A few days later, he dumped me by text.

'I went out with my ex last night and we've decided to give it another go.'

I felt kicked, breathless, lost. I went and played some tinny heavy metal very loudly and cried my eyes out. I think I even did that thing where I slid down a doorframe, like they do in all the good movies. But in the end, I got on with it, washing, dressing, barely eating and wearing all black.

'Didn't see you there!' quipped a friend, bumping into me, all Sicilian Widow in black Gap and bad eye-makeup. Sainsbury's spoilt the setting, admittedly....the Trevi Fountain would've been more appropriate.

But then! Then, my friends, he texted me....

'Hi. How are you? X'

My heart leapt, raced and all the kind of other athletically impossibly stuff that is used widely by bad novelists. And me.

But I played it cool....I was mean and calculating and left it all of 11 minutes before I replied. I slept with my phone like we were brother and sister and living together in a trailer park. Clutched, it was, to my bosom, or failing that, my pocket. I lived for its bracing vibration. And then, 2 days later, it did just that as I pulled into Tesco.

'Hullo darling!' he said, 'this is just a welfare call!'

But I fell for it all and I went round the next day. He was shooting (darling!), and strode towards me once more with all that jerkish arrogance that I'd come to love and desire more than common sense would permit.

We snuggled together on the sofa.

'I don't want to lose you from my life now I've got you,' he said, pausing to stroke my hair.

Silence passed. A horse brayed somewhere.

'Would you like to go upstairs for a cuddle?'

Again, I leapt, a little too quickly for my retrospective liking. In fact, retrospectively speaking, I'd have liked nothing more to have splattered his cream jodhpurs in my tea (milk, one sugar), finished with a slap round his ruddy (bloody) face and a knee in the groin. But I was holding his hand as he led me gently up to the creaking eaves of his house where he made very bad love to me, and passed me a bottle of body lotion once we were done.

'Could you massage my back, darling?' he said, face muffled by the pillow, head on his beefy arms.

It saddens me to think that I cheerfully, hopefully, performed my best ever effleurage strokes for this bloke, but the lesson's learned.

2 days later, he dumped me again, this time it seems, for good.

'I've realised since seeing you that I'm not over my ex,' he put, 'but I'll always remember you fondly. Keep in touch.'

A week later, he changed his number.

Emergency....

....so, there was I, clutched in a beefy embrace and my heart pumping in my ears. He ushered me inside what was a little cottage, bracketed in all directions by fields and stables. A few hundred yards beyond his drive stood a rather proud looking, red-brick farmhouse.

'Oh, my parents live there!' he boomed, 'it's called Toad Hall!'

The idyll was shattered by that confession. And furthermore, by...

'My place is called BagEnd!'

OK, so let's rack up those clues....

- dodgy 'do you work out?' opening line
- bad coat
- patter of generic chat-up lines
- his hand on my bottom at the soonest possible opportunity that we were beyond the scope of the PCC
- his 'cousin' in a filmy negligee on his phone
- ribbons
- his sharing a plot of land with his parents
- a dog called Kaiser
- a house called BagEnd


Oh, and just to top it off, as I was dragged across a windy field to see his horses, he announced their names

'Black Bess and Starlight!'

Now, Black Bess isn't too bad. Sure, it lacks imagination and even the horse itself, chewing morosely on a carrot seemed to say,

'Don't say it! Just because I'm sodding black! My last owner lacked similar imagination!'

But my real concern was with Starlight....after all, this was a man who'd ridden the military tide through Borneo, Germany, Afghanistan. He was as hard as nails, 6'6, a military officer and a big-cheese in the local police force. Surely he couldn't be held responsible for giving his horse such a gay name?

I found myself in a stable, watching him throw forkfuls of straw in the air.

'My two passions!' he boomed (his default vocal setting), 'are riding and horses!'

I daren't ask for clarification....

We went back across the field, and he showed me his house. A sunken bath, scruffy leather sofas, an AGA and a battered piano in an alcove. I was slowly warming to his interior decor, he was making me a cup of tea when he revealed what really ratified, to me at least, that beneath the suited and booted exterior there may well have lain a butt just wiggling to be taken.

'Through there,' he jabbed a finger behind me, 'I've got a sauna and a hot-tub.'

