Why a Tinder match won't necessarily light a flame

Last time I gave you the first installment of my guide to Tinder success, so by now you will no doubt have got yourself a number of 'matches'. Don't get too excited. Remember these people are only really 'matches' in the same way as how, say, Doncaster is twinned with Rouen. Now you must begin the depressing process of judging their personalities through the medium of online chat.

Remember, your choice of introduction is important. This is not acceptable:

And you should really run it through spell checker if you’re dyslexic:

But bear in mind that if you take a chance and start the chat, about 50% will go something like this:

Many chats will begin and end with "What you looking for?". Do not bother answering this question. This is code - transposed from Grindr - for "Are you looking for sex in the next 20 minutes?" If the answer is 'no' then they will quickly lose interest. If the answer is 'yes' it should almost certainly be followed by “but not with you, you've probably got more STIs than the word stigmastistical” *

Once you've kicked off, most chats will quickly reveal the chattor is not yet ready for unsupervised writing. I don't just mean "definately" for "definitely" sort of thing; I mean the sort of prose Terry here might be responsible for:

I know, it made my brain cry.

Some of the chats will involve un-ironic use of emoticons. They must be quickly terminated.

Some people will use the word lol instead of its acceptable ironic counterparts lolz, lulz and roflz. I know.

Once you've really got going, you'll find the majority will just be dull. A useful rule of thumb: if they can’t be interesting or funny when they’ve got time to think about it, they won’t be interesting or funny in real life. Think about it: I’m interesting and funny in my blog. QED.

But my all-time favourite ones (yes, this really happens) are the ones who you will get into a long and involved conversation with, begin to like, start projecting all sorts of impossible personality traits on, fall in love with, mentally marry and have two children with, finally ask out on a date, and then they'll say "I'm not really looking for dates". I'm sorry, what? Well WHAT THE FRICKING FRICK ARE YOU LOOKING FOR THEN?! A fricking pen pal? Lord fricking Lucan? The cure for the common fricking cold?

I know what you're thinking: they are looking for dates, they're just not looking for dates with YOU. Fair point, but twice this has happened to me and then they've carried on writing to me: "No thanks, I'm not really looking for dates. So what you up to tonight?" I'm sorry but have I fallen into a vortex in the homo-continuum? Are you really telling me you live in London and you have enough time on your hands to have an online conversation with someone you don't know about whether they're watching Downton Abbey. If you're bored why don't you just go and look at lists of 21 Autocorrect Cats With Dog Beards Who've Got Their Priorities Right Doing The Ice Bucket Challenge (and you won't BELIEVE what happened next) or whatever. You're seriously just looking for a CHAT? There are CHAT ROOMS for that sort of thing. (There are still chat rooms, right? Or was that a 90s thing?)

Once you have ruled out all of the above you should be left with two or three acceptable alternatives who have made it through Boot Camp and Judges' Houses to the Live Finals. But don't get carried away, it's still way too early to get excited at this stage. Remember Christopher Maloney made it to the ACTUAL FINAL.

These people are on Tinder. They're probably still mental. Now you have to do the really difficult bit and figure out what's wrong with them IRL. You still have to kiss a lot of frogs, even with the wonders of modern technology. And here I can help you no longer. Except to say this: just remember, in real life it is UNACCEPTABLE to swipe someone left if you don't like them.

Happy swiping folks!

* Yes I did just make that word up.

Why it's all about swiping left

My recent reintroduction to single life has taught me several important things: the importance of remembering my keys ... that a six-pinter of semi-skimmed milk can go (very) off before you have time to finish it ... that if I want a dessert I'm gonna have to just order one cos I can't do that trick of "no, I'm totally full thanks but YOU should have one." But there is one area in which I feel my learnings could be particularly useful to others: namely, the complicated science of using Tinder.

After a lot of practice I've got quite good at it (who knew I'd have a talent for judging people by appearances?) and sharing is caring. So, over the next two blog posts I will be publishing what I'm calling The Gay Idiot's Manual to the Practice of Tinder Initiation in Today's Society, or GIMP TITS for short.

Part One - Getting 'matches'

When you start exploring certain things quickly become clear. The majority, who can be quickly swiped left, are either old or ugly. And by old, I of course mean over 30. And by ugly I mean fugly. I mean let's not get too choosy at this point or we'll be here all day.

