Party pooper

In my opinion, parties are the best places for meeting people.You don’t need an opening line – you can just ask how they know the host.

So I had high hopes for last weekend, as I had been invited to my best mate’s housewarming party – my first house party for longer than I could remember. Not only would I know most people there, but everybody had been asked to bring a single friend. I had even been guaranteed the presence of two ‘suitable’ women.

So to say I was disappointed, after setting aside an entire weekend to travel to Sheffield, to find that the ‘suitable’ women were my best mate’s wife’s teenage cousins and the only other female singleton was her sister (who I have yet to have a conversation with, despite having known for more than two years), would be a huge understatement.

The week got worse. A few days later, I had almost £17,000 of work cancelled for next year, and received a letter telling me that an ISA into which I had invested £16,000 over the past eight years had not only earned no interest, but was now worth £11,000.

As I couldn’t feel much worse, I decided to ask out a cute woman in the office in which I have been working this week. She wasn’t the most attractive woman there, but she was my type (short red hair). And, as far as I was concerned, she wasn’t out of my league.

Of course, I didn’t have the courage to ask her face to face. Instead, I put a business card on her keyboard (late at night when there was nobody around) saying: ‘In the unlikely event that you are single, I’d like to buy you a drink.’

Perhaps the cleaner threw away the card before she had seen it. Perhaps she was appalled by the quality of my business card (the card is very thin – but what do you expect for free?). But she hasn’t responded.

So I’m off to the Peak District tomorrow for a walking weekend organised by my best mate’s company (will4adventure.com). He has said it will be chock-a-block with single women, one of whom he thinks I would like. Bearing in mind it was him who promised two suitable women at last week’s party, I am not too hopeful.