It’s fair to say a great many of my friends have commented on my dating adventures.
Most of them have just laughed, but a select happy few have pointed me in the directions of dating sites that they themselves or friends have used successfully – or alternatively, ones that they think me going on would be hilarious:
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My friend Janine (who is now becoming a regular feature of the blog) would like to make it clear she’s not into polygamy personals, or threesomes, she just thinks it would be funny to see me blunder into them.
Another ludicrous favourite that has been suggested is Sea Captain dating, which measures your distance to your dates in Nautical miles – but more on that later. (Yarrrr).
While some of them have been a bit optimistic – for example, my friend who met her husband through millionaire dating (“I was sick of being taken out in Birmingham, decided I wanted to be taken out to Barbados”) – there was one message from an old university friend that caught my eye.
Hi Willard,
I hope you are well. I saw your blog post – I think you beat some of my crackers! That said I thought I’d share with you that Tom and I met on Muddy Matches, it’s an agricultural / country dating website.
There were some astounding men on there, and not in a good way. Having been assessed by some as to whether I’d breed well (estimated breed value ebv is a common term in ag) I was lucky to find Tom. If you’re in need of entertainment then it’s worth having a look!
Just thought if you were looking for a different type of women it does have a good mix on there!!
So, farmer dating. Yes, we’re definitely back in the twilight zone. As my ex-Sun journo housemate said, taking a drag on his cigarette “I dunno mate, Muddy Matches sounds like a cover for shitlovers.com”.
As a confirmed urbanite – I live in the middle of London and love it – I was a little nervous about logging on to a site which enables you to meet “muddy” country types. I couldn’t help flashing back to one afternoon in a rural barrister’s chambers in my mid twenties, when a man wearing tweed with bushy white sideburns & wellies walked in, laid his double barrelled shotgun on the clerk’s desk and said, in a broad west country accent “Oi’ll be needin’ a lawyer, Oi’ve just shot moi woife”.
Indeed, much of my mercifully brief legal career consisted of defending tractor thieves who hailed from a hamlet near Bath called Norton Radstock. I was slightly worried anyone I might meet on the site would be the sort of ruddy faced person who chews tobacco and readily uses a bit of rope as a belt, but at least the Radstock experience would stand me in good stead if the conversation turned to the value of agricultural machinery.
I was slight reassured that the site’s “rate your own muddiness” calculator proclaimed me to be “Muddy at heart, but you think civilisation also has a lot to offer”, but equally worried that the top three options on “how did you hear about this site” were “Horse & Hound magazine”, “The Field” or “at a cross-country point to point”, none of which were things I was that into. So, I put myself out there.
After a couple of days, I had a couple of messages, but one leaped out at me. There were plenty of “country girls at heart” who lived on the King’s Road (it seems very good for finding those – if you’re a bloke who loves horse riding with women called Persephone, you probably couldn’t find a better site), but there was only one actual farmer.
She was a fruit farmer from Berkshire, and she was very flattered by my offer to come out to her village for a swift pint. So, one evening, I jumped on a train from Paddington, and ventured out into the wilds. We’d agreed to meet at the station, and so I waited there for five minutes in the freezing rain before she pulled up, in her battered Land Rover. I laughed, but what did I expect? She flung open the door, invited me to jump in, and we sped off to a local pub.
She was very pleasant – late thirties, had worked in the City for a few years before jacking it in to take over the family farm. She’d been with the same bloke for about 8 years, but had broken up with him last year when it turned out he was a bit of a shit. We had a lovely chat in front of the pub fire, decided to extend the evening into dinner.
We talked about how we’d both dodged the bad marriage bullet, politics, how rubbish the EU is, our families – we’d both had parents in the military, so we were able to compare notes on growing up as army brats. She had a great dirty laugh, and was seriously flirtatious, in a kind of wax jacketed, upper class, graduate of Cheltenham ladies college way.
She told me of the difficulty of meeting a man when her main concern was often making supermarkets pay on time for tons of raspberries; her last date was with a Bulgarian farm worker called Dmitar, although it was “less dating, more just sex really. His English wasn’t really up to conversation”. The mind boggles. Farming was never like this on The Archers.
After dinner, she drove me back to the station, and I got my first proper kiss of the dating project! Hurrah!
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