Speed Dating Events

Not all men are wolves in gorilla’s clothing. There is a successful proposition for every unsuccessful one, and many men discover for themselves the truth of the old biblical adage, ‘ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find’. They don’t have to be great stylists. They simply have to make a woman feel as if they mean it for her, and for her alone. If they can do that, they can get away with the most . . . laid-back approaches. Read the rest of this entry »

Becky is fated never to become Lady Crawley. But sometimes the loser lives to fight another day. More poignant still are those proposals which hover on the brink of fulfilment rather than living on into reality.

No one conveys the sensation of love holding its breath better than Dick Francis, a master of the experience of unfulfilled longing. His heroes, bruised and bemused by life’s rough passage, can see new love glimmering and growing but hardly dare to hope that it can be for them. The defeats of the past have taught them that loving means losing, and the loser left with nothing but a legacy of painful memories and stifled sighs. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, only some marriages are made in heaven. The others need a fair bit of terrestrial stage management to get them off the ground. This is the story of Maggie and Willie in an evergreen drama, Hobson’s Choice. Maggie, at thirty, is the unmarried daughter of the bootmaker Henry Hobson. She has been working like a dog for her father all her life, and her prospects are getting dimmer rather than brighter.

Maggie develops a fellow-feeling for Willie, her father’s downtrodden labourer, who is nevertheless ‘a genius at making boots’. She forms a plan in her mind — but then she has to break it to Willie: Read the rest of this entry »

‘I want to ask you a question.’

‘What?’ I said, in a small unpromising voice. ‘How would you like to be Mrs Buddy Willard?’

‘Man proposes, God disposes’, runs the proverb. And women have to put up with the mess they both make of it’, as one of England’s premier duchesses observes in her irreverent moments. Since society and custom have traditionally favoured men with the right of proposing, all too often women are no more than sitting ducks — and there are some terrible bird dogs around. Read the rest of this entry »

This South-West version of the Hound of the Baskervilles barks and sniffs round him all night. The Major hangs there in mortal dread that any second he will feel a vicious set of canines sink into the seat of his pants. But this is not the only trial. If ever a man suffered . . .

The wind begun to blow bominable cold, and the old bag kep turnip round and swingin so it made me sea-sick as mischief . . . thar I sot with my teeth rattlin like 1 had a ager. I do blieve if I didn’t love Miss Mary so powerful I would of froze to deth; for my hart was the only spot that felt warm, and it didn’t beat more’n two licks a minit, only when I thought how she would be sprised in the mornin, and then it went into a canter. Read the rest of this entry »

One man who most uncharacteristically takes it at a jump is Mr Knightley, in Jane Austen’s Emma. Knightley is nothing but grave and circumspect when it comes to other people’s affairs, but when it comes to his own moment, it sort of steals up behind him and pushes him over the edge.

This proposal comes as a great surprise to both participants, since the lucky recipient herself does not see it coming. Emma is convinced that Mr Knightley is going to tell her off, as he has been a stern recording angel of her minor follies and vanities. So when she senses that Mr Knightley is on the brink of something, ‘her immediate feeling was to avert the subject if possible.’

But like murder, love will out:

Emma could not bear to give him pain . . . cost her what it would, she would listen . . . Read the rest of this entry »