Just as some relief from the Christmas Hangover comes in the form of the January Paycheck those in loving (or otherwise) relationships have to deal with the next commercial spend fest that is Valentines Day.

When I was married I was grateful for this annual reminder that I loved someone, because it was increasingly slipping my mind as time went on.

Saint Valentine , for whom we have to thank for this reminder, was put in prison for performing marriages for soldiers which was a big no no at the time . Whilst in prison he is said to have healed the sick daughter of  the jailer looking after him. Before his execution he wrote her a letter and signed off with the now infamous “Your Valentine”.

I wonder if what really happened was that he was caught by the jailer giving his daughter a good ‘healing’ and was executed as a result? We will never know.

Years later Chaucer referenced Valentine in a poem (probably looking for something to rhyme with ‘moan and whine’) and a romantic habit, fuelled by marketeers, was born. Florists, confectioners, jewellers and restaurants truly experience LOVE at this time of year.

I love wandering the streets and gazing in the restaurants at this time of year. Thousands of bemused and bored looking couples sat in packed restaurants that make battery chicken farms look like avian penthouses. Munching on food from the overpriced “Valentine Day menu”  trying desperately to think of romantic things to say to each other and avoiding eye contact for fear of giving away that they would rather be watching football or Coronation Street.

NOT THE SINGLETONS THOUGH 🙂

Valentines Day is for singles a time of great tidings for two reasons

1: You get […]

It took five years of dating and over 200 of them before I was able to say I would love to take you on a date

There are two types of first date. There is the first date with a woman you have actually seen and the blind first date, normally arising from online dating or an introduction from a friend.  You could argue that its not ‘blind’ because you have seen a picture of the person on their profile but we all know how you women love to use the most flattering of your pictures so this is not reliable evidence of hotness.

A first date with you if we have met before can get me in a right spin (perhaps these ‘online’ days this should really be called our second date). I know I fancy you or we wouldn’t be having a date, so I will get all worked up about what to say, how to act, what to wear (I regularly buy a new outfit for such occasions) and what I need to do to make you like me.

Believe it or not I also treated most first ‘blind’ dates like this too. Since I first winked at (that still sounds weird) or messaged you I have been busily building you up in my mind. You are a smouldering beauty with a Helena Christensen figure, a funny and engaging personality who has kinky fantasies about slightly overweight middle-aged men.

Every email and phone conversation reinforces my view that you are the one I have been searching for all my life. By the day of our date it is taking all my willpower not to just buy an engagement ring to bring along with me.  And […]

Click on this link to buy your copy of Tidy up on your way out and I will donate £1.00 to the Bosom buddies charity. The Kindle book is less than £3.00. P.S did you know you can download a Kindle reader for your iPad or iPod for free?

On the matter of breasts

Ever since one of my schoolboy friends typed the number 58008 into a calculator, turned it upside down and held it in front of my face I have been intrigued and fascinated with boobs.

My parents couldn’t afford foreign holidays, depriving me of the opportunity to see a pair for real (with the obvious exception of my mothers – they do not count) until Jennifer kindly obliged by letting me have a peak in the playground. I was ten and so was she. Given that her chest did not look any different from mine I was underwhelmed, but she still counted. The pace of female development accelerated in senior school and I became very aware of the multitude and diversity of the emerging jumper bumps amongst the girls in my class. Unfortunately this surge in chest development coincided with a collapse in my self-confidence and it was to be another six years, post Jennifer, before I was to behold my first proper real life pair of full-grown knockers.

A couple of the more confident boys in my year claimed to have seen lots of boobs. I had no reason to doubt them and their anatomical descriptions appeared to have been correct, even in hindsight (although some of them had access to research material of a pornographic nature so they may have fabricated or at least embellished the stories). The nearest I got to […]

My close female friends frequently bemoan the absence of decent single men. They often whine to me that they keep meeting losers when they go on dates or they end up with the wrong types. I don’t recall these discussions happening so much with my male mates. We don’t seem to look at the world the same way in this regard.

Having said that I did go through a period where I just met mad women with self-esteem, lack of confidence or “all men are dicks” type issues. In fact “Tidy Up on Your Way out” is littered with such stories

I suppose we ought to clear up what they mean by a loser first.  Any number of attributes can render a guy a loser in their eyes. It could be poor dress sense, bad breath, excessive prudence with their finances, a failure to move on from previous relationships, too keen to move the discussion onto sex, still seeing other women or, as one of my friends told me “so boring that I actually fell asleep on the date”.

None of these things sound particularly remarkable or unusual. But it does get stranger when it seems to be the same reason, or handful of reasons, EVERY TIME.

So once I have established my friends precise definition of a loser I try to move the discussion on to what they actually do want. This is a typical answer. “Well I just want a man that doesn’t go out with his mates all the time, is not chasing other women and doesn’t look like they have been dragged through a hedge. In other words they can tell me exactly what they don’t want.

