Boy meets girl: Where's my pen?

Jul 4 2008 Playing The Dating Game with Ed Saunt and Vicki Eltis, Staines News

Ed's date

These days texting is so important. I think I somehow missed the text message revolution and it's costing me dear on the dating scene.

It's my main weakness and I've had to work hard to develop my now moderately accomplished 'question vibe' technique (I basically bombard her with questions and hope one of them will be worth replying to).

Recently though, I've been going back to the old school in an attempt to liven up my love life - I've taken up good old fashioned note writing.

Yes it's cheesy. Yes it's sickening. But, trust me, it works.

At time of going to press I had written love notes to a sandwich-maker, a couple of bar girls, a random woman I met in the street and even an air stewardess.

You may want to grab your sick buckets but I also employed the services of the cutest kid I could find to pass the following note to the trolley-dolly: "You're pretty. Mile high club? x"

However, both the crowning glory and the crushing defeat of this policy came with my note to Angry Casino Girl.

Natalie (I know from her name badge) is one of the most exceptionally beautiful women ever to deal at a card table. She's also one of the rudest.

So, towards the end of a night at the tables (just observing of course), I decided to write her a note.

She had expressed nothing but pure hate for me to this point so I had nothing to lose and I was on top of the world when she texted me the next morning.

She even agreed to come out to meet me at the club I was at the next night and turned up looking more gorgeous than ever.

So, we're settling down together, right? Unfortunately, halfway through the evening I lost her and decided to send her a text.

And this is what I came up with: "You around for chat/kissing? x"

My textual incompetence exemplified.

Where's a pen and paper when you need one?

Vicki's Date

Rewind 60 years or so when the way to communicate was simply by posting a letter.

In those days, dating etiquette was different.

If a women liked a man, one way to let him know was to drop a hanky in front of him.

Today, though, things are different. We can flirt outrageously and it is okay for women to make the first move.

In the good old days people would fall in love at the local dance hall, pine for their loved one as he got sent off to war and stick by one man, who, if they survived the hostilities, would come back to marry their girl.

You would not dream of ending up in a man's bed unless you were married to him and more often than not those marriages would last 50 or 60 years.

I have spoken to many 70 or 80 years olds as they celebrate their diamond wedding anniversaries.

That kind of thing will, I feel, be unheard of with my generation and even the one before mine.

Today, with technology advancing fast, getting in contact with a man is far too easy.

Whether it is via telephone, mobile, email or text.

I often wish I could go back in time to the era when good old-fashioned courting really was exciting.

Okay, seeing the love of your life have to go off to war isn't nice but at least absence did make the heart grow fonder in many cases.

I have spent many mornings regretting that the man in my life has been too readily nearby at the press of a button.

Drunken text messages or missed calls in the middle of the night just make people like me, who love communicating, seem desperate. Maybe I need more patience.

There's one man in particular, who has often been on the receiving end of one of my drunken text messages.

I fell in love with him last year but my feelings for him were never quite reciprocated.

Would he have stayed interested if we had met in the 1940s? If we could only write letters to each other? Maybe now he must be bored of hearing from me!