Celebrity has its uses. It’s fab for bagging hard-to-get restaurant tables, sashaying up a red carpet to view a ‘must-see’ film three days before Josephine Public and having eyebrow-tinting kits, sequined cushions depicting your own face and Victorian chimney pots delivered, gratis, to your door. Yes, really. This is what happens when you have 400,000 Instagram followers, like me.
On the other hand, celebrity is a right Debbie downer if you’re dating. I wouldn’t dare dip even the tiniest pedicured toe in the teeming maelstrom online. I couldn’t risk it.
A celebrity chum confided that she once had a rendezvous with an app-matched stranger at an obscure hostelry. Big mistake.
Within seconds the dentally challenged, dandruff-dappled individual (utterly unrecognisable from his profile picture) peeled off to the loo to text this unflattering message to his 17 followers. ‘WTF! Hook-up famous bird off the telly [inserted name]. LMFAO! Lol!’
Minutes later the info, frenziedly tweeted and re-tweeted, had circumnavigated the globe eight times and tabloid newspapers were on red alert.
A pap was lurking outside to capture her haunted expression as she fled, after three wretched gulps of warm G&T, desperate to escape further details of Mr No-Thank-You’s recent prostate procedure.
Celebrity has its uses. It’s fab for bagging hard-to-get restaurant tables, sashaying up a red carpet to view a ‘must-see’ film, Vanessa Feltz writes
If I did the same thing I know I would wake up to the ‘news’ that me and the app date are ‘blissfully happy soulmates’ who ‘are revelling in one another’s company’. Or, even worse, to doleful disclosures: ‘Vanessa’s family and friends are worried this thrice convicted felon, who deserted his wife and seven children to wine and dine Feltz and has two Asbos and a history of unsuccessful drug dealing, may not be the Prince Charming she seeks.’
You get it. Tinder is no-go territory. I am mother and mum-in-law to two eminently respectable daughters and their pillars-of-the-community spouses. Do I want to ruin their morning muesli by exposing them to embarrassing omni-media fallout from catastrophic Bumble and Hinge forays? What do you take me for?
I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t there a special secret ‘celebrity app’ where dazzlingly famous folk flirt and frolic clandestinely? Don’t you have to pass a ‘celebrity test’ to qualify? Hasn’t Vanessa heard of it? Of course I’ve heard of it! I’m not going to dob in the soap star who described the site as ‘full of 18-year-old Russian prostitutes and David Walliams’.
I didn’t try it because two nurses earwigging our conversation at an adjoining table pitched in to tell me not to bother. Both ward sisters signed up with high hopes of hobnobbing with superstars and were disappointed.
One managed a few too many drinks with a former broadcasting colleague of mine, known to be ‘happily married’, and regretted it. I decided not to sample the fare.
I’m stymied. Either I just pitch camp at the British Museum café or in the smoked salmon aisle at Marks & Spencer and fling sprightly badinage in the direction of fanciable males or I throw myself entirely on the mercy of friends/plumber/hair colourist/renal surgeon and beg them to ransack their roster of acquaintances and fix me up with anyone single pronto.
I’ve been solo for 22 months – bar an ill-fated four-month fling with a fellow who managed to be unfaithful and boast about it to my best pal’s brother despite attending break-of-dawn synagogue services seven days a week.
Never was a man so strictly kosher and so energetically putting it about. He was fun. I was prepared to overlook his liberal use of mahogany hair dye and deluded insistence he was constantly mistaken for Al Pacino. Sixteen weeks later his nocturnal meanderings were the talk of my entire neighbourhood. Bye bye. Curl up and dye.
Ms Feltz split from fiance Ben Ofoedu early last year, after a 16-year relationship
As time creaks on, I’m guilty of subjecting close chums to indelicately pressured interrogations: ‘Come on. You haven’t introduced me to anyone since that deadly actuary who spat in his own soup. What, you can’t think of anyone? Think harder! Think divorce and death. There must be a widower wafting about. Someone who needs consolation. Rack your brain. Ask your podiatrist.’
I realised I’d better row back when my soft-hearted cousin placated me with: ‘Well, I do know someone whose wife is in intensive care. She’s been ill for ages. If she dies, I’ll take you with me to the shiva [Jewish wake]. You can bring one of your lychee cheesecakes. You never know.’
Writing this, I could describe myself as fresh from another dating disaster if the word ‘fresh’ wasn’t so blindingly inaccurate.
It happened two nights ago and I’m still pulverised, diminished and a little more desolate than I ever want to feel. The chap came highly recommended by a friend of a friend of a friend. In other words, the kind pal who bothered to engineer the event hadn’t met him personally. Nonetheless, pre-date box-ticking was superb. He was 64 to my 62, a lawyer of distinction. He was willing. I was willing. Why wouldn’t a spark ignite?
To plough on with dating after a brace of bruising failures takes dollops of optimism. You must trust the next bloke will emanate a shred of humour, gaze at you more longingly than at his apple crumble and exude enough pheromones to float your flipping boat. You must believe each farting, fatuous frog punts you closer to your perfect prince.
If you lose that faith you’re finished. You’ll throw in the towel and be marooned on the sofa watching Strictly in sorrowful solitude until your last earthly gasp. Let’s face it, you wouldn’t subject yourself to the avalanche of waxing, blow-drying, false-eyelash applying, agonising stiletto-wearing, prodigious perfume spraying and the making of delectable small talk if you didn’t nurture a scintilla of hope that the next date might miraculously turn out to be The One.
That’s why it’s such a blow when, as my Saturday night date did, a man lumbers to the door, says something sniffy about the house, doesn’t smile, make eye contact or utter a word about your fabulous dress, freshly coiffed hair or splendid cleavage, turns on his heel and plods to the car, breathing heavily and focusing forensically on the sat nav. I sat stewing as he steered us into heavy traffic and unleashed his frustration on me as if we’d been unhappily married for half a century.
When I tried to calm him by saying soothingly: ‘I don’t mind if we lose our table. London’s brimming with restaurants. We can go to another,’ he was livid. ‘You don’t mind?!’ He complained about the time it had taken him to drive from his house to mine, the onerous burden of his legal cases, and covered rape, alcoholism and limbs so severely amputated ‘there was no stump. No stump!’ in pre-dinner conversation.
He barely concealed his fury at my failure to order the paella for two. I loathe paella and didn’t want to share a continent with him, let alone a vat of noxious rice.
The final ignominy came when he pulled up outside my house and said grudgingly, ‘I’ll open the door for you.’ Eager to escape, I yelled, ‘No need!’ He said ominously, ‘It’s a heavy door.’ ‘I’ll be fine,’ I insisted. He was right. It was a hellishly heavy door.
Extricating myself elegantly with bag in one hand and keys in the other was agony. I was scared the door might lop off my limb like the aforementioned amputee.
If I had an ounce of sense I’d say, ‘Never again!’ hang up my black lace balconette bra and matching G-string and give up.
I haven’t and I won’t.
I still think Mr Delightful is waiting for me out there somewhere. I still need and want someone to turn to and say, ‘There’s a fox in the garden,’ when there’s a fox in the garden. I’m not ready to give up and eke out the rest of my days alone.
In fact, there is another date in the offing. I have the glimmerings of a good feeling about this one. You never know.