What you think about is what becomes your […]

I visibly cringe when I see ‘no baggage’ written on women’s dating profiles. My experience of dating is that there is no one who reaches my age without having baggage. In fact we have more of it lying around waiting to be reclaimed than we think.

I am not talking about the physical ‘baggage’ like children (and before you criticize me for calling children baggage I have heard women describe there children like this on more than one occasion), an unsold house, debts, court injunctions or an ex who still texts every hour and periodically threatens to kill him/herself if you don’t go out with them again. Those are easy to understand and cope with. Well sometimes. I went out with one girl who spent most of our first date responding to texts from her ex asking about who I was. Needless to say, romance never bloomed.

The baggage I am referring to is invisible to the naked eye. The baggage in our minds. You may not realise it but everything we’ve ever seen, felt, heard or smelt gets filed away in our sub conscious minds (and there was me thinking I had a shit memory!) – EVERYTHING. These filed away bits of information shape how we think about the opposite sex and how we thing about what they say or do in front of us.

“Yeah but that is all in the past. That partner of mine who slept with someone else, treated me like shit, hurt me (or you did it to them) – I am over him or her”. It’s true that you may not actively think about them but that doesn’t mean they don’t have an impact on you anymore. You see everything […]

Chatting Up Women
Ladies I would like you for a brief moment to pause and reflect on the challenge facing men when it comes to making first contact. You see I wish I was James Bond. Strolling into a bar, with all the ladies looking admiringly at me, before casually dropping a humorous, yet sexy, line to the hottest woman in the place. But I’m not. I am Dave, born in Essex, and brought up on a solid diet of the idea that rejection is a bad thing.

How I think I look to women
Avoidance Tactics
For me the challenges of chatting up women manifest at two levels; having the courage to go up and speak to a woman I don’t know (or as the ‘pro’s’ call it approach anxiety) and then actually managing to say something.

The brutal reality is that I used to bail out more often than I got to a point where my mouth is required to act. In my mind there was always a plan B. As I approached if I saw the slightest sign of the target female looking anxious, about to talk to her boyfriend, searching for a weapon or just plain angry with me, I would swerve to the right or left and either head to a toilet (if they are on a path that looks like an obvious trajectory) or pause, look skyward (like Columbo possibly even holding up an index finger) as though something of massive importance has literally just occurred to me, swivel around and rush back giving the illusion of urgency.

If I actually decided to remain on course and make contact, the words I want to say, all so clear when I first set out from […]

How To Impress A Girl – What Every Man Needs To Know About Women
There are many men, and probably quite a few women, better qualified than me to comment on how to impress a girl. Having said that I am pleased that buried within my own patchy, but reasonable dating track record, are some principles that I like to think stand true in the colourful world of dating. As with any principles there are always exceptions. When I was on a lads holiday in Camber Sands as a fresh faced seventeen year old, the only fit girl on the campsite chose to get off with me instead of my better looking, cleverer and taller friends. It was a one off event that confuses me to this day. These days I prefer to operate to some well-tested principles that at least maximise my chances with the vast majority of the female population.
1. Interests are not interesting
Unless your eyes first met across a scale model of Davros at a Doctor Who exhibition, you are probably best avoiding the subject of your own Dr. Who obsession until you have established what your date’s interests are. I can wax lyrically about the impact Gary Numan had on the whole future of music when he first exploded on the scene in 1979, for hours. It has proved remarkably unsuccessful as a source of attraction with women when I am dating (having said that my first proper date with my ex-wife of eight years was a Gary Numan convention – there are always exceptions people) Far safer to establish what her interests are first and direct the conversation towards those things first. These requires the diligent application of my second […]

PRESS RELEASE  – Author Dave Gammon hits back at the online dating industry following recent allegations that they use fictitious profiles to maintain the interests of their paying members.

Dave Gammon comments as follows

“You bastards. I knew it.

From my earliest online sharking something didn’t feel right in the relationship with the dating sites. You see, in my head, there is an order to things. I know where I sit in the attraction pecking order. I am not premiership, but am not pub league, if you know what I mean.

Yet online I get approached by women who would not give me a fleeting glance in the street, let alone grant me underwear access privileges.  Even with the considerable handicap of being the opposite of photogenic (apart from the one in a thousand shot we all have where we a strange combination of light, camera angle and pose made me look rugged and, dare I say it, sexy) I had a succession of screaming hotties message and indicate interest. The dating game was never this easy for me

It cost me many a sleepless night trying to figure out why the hours I spent skillfully crafting a witty and considered response to their invitations seemed to consistently elicit no response. I studied and acted on the dating tips and dating advice but it made no difference. I chalked this down to one of two things. Either my idea of interesting banter was not shared by good looking women, or that they had undertaken a forensic examination of my profile and found something that didn’t quite tie up.

My suspicions were particularly aroused when a friend and I registered (separately I might add here) for a naughty site that had […]