I got some cool presents for my birthday - a chair, a mug, a bottle of kahlua and a rather spiffy bottle opener. Somewhat more chillingly, the day after my birthday, I got a garbled phone message about speed dating when I was wandering about in a haze of illness. I duly dismissed this as Jeff or Josh pulling my leg and went back to bed.

Man, that was a mistake.

That afternoon, Jeff handed me a couple of bits of printed paper while struggling to supress a smirk. I unfolded them to find out that he had, in fact, booked me onto a fucking speed dating session. Christ on a crutch - okay, it's been a while (well, not that long but for the sake of argument it's been long enough), but speed dating? Argh. Argh argh argh.

He'd also booked Josh onto this. Turns out Josh had been complicit in this as well (I suspect he sneakily wanted to go to it) and he was my official moral support. So, on Tuesday evening - the hour of my doom - I was heading for my bike (which was taking on the aspect of Charon's ferry at this point) and I got a text message from Neil, intimating that- well, here we come up against the limits of who I'm prepared to incriminate in public, and the young lady concerned is an innocent as far as the Roquefort Files are concerned, so let's just say he intimated that a girl we both know might actually want to go out for a drink with your humble correspondent. Which turned out to be the case, so as a small digression from this otherwise cringeworthy entry: woohoo!

Back to the eye-rolling-so-far-as-to-inspect-back-of-socket prospect of speed dating.

We got to the Three (abandon all hope, all ye who enter here) Sisters a bit early, so I chucked a Guiness and a G&T down my throat and we wandered/jittered in. We were definitely among the youngest guys there, and probably among the girls as well. The hostess (who had a bizarre tic involving shaking her head vigorously whenever she said anything) told us what the idea was: the girls all sat down at numbered tables and the guys would move between them in order, with three minutes for each 'date' and a couple of breaks in between. If you wanted to meet up with someone, you ticked their name on a scorecard. A whistle (!) went and we all started.

After a bit of a stuttering start, I actually got into the swing of things. I had to stop myself from trying to work out why a given person was there, and whenever I was asked it felt a little awkward explaining that it was actually a birthday present. Conversely, though, it made people more at ease, and I was genuinely surprised a few times at how short the three minutes were. Most of the people seemed to be likeable enough, and had fairly decent chat, but at one point a girl actually made the mistake of saying: "So tell me about yourself,". I couldn't resist. Somewhere in my mind something snapped, and I smiled back: "Well, I'm annoying, abrasive and I like snowboarding. How about you?". I suspect she didn't tick me.

The irony about the whole experience was that of all the people I met, I'd have happily gone to the pub with a lot of them for some standard-issue boozing, but I couldn't pick a single one I'd want to date. Kind of handy really, given the eleventh hour reprieve from singledom that I'd been granted half an hour before I arrived!