Net loss

I’ve been getting ‘interest’ on Dating Direct from more countries than Michael Palin has visited. There have been ‘visits’ from France, Germany, the US, Philippines, Indonesian and Portugal, as well as ‘winks’ from Colombia, Kenya, Qatar, St Lucia, the US, Bulgaria, Peru, Norway, South Africa, Russia and Vietnam (none of whom had even looked at my profile first).

I also had a rare ‘chat’ request. It was from a woman in Ghana without a picture. ‘How are you?’ she wrote. I ignored it. Ten minutes later, she repeated her fascinating missive. When she contacted me for a third time (with exactly the same message), I lost patience. ‘Go away,' I typed. ‘OK, I will go away,’ she replied. I almost felt sorry for her. But what did she really expect?

More worrying than the lack of interest from anyone who didn’t live a long-haul flight away (and I regarded my ex living in Hertfordshire as a problem) was a surfeit of women that I wanted to contact. Despite trawling the website for hours, I found only one woman who I was interested in contacting – apart from those who had already ignored previous emails.

As a result, I decided to quit my subscription the day before my trial week expired. Typical of Dating Direct, though, my bank account was still debited for three months’ membership. After a couple of terse emails, they agreed to refund me.

So it’s back into the real world I go.