One tribe you'll quickly encounter are the shirtless (and occasionally headless) folk. Tempting but best avoided. If a six pack is the most interesting thing about you, get yourself back on Grindr where you belong. Swipe left.

Then there are the spiritual ones. They've basically read a few Paulo Coelho novels and they think they're Wittgenstein. They can be spotted by their 'about' sections, which will usually be written in quote form, often of lyrics from Enya. Obviously, swipe left.

The next tribe are the people who write in imperatives as to what you must be: "Be spontaneous and fun. Be funny and clever." or worse, what you must not be: "Don't be needy. Don't be too into yourself." It will take all your self-restraint not to message them saying "Don't be so frickin choosy - there's a reason you're on Tinder." Don't be mean. Do swipe left.

Then there are the People Who Are Not From London. Like almost all of us who live in London, these people are not originally from London. But unlike almost all of us, these people have chosen to define themselves entirely by this fact. So much so that when asked to write a few lines about themselves they've opted for "Northener, living in't London" / "Irish fella looking for some craic in London" / "Welsh lad in Lyndyn" / "American, new to London - awesome!" Swipe left.

Every now and then there's a girl who's got confused. Or Perhaps she's just an über fag hag. Put her out of her misery: she needs to find a real boy before she becomes Karen Walker. Swipe left.

Likewise, people from Essex who set their distance settings wrong. Do you really want to commute to Billericay for dates? Swipe left.

This should have covered about 95% of your Tinder experience. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Hang on in there.

We come now to the ones who, at first glance, could go either way. These require examination of further photos and careful consideration. By which I mean at least one and a half seconds.

The first lot, and by far the most abundant, are the one-hit wonders. "Ooh," you think, looking at their cover photo, "he's cute." Then you swipe to the next photo. *Shudder*. "How do they do it?" you ask yourself. "So attractive there but so much like Madge Bishop there." Fact: anyone can take one good photo. It's an optical illusion. Swipe left.

The next lot are your classic Monets. They know they look good from a distance and hence have uploaded five photos of themselves on the end of a distant peer / waving from the top of a tower / on the other side of the road / in a pool - at the deep end / sitting on top of one of the Trafalgar Square lions. But perhaps knowing they'd be pushing their luck with all six, the last photo reveals the truth close up: they're no oil painting. Impressionism may be a good first impression but that's all. Swipe left.

Of the remainder the vast majority will be either Ants or Decs. Like Ant and Dec they are, at first sight, almost attractive. But on closer inspection they fall neatly into one of two camps. The Ants (or the Decs - who knows which is which?) are kindof handsome but when you really study the images you realise they're actually about five feet tall. Like Nicholas Sarkozy (or Ant or Dec ... or whoever he is) they have carefully staged all photo opportunities to make sure they look like a normal-sized person, but a trained eye will notice you can never see below their waste lines and they're never stood next to a normal-sized person.

The Decs (or the Ants) on the other hand, are all forehead. It's something to do with selfies. These should be swiped left. Life's too short. And so is Ant. Or Dec.

Following these simple guidelines you'll soon find there are a handful of people from the hundreds you've scrolled through that you haven't swiped left. Assuming you haven't made any of the above errors yourself it's possible that one or two of these haven't swiped you left either. Congratulations, you have 'matches' (haha). Now here's where the really depressing part begins: the chats. And these I shall deal with in my next post. Until then ... keeeeeeeeeeep swiping.

Why everything doesn't have to be rubbish

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it before but I’m not a big fan of Jeremy Clarkson. So the last thing I want to be is a Clarkson-esque comedy ranter. However, some things just demand rantification (things like Jeremy Clarkson). And this week, my chosen topic is “all the stuff”. I am aware that someone has written a book loosely on this subject, entitled “Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit?”. I have not read the book – it sounded a bit not-really-worth-writing-a-book-about for my tastes. But the sentiment is fair. I say this not to be funny or controversial, but to make a serious point. A call to arms, if you will: against rubbishness. 

