When A Man Loves A Woman

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A study published this week showed that women prefer old fashioned wooing to smart, modern day chat up lines. And in similar examinations of the bleeding obvious a different report proved bears like to wander through the trees looking for toilet paper whilst another showed the Pope may go to Mass now and again.

These statistical reports seem to come out daily, and if you look up any dictionary in 2009 the phrase “academic study” would have a definition along the lines of “the act of desperately grabbing a handful of people and asking them a silly question to back up any publicity campaign your sponsors may be involved in”. But, I must confess, the reports are a lot of fun, especially when it comes to the battle of the sexes.

Since Eve first told Adam that Eden’s grass needed cutting, men and women have always battled to get hold of any information that will give them the upper hand, and today there is no shortage of people willing to supply that info for a quick bit of publicity. A new survey this weekend, for example, from a chain of garden centres, told us that a bit of gardening helps men increase their sex drive. Quite how spreading manure and pulling up weeds increases the male’s libido was not explained but, if it’s true, then no wonder that bloke Alan Titchmarsh always looks happy. Perhaps we’ll find an Anne Summers garden at Chelsea this year with rappers singing about men and their hoes.

I asked listeners on Smooth Radio to reflect the battle of the sexes this week and text me their favourite chat up lines, which showed that the oldies are still the best. “Would you like twenty pence to phone your mum and say you won’t be home till morning?”, was one, kind of creepy, one. Or how about “when they arranged the alphabet they should have put U and I together,” or “my eyes must be hurting cause you’re a sight for sore eyes.” There was even a modern day twist with “there’s something wrong with my mobile phone. It doesn’t have your number stored on it”.

My favourite came from a listener who used this line to a girl a few years ago and they are now, he says, very happily married. “Would you like to dance?”, he asked her. “You would? Great. Can I have your seat?”.

I’ve always found the opposite sex to be a mystery wrapped in a puzzle inside an enigma that’s written in Mandarin and then encrypted using technology from the future, so the thought of chat up lines was always redundant to me as, in order to use them, you have to be able to unfreeze your mouth first. I’m convinced every girl I’ve ever met, even today, assumes I’ve just returned from a bad dental visit where the tooth doctor used animal strength anaesthetic.

I first came across a chat up line, although I didn’t know what it was at the time, at a university party when a guy I knew from my karate class, who was a year older and therefore to be held in awe, said to a girl something like “you may not be the prettiest here but beauty is only a light switch away”. Today he’d probably get his head smacked but, back then, it made the girl laugh and the ice was broken.

And don’t girls always say a sense of humour is much better than good looks? I used to try telling jokes, which didn’t work. I‘d pull funny faces and they didn’t notice, and if I tried acting the clown I may as well have been centre stage at a cremation. I found that it was only when I asked for a kiss that they laughed.

So I do look forward to these statistics and surveys because I know that somewhere there’s a poor unlucky individual like I was who will believe in them and use their findings to try and improve his luck with the chat up lines.

Another set of statistics which was released this week tells us that, due to the recession, men are paying ten per cent less than ten years ago on a first date. But it also stated that when women pay they spend, typically, half of what men spend. Now, even though I’ve said that these statistics are nonsense, I want to believe this as it panders to my male sense of being brow beaten and subjugated by the fair sex. So perhaps I’ll simply cherry pick the surveys that work for me, and bin the rest.

I encountered one guy this week who was trying out a modern day chat up. I was walking down Oxford Street in London and saw several of those student charity collectors who wear a different, luminous coloured nylon jacket each day depending on which good cause they’re collecting for. These guys, with their blond dreadlocks and woollen tea cosy hats, must have been told to go in to charm overload to make the ladies part with their money in these tough financial times as the one in front of me held out his arm to a girl and said, as the ice breaker, “so I hear you’re taking me to lunch”. Quick as a flash the girl replied “What? Dressed like that? I don’t think so” and kept on walking without losing a step. Magnificent!

And that’s the problem with chat up lines that no amount of surveys prepares you for. They’re only useful if the other person doesn’t have a ready comeback. “Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?” works fine until you meet the girl who replies “Yes. Sorry for causing the deformity when I landed on you.”

