilfering pebbles and a cryogenic moth caterpillar? Beluga whales creating their own spa and exfoliating with gravel in the shallows? Not to mention the cameramen filming penguins in insane weather conditions; when told at one stage to take refuge in their hut by a scientist because the Arctic storm would probably kill them if they didn't, one of them calmly replied, 'We don't do that. We're the BBC'. AWESOME.) In short: I freeze and my brain goes wibbly.

We'd established there would be A Date. 'What would you like to do, then?' the chap asked.

Things I like doing: going to a pub and drinking red wine and having a chat. Seeing something at the cinema. If it was a weekend, then after all this Frozen Planet excitement, I could have suggested Edinburgh Zoo, as I haven't been there, and it has penguins.

This is what came out of my mouth instead: 'Um. Well. Er. I've always sort of fancied going up one of those indoor walls. You know, the pretend rock climbing thing. I've never done that.'

See? Total brincicle. I have a fear of heights and no co-ordination. I can barely haul myself out of the bath. Going up a pretend rock wall affords the poor chap nothing more than an opportunity to stare at my arse (why would any sane woman suggest that?) whilst listening to me shriek and then having to rescue me when I get stuck halfway up, dangling in a harness like a hapless Blue Peter presenter from 1985. Oh, who am I kidding, I'll never make it to halfway up - I'll quit when I'm two foot off the floor. I have demanded that he take me somewhere that's about the same height and scaleability as the average egg box.

This has 'doomed' written through it like a stick of rock, doesn't it?