I’m coming towards the end of a fairly extensive renovation project on my flat. Actually, you can delete the ‘fairly’. It’s been about as substantial a renovation project as one can do on a one-bed flat the size of a postage stamp. It has involved completely gutting, re-wiring, re-plastering, re-flooring, installing a new bathroom and kitchen, under floor heating, new hardware throughout, and then decorating to my ridiculous tastes. A Young Person with a loose grasp of what words mean would probably say it’s been ‘epic’. It has not, of course, been epic. The Hundred Years War was epic, this has been a large-scale flat renovation.

My frequent companions throughout the project were Lucy Alexander and Martin Roberts. And for those of you who have jobs, they are the presenters of the 10am home makeover programme “Homes Under the Hammer”. As companions go they’re both incredibly irritating. (They seem to have those personalities that only daytime television presenters are allowed to have – where everything they say or do is at once nice, and mildly amusing, but unsettlingly and inexplicably cringe-inducing.) But they do present one of the most dangerously addictive programmes on television so, like that friend you’re only friends with because they have a good DVD collection, I’ve stuck with them.*

The basic format of the show is that Lucy or Martin charge round a semi-detached two-up-two-down in Hounslow or somewhere awful rambling about parking access and ‘potential’, we watch a load of rich people bidding for it at auction, then the buyer does it up in slightly longer than they thought it would take for slightly more than they had in their original budget but sell it or rent it for a ridiculous profit anyway. It’s like a big lovely advert for capitalism. And smiling inanely.

The comforting thing about it all from a property development perspective is that everyone, no matter how atrocious their taste or poor the quality of their handiwork, seems to make a shedload of cash, despite the fact most of it was filmed in the middle of a massive sod off recession (remember that?); the discomforting thing about it from a faith in humankind perspective is that everyone, no matter how atrocious their taste or poor the quality of their handiwork, seems to make a shedload of cash, despite the fact most of it was filmed in the middle of a massive sod off recession (remember that?). Which means people all over the country are buying this shit. In their thousands. With their thousands.

What almost everyone seems to do is take a ‘slightly dated’ property, tear everything out because it’s ‘slightly dated’, and then put back cheap shit stuff, which in 20 years’ time, will probably be torn out again in episode 7561 of Homes Under the Hammer or Homes Under the Space-Computer or whatever they’ll have instead of hammers in The Future, because it will be ‘slightly dated’.

On one episode a seasoned developer was asked what his secret to success was. His response was: “Remember you’re in this to make money and it’s not your own property. Don’t put too much time, effort or money into making the finishing look nice, it only needs to be good enough to get the tenants in.” Lucy Alexander nodded and smiled enthusiastically. “Very wise words”. Wise, perhaps. But am I alone in finding this utterly depressing?

The tragic thing is that he is right, and he is only stating what has essentially become a mantra of the modern world: Don’t make a really good job of things, it’s not worth any more money. You see this phenomenon in many aspects of modern life: in modern architecture, in fashion, in most consumer goods (they should be called consumer good enoughs). Sure, often good enough is good enough, but whatever happened to taking pride in the way things look and feel? Good quality may not necessarily be worth any more money but isn’t it sometimes worth it as, dare I say it, an end in itself? Don’t we want things to be good just because it’s good to be good, not just good enough?

I’m not into all that ‘everything used to be better’ nonsense – they didn’t even have Facebook in olden times – but, though they may have been as mad as a box of frogs the Victorians at least knew the importance of quality stuff for people’s wellbeing. They knew that a rounded brick on the edge of a building would make it look better, even if it cost more and was harder to produce. Because a building will be around for a long time, and people have to live there, and when things around us look and feel better quality, we feel better. It's that simple. And yet we seem to have collectively forgotten this.

I've tried, in my own renovation, to source most things second-hand and have therefore got much better quality pre-loved stuff for a fraction of the price. Good for me, aren’t I wonderful? I know I sound smug (smug is my shtick, deal with it) but I haven’t done it as a duty to mankind; in most cases it’s made my flat better, my budget lower, and sometimes even made my life easier. Though admittedly lifting the cast iron bath up the staircase will be filed in the same compartment of my brain as “that time I fell over in school assembly” and “all the births on One Born Every Minute”.

