Bumbling Dad. Midlife dating tales from London.

We'll start at the very beginning.  It's a very good place to start First Tinder date ever.  Alone in a new flat in London after a couple of decades spent falling in and then out of love, with breeding in between.  Ex and I are polite and practical. Kids are fab and undamaged by the split, spend lots of time with me, and neither have any further place in this blog, other than possible future inadvertent cock-blocking.  Time will tell. Alice.  She's my first ever Tinder match.  The massive whoosh of validation.  She's a nurse.  Voice like car wheels on a gravel road in the phone chats we have over the days leading to the date.  Kooky and intense. Petite, bobbed, greets me with a warm hug; chats, drinks and eats with me in the gilded delights of West Hampstead; comes back to my starkly empty flat, spends the night in a variety of warm and friendly gymnastic poses, kisses me goodbye, ghosts me within a week. Is this the real life?  Is this just fantasy?  Caught in

Four years of dating apps and experiences in London.  Enough trauma to have a specialist hospital wing named after me.  The names have been changed to protect the guilty and the innocent. There's some catching up to do here.  I'm planning to bring things up to date - a time when I find I've accidentally turned the wrong side of 50, loved and lost somebody who might have been "the one", and am embarking once again on a round of first dates with lovely ladies, some of whom could win Oscars for use of photographic effects, and many of whom are bizarrely specific about height requirements but flexible in attitude towards the accuracy of the age shown on their profiles. But there's some dating backstory too.  I need to tell you about the woman who married someone else 12 weeks after we broke up, the passionate South American who broke into my flat, the delightful girl with the dreadful hygiene issues, and what I've learned about profiles which only have hea