Bumbling Dad. Midlife dating tales from London.

The only thing worse than a profile with no picture, apart from  possibly anal herpes or doing up a zip fly a tad too quickly and enthusiastically before being fully tucked away, is a dating site profile with just headshots.  Beautiful, well lit, artfully posed headshots, showing off lustrous hair, luscious lips, and eyes like limpid pools of liquid diamonds.  Rather like an iceberg, a headshot only profile tends to have a little more going on below the surface. Or in this case, a lot more below the neck. I’ve learned this the hard way, and broken my own rule on a number of occasions, none of which has led to anything but disappointment. I love a rounded, curvy figure. There’s something very alluring about the softness of warm flesh, the wobble of a bingo wing. I’m no Adonis myself, and it’s completely natural that women (and men) in their mid years might have an extra few pounds here and there, a sprinkling of cellulite, a slight downgrade in the degree of perky pertness that underpi

No, not this one, it's a bathroom selfie.  Swipe left Aaaaagh!  She's just plain scary.  Swipe left This one looks OK.  Swipe up for next picture.  Shit!  That's Bumble, this is Tinder.  I've just Super Liked her and I've only seen one picture.  FML. Completely blank profile.  Not even a pic.  Swipe left Not interested in ONS.  Literally every profile says this.  Took me ages to work out what ONS is.  Useless knowledge anyway; nobody's interested "Marisa"  102.  Clearly not her real age.  But looks dead behind the eyes.  Swipe left Blimey, this one has a bio.  Some actual words about herself.  Unfortunately, most of them are about dancing in the rain like nobody's watching.  Swipe left Looks ok.  At least, I think that's her.  First photo has two girls in it (no cup, fortunately).  Second photo is a group shot.  She could be any of them.  Next 3 photos are of a cat.  Swipe left Ah, another bio.  What's this?  - I'm 5'8&quo

Talk to my chums I did.  And you know what?  They were the square root of fuck all help.  Mainly because they'd all married twenty-some years ago, and I was the novelty singleton.  Apart from the wealthy mate, who was moving on to his third wife, but he was more helpful from a separation perspective.  His boggle-eyed heat-seeking wife missile thinking wasn't for me, thankfully, particularly in light of how that  marriage turned out.  But everyone else just wanted to swipe through dating apps with me.  Which was occasionally hysterical, but also betrayed the bleak nature of my future - destined to die alone without even a cat, because renting high up. And not a cat owner. Although chum Jim kindly recommended E45 lotion for genital husbandry purposes.  And that helped.  But I now have an aversion to latex.  And the fear that Jim knows exactly what cleanses underneath my foreskin.  Form an orderly queue, ladies.  And don't @me, Jim. So.  Plenty of Fish.  Deep Breath. It

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