archiveLondon dating

Stats: 35, 5’9”, brown/er, none, Gloucestershire Where: Kennington, London Pre-date rating: 6/10 While few are so clichéd as to fancy only tall, dark and handsome guys, most of us have a type, whether we choose to admit it or not. Certain things attract us; if you put our dates or former lovers side-by-side, there’d be a common thread. Straying away from these comforting features, whether a bent nose, blue eyes, or a job in finance, can be a risky strategy. But sometimes we must journey into the unknown. My online...

The Apple Store is a strange place. It does its very best to pretend it isn’t a shop. There are no tills ringing or sour-faced shopgirls stacking shelves with garish product or hurrying along pretending they’re too busy to help you, no groaning rails or higgledy-piggledy stacks of boxes. The Apple Store, especially the one in London's Covent Garden, is more of an ‘experience’. Smiling pretty boys in skinny jeans loiter at the doorway with eager smiles and eyes so wide they can only be the result of a recently...

There are some dates you feel you should go on, even if you really ought not to. Maybe it’s because somebody incredibly handsome has deigned to ask you out, or perhaps you are lonely, and your diary tells you this coming Friday is a blank space, its page a polar landscape. Whatever the reason, sometimes we say yes when we should be raising the drawbridge in an emphatic no. Johnny, 28, is such a no. But his square jaw and icy blue eyes draw me in, and he pets my...

Stats: 31, 5'11", blond/blue, Kent When: Spring 2012 Where: London, W1 Pre-date rating: 7/10 Sometimes, when you haven’t spoken to another person for days, you long for human contact. It can be anything: a smile from a shopkeeper as you hand over the money for your pint of milk, a phone call from someone in India claiming to be called Valerie and asking if you have had an industrial accident lately or, more usually, someone sitting opposite sipping from a pint while you imagine what kind of kisser they’ll be....