Speed Dating Events

One of the greatest payoffs of doing The Rules is that you grow to love only those who love you. If you have been following the suggestions you have learned to take care of yourself. You’re eating well and working out. You’re busy with interests and hobbies and dating, and you’re not calling or chasing men. You have high self-esteem because you are not sleeping around or having affairs with married men. You love with your head, not just your heart. You are honest; you have boundaries, values, and ethics. You are special, a creature unlike any other. Any man would be lucky to have you! 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 »

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 »