Don't Look Back In Anger

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I hope that you had a great festive couple of weeks, didn’t kill any family members, got the socks you wanted, ate yourself silly, embarrassed yourself at the neighbours’ party and tripped over your Sales bags in the High Street spilling coffee all over some poor innocent bystander. At least that way I won’t feel alone.

So now things are more or less back to normal and we should all feel ready to face the new year and whatever it will throw at us. If you have time, and go to the BBC news web site, you’ll see that they’ve asked people to comment on what they fear most about 2009, and it makes for very sober reading with around half the readers fearing economic meltdown and the other half fearing for Gordon Brown’s health.

To be more accurate they fear that he has probably got great health and will still be around later in the year to muck things up even further although, to be fair to our Prime Minister, it is slightly less than half who wish him ill as one guy said the thing he feared most of all was cheese being made illegal and there being a pickle shortage.

It may be me trying too hard to be arty and literate, or perhaps I’ve been inhaling too much Marks and Spencer Christmas pot pourri, but I’ve always thought of the upcoming new year as a kind of vaguely familiar person from my past who I can see in the shadows getting ready to throw me a present. As I catch the box I never know whether it’s a great gift or not, and I take around twelve months to unwrap it and work things out.

On reflection, having read the last paragraph again, you’re right. It must be the pot pourri.

The vaguely familiar person that was called 2008 threw me a great present which was full of things that made me happy and grateful and led to a fantastic year, but I fear that the shadowy figure that is 2009 is not getting ready to throw me a parcel but to throw up all over me, and indeed all of us. The year ahead looks tougher than Jonathan Ross’s chances of a knighthood, but that wasn’t going to stop me from my annual, year end, tidying up of drawers and old photos, ready to welcome in the new year.

I won’t bore you with the memories that came flooding back as I found half torn, fading, family photo groups and memories of Christmases past, though one particular polaroid of me lying across a sofa after a few drinks at a festive Top Of The Pops party brought a smile. If I remember correctly Julian Lennon and I had just bonded but, with the flow of wine, I thought his dad was still alive and kept asking when he was going to bring out another record. Julian will always be tops in my book for his patience, or perhaps he was simply as well oiled as I was.

But, the one photo that rekindled most memories during my end of year office tidy was my old university matriculation card.

I’ve written before about one of these cards where I wore a beard, but this one predated even that, and was very scary. I looked exactly like an Iraqi wanted poster, the image of a militant student who wanted to change the world, defeat capitalism and pick a fight with every grown up before giving his washing to Mum and settling down to a packet of chocolate digestives in front of Coronation Street. If I was as hard as nails then the nails must have been made of wet tissue paper.

I probably would have saved the world if I could have got myself out of bed in the morning but I settled, instead, for the humiliation of explaining to my Maths teacher why I’d missed his dawn lecture, a daily dressing down on my way to the student restaurant and the heaven of pies and beans.

I must admit that the mean, moody, would be terrorist look on my card is somewhat spoiled by a huge spot on the end of my nose, a centre parting in my hair that Moses could have led the Israelites through, and an attempt at designer stubble that looks like I’d glued iron filings on my chin and then had most of them blown away in a gust of wind. The diagonal, striped, brown pullover completes the underprivileged, charity shop look, and I looked very much dressed for the part of a fan club member standing with other disadvantaged souls outside a Cliff Richard concert. But, at the time, I thought I was cooler than a polar bear sitting on a glacier, eating ice cream in a snow storm.

It was around this time I decided on my career after a local radio DJ came to play records at our student disco. I had just started as the DJ there and was asked to keep putting the records on while the celebrity gave his patter over the microphone and gave away some prizes. It seemed he had an easy life and, as I watched him getting paid in bundles of cash, I knew that this must be a more fun way to earn a living than being a scientist. Watching the girls gather round him for autographs I knew it had better perks too.

Each day when I present my show on Smooth Radio, whatever that half familiar dark stranger called 2009 throws at me, I’m going to remember back to that day and the enthusiasm I had, even if I hadn’t quite sorted out the clothing or haircut yet.

A new year is a time to look forward but, sometimes, you have to look back first. It stops you taking yourself too seriously.