I think at this point, had I applied to the police and been asked to take a simple aptitude test, I may well have been thrown out for such a poor score...

However, he was keen, it seemed, to prove that he wasn't actually gay at all. He'd pinned a pic of a leggy nurse to his fridge door and his tour of the house led me to his bedroom where Jilly Cooper novels and condoms lay on the bedside table. We lay down on the bed together and fumbled with each other for a few moments. Suddenly, he pulled back, looked at me and smiled broadly.

'We should work out together,' he suggested, 'and you could wear tight lycra so I could see your vulva!'

I don't think I said anything. I don't think I thought anything either, but I did feel the primeval visceral rumble of terror in my tummy...

Deviating away, temporarily, from the Copper and Cuffs, an internet forum caught my eye last night. On it, the original poster was explaining a tale of a rather lack-lustre pursuant performance from A Bloke.

'But I've texted him,' she'd say, 'and got back "Hey babes!" What could that possibly mean?'

The thread ran on for far too much bandwidth and on each post, the (mainly) female cyber-pals would go

'That means he really likes you! Now, at 4.45pm exactly, you've got to pretend you've got another bloke on the scene to pique this other guy's interest further! Then, make your way down Oxford Street with half a lemon in your pocket - I read this in Cosmo, it must be true - and......'

or

'Right! Now, you've got to completely ignore him! DON'T reply to his e-mails. DON'T reply to his texts. Maybe accidentally let a mutual friend know you've got your eye on someone else and can be found at the STD clinics on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. And finally, key his car, steal his ID and get drunk. He'll realise then that you're The One!'

(blah-de-blah-de-blah-de-blah......)


Since when did women become so dumb? Just what happened to us? Since when did we decide that the only possible way that we could get the truth out of a guy would be to nick an Enigma machine, wait for a full moon and with a snippet of his hair for good luck, and his last text held in your palm, somehow extrapolate the truth whilst wolves howl around you and Tim Burton spikes your hair up into a punky mess....?

Suddenly modern dating etiquette would have it that all men are speaking Urdu through a funnel in an underwater shed. But in no other walk of life do we afford ourselves this same luxury of ambiguity.

Girl asks bloke: What do you want to drink?
Bloke tells girl: A pint of lager
Girl rushes to the toilets to text her best mate - 'He's ordered a lager! Surely he means a whisky? What's going on?'
Bloke chats up barmaid. Enjoys lager. Gets earful from girlfriend.

I'm a woman and don't like to do my fellow females a grand disservice, but it's time to throw away the Linguaphone and interpretative software and take a 'no' as meaning just that.....

OK, so I'd left the bar, The Copper wasn't with me (I'd shrugged him off thinking that despite the desire, he'd think me too easy were I to capitulate there and then....) and a smile was stretched wide across my face. I went home, thought intensely and euphemistically as an aid to sleep and woke up the next day to a text.

'Hullo gorgeous!' he put, 'fancy coming round to my pad?'

Oh God. The Pad. But I brushed that from my mind, got the directions and clambered - brushed, perfumed and nervous - into my car. Half an hour later and I still hadn't arrived. My phone bleeped:

'Hullo gorgeous! Are you lost? Look out for the ribbons!'

The what?

Slowing down the country road, I suddenly saw a rather curious bundle of ribbons tied to a gatepost. Nervously, I steered my car in, not knowing what to expect. A cult? The UK equivalent of Leatherface wheeling towards me? Or maybe a 6'6 man in jodhpurs, kinky boots and once more, that crocodile smile. If I'd have had a Sat Nav, it would've started bleeping at me furiously to reverse, but smitten by his buttocks (I have weaknesses....), I parked my car and got out, trying to emulate the girl in the perfume ad whose graceless beauty knows no bounds. Not even a Rover 200 and a shedload of mud.

'Hullo,' he purred, and the scene seemed set for perfection, until an Alsation bounded up to me from nowhere and began to hump my leg. The dog was named 'Kaiser,' and I can only but apologise to you, reading this, for thinking, 'How many more glaring pointers did she need?'
But I was young, smitten and easily persuaded. If I'd been a pensioner, I'd have probably given some tosser in a van 60K to tarmac my drive