What happened on the date Sophie | Laurie Any awkward moments? The waiter commented on our chemistry – we were the spectator sport. Good table manners? No complaints. Any awkward moments? Only when the waiter complimented us on the "chemistry" at the table. Good table manners? Very. OK, so this is more than table manners, but I had to put the “awkward moments” in because the “table manners” responses were practically a double-impeccable. I can’t even imagine why the waiter thought it was appropriate to butt into the date, but it...

Spare a thought, everyone, for Jonah Hill – the character actor caught on tape this week telling an irritating, confrontational paparazzo to suck his dick, signing off with the beautiful "faggot". No sooner had the first bored internet user finished listening to the second syllable of “faggot” spill from Hill’s mouth than the Wolf Of Wall Street star was hastily beating a retreat, apologising profusely, his Hollywood bankability draining before his very eyes like an iPhone battery at a festival. Hill has flung not one but two apologies out into the...

The supermarket can be a boring and depressing place at the best of times, let alone if you’re single. Couples snogging in front of the very shelf you’re trying to reach – lasagne for ONE – or, much more likely, arguing about being organic in front of the tenderstem broccoli. It’s a nonstop misery-fest, from the very moment you pick up your basket – complete with someone else’s scrunched up receipts in the bottom of it, the bastard – to the awkward hunt for your loyalty card as your cans...

What do you look for in a man? Nice eyes? Bright smile? Good taste in footwear? Ability to make you laugh? We all have tick-boxes and black markers at the ready when it comes to finding a mate. I can’t tell you who you should date – that is simply none of my business – but I can certainly advise you give this quarter-century of drips a wide berth. Yes, it’s another 25 men you should swerve to add to the 75 I’ve already blacklisted. And I should know how bad...

There are so many social minefields these days, and endless faux pas just waiting to happen, it's surprising we ever bother going out at all, or communicating with anyone. If it weren’t for thick skins and an ability to recover from public mortification, we’d be better off living all alone, rocking back and forth in our world where nothing ever really happens, but we are all safe. Few things are as mind-numbingly political, stupid and awkward than the simple ‘x’. Not the one that marks the spot on a treasure...

When you are growing up a future gay, you learn very quickly that your relationships with straight men are never going to be anything other than complex. Whether you’re trying to explain to your dad for the eightieth time that you’re not going to kick that football back at him no matter how many times it flies over your head, or enduring the weekly terror of “Backs against the wall, lads” in the showers after PE, it can be difficult to make yourself understood. So alike, but oceans apart. Many...

Football I remember a very miserable afternoon – a rainy Saturday – spent in a pub that smelled of cauliflower and dog, staring with great concentration at a TV up on the wall. I didn’t really dare look away in case I looked like I was bored and I couldn’t have given two bronze fucks about what was happening on the screen so I fixed my gaze on a spider at the corner of the TV. The spider span a web and then fell onto a table and crawled into...

When you’re dating you hear a lot of talk about ‘soulmates’, ‘the one’ or the perfect match. Even the singles website where I met most of perfectly willing – but not always able – victims was called Soulmates, as if everybody on it were hopeless romantics staring at the sky with mooncalf eyes, waiting for Mr Right to swing off a star and drop into their arms. Quizzes, algorithms and your own ridiculous preconceptions help you decide who this person is likely to be, this ‘other half’ of you, and...

Dating used to be very simple: you meet a series of near-strangers for an awkward drink in a pub that’s always too noisy/busy/rough/far away from a Tube station, decide whether you like them or not and if so do it all over again in a nicer venue and perhaps with food. And then you get married. Now that everybody has the attention span of a gnat and is swiping left and right on their iPhones without so much as a thought for the kingdoms of emotions they’re quashing, dating has...