I have always thought of weather like that of the last week as Dating Weather. It’s not that one can only date when it’s hot, or that one is more amorous in heat than cold (if anything, the reverse is true); but when I was young and single I was very poor. As George Orwell observed in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), in a line so good Nancy Mitford stole it: ‘It is not easy to make love in a cold climate when you have no money.’ Dates in the winter necessitate a restaurant or a cinema or, at the very least, somewhere with heating – and that costs money. Dating in the summer is a walk in the park.
And now I am old and single, I am cash-poor – at least until the matrimonial acquest is sold. (My ex-wife’s estate agent claims that a sunny spell is House-Buying Weather, but I haven’t seen any evidence yet.) And so I am back to dating. For three months of the year, which is as long as you can expect Dating Weather in a cold climate. I attempted a first date picnic in Hyde Park in September some years ago: we sat eating Eton mess in the drizzle. There was no second date.
It is no use complaining about the double standard: I have female friends who rely on being taken out for dinner for most of their calorific intake. But, they say, getting date-worthy hair, nails, and leg waxes – what you might call the bidding or tender costs – is very expensive. As if a barber shaves the hairs off a chap’s earlobes for free. But it is different for girls: they just have to turn up to be wooed, a man has to have a Plan.
My first date after the divorce was, unfortunately, in mid-winter. I had been intending to wait until Dating Season but it was an old (platonic) friend of mine who, after hearing of the separation, didn’t last five minutes before asking ‘So…. are you dating?’ Obviously, I had to make a Plan. There was a decent well-made play at her local theatre, and a restaurant nearby with a pre-theatre prix fixe, all well within budget. But, as von Moltke could have told me, a plan never survives first contact with the entreé. She was running late – there are time costs to bidding and tendering – and, when we finally got the restaurant, the waiters were putting away the prix fixe menus. Improvise, adapt and overcome: once she’d decided what she wanted to eat, I could do some mental arithmetic based on how much money I had in my bank account and then remember that I’d had a large lunch and only needed a salad. With two glasses of mid-table red, I was still within budget – but I’d committed my tactical reserve.
Inviting a girl for a picnic seems romantic, rather than cheap
The bill came. It had been so long since I’d been in a restaurant with cutlery that I had completely forgotten about the optional service charge. The optional service charge took the bill over my overdraft limit. I took the waiter aside and asked if he could remove the optional service charge – I could send money to the troncmaster later – and he said he couldn’t remove the optional service charge, not without the manager’s permission. My plan had gone the way of the Schlieffen Plan, relying too much on rigid timetables and a complete misreading of the other party’s mobilisation time.
I had to go back to the table and confess that I couldn’t pay the bill and could she help out and I would pay for the next one (tactics). She rolled her eyes and paid. I thought I had been forgiven until a couple of months later she wrote an article – she is a journalist – cataloguing her record of Awful Dates: I was the guy who didn’t tell her he couldn’t afford the meal until afterwards. The commentators below the line – as always, models of compassion and wisdom – were, for once, unanimous in their view: a chap who couldn’t stand a meal shouldn’t be going out.
But now it is Dating Weather again. Inviting a girl for a picnic seems romantic, rather than cheap. It is, incidentally, cheaper – for the price of two glasses of mid-table red with corkage, you can buy a bottle of something decent and fizzy – but it’s not guaranteed to be romantic. I had a picnic with a girl on Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh to watch the sunset and hadn’t planned on being surrounded by Scottish teenagers necking Buckfast. Not just that – it was during the festival; there were gangs of roaming student actors and the ever-present risk of outbreaks of musical theatre. But, until global warming really gets going, you do what you can in a cold climate.
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