Whilst attempting to shoehorn the second-hand kitchen, which came from a large farmhouse, into my shoebox-sized flat, my dad literally said 67 times “this would have been a lot easier if you’d just bought a new kitchen from IKEA.” Which is undoubtedly true. But I think even my dad, in his weaker moments, would admit that it’s sometimes worth making the effort for quality. Otherwise everything will just keep getting rubbisher and rubbisher and we’ll all end up sat in our rubbish underpants, on our rubbish Argos sofas eating Morrisons ready meals and watching Topgear. And nobody wants that.

So can I invite you to make a pledge with me, against rubbishness. Join me in the fight to get good stuff just because it’s good, and to resist the lure of the cheapubiquitousgubbins. If this movement had a hashtag, it would be #banishtherubbish. And I will start by swearing not to watch Homes Under the Hammer ever again. Maybe.


*I don’t really have a friend like that. But if anyone out there has a great DVD collection and would like to be used in such a fashion, step this way.

Why I'm never lost

Recently I had to drive to Salisbury to collect a kitchen I’d bought on Ebay. (I say ‘had to’; the truth is that I about as far from ‘had to’ as it’s possible to be – I chose to buy a second hand kitchen on Ebay, against the strongly worded advice of all the key stakeholders in the operation. But having committed to buying it, I had to drive to Salisbury to get it). Although the collection, carrying and installing of the kitchen proved – as all the aforementioned stakeholders had predicted – to be 50 shades of horrendous, the six hour round trip across London and the home counties in a long wheel arch van was, astonishingly, relatively pain free. I would like to share with you all the secret of my success…

There's one question I always dread whenever I arrive at a destination I've never been to before in a motor vehicle: "how did you get here?" It tends of course to happen only outside London. In London only the certified insane or the suicidal drive. It also tends to come from a man. It's one of Man's favourite things to talk about at a social gathering. In fact I have been to social gatherings where groups of Men have spent almost the entire evening discussing which way they came.

"Which route did you use?" Man asks, "did you come down the A614?" *

"Oh no," Other Man replies smugly, "I never take the A614, you get snarled up in traffic at the Mansfield roundabout. No I came along the B612."

"Oh!" Man replies, clutching at his testicles to prove he still has them, "but don't you find the 612 is slower generally."

"Well of course if it's busy I just slip onto the 629." says Other Man.

"Oh yes," Man says doubtfully, "Julie likes the 629. I prefer the motorway myself."

And so it goes on. For men of a certain generation discussion about routes is their party mainstay. It's why they came to the party. They're not interested in gossip or what's happening in Downton Abbey. They would only be interested in soap opera if the B614 were having an affair with the A319.

The truth is that I haven't the faintest idea which way I came. I haven't looked at a roadmap since circa 2008 and I don't pay the blindest bit of notice to the route I'm taking. I have road number dyslexia. And yet I almost always get exactly where I intend to be with the minimum of fuss, and I am almost never late. The reason? I am part of Generation Sat Nav.

I don't know how to get anywhere from anywhere. I am 28 years old, I have been driving in the UK for over a decade and I honestly couldn't tell you where the M1 goes from and to. Or the M2 for that matter, or the M3. Is there an M3? Actually wasn't that a boy band? I know the M40 goes to Birmingham because at one point I had to drive to Birmingham a few times in a row for work and eventually I noticed that I often seemed to be on the M40. For a while I got a kick out of telling people "I know the M40 like the back of my hand now, I've been up and down it nonstop these last few weeks." It felt like a very Manly thing to be saying. But then I stopped going on it and before writing this I had to google it to check it was definitely the M40. I didn't want to look like an idiot.

I'm not a frequent driver, I'll admit, but I do drive fairly regularly for work, often on short deadlines, often under pressure, and all over the UK. I can honestly say I have never been seriously lost. When setting out on long journeys I will take a road map with me but I take it not exactly to use when lost but as a kind of talisman against lostness. And so far it seems to have worked very well.

In my experience of being in a car in which two or more people are discussing which route they will take to a particular destination I have quietly observed that far more stress is incurred and far more time expended than if all participants had agreed before the journey commenced to silently follow the sat nav with blind abandon, regardless of what they knew about that road and the traffic around that junction and the winding roads through that village.

Because of the nature of my work I often drive with older, more experienced men in the car. They DO NOT TRUST sat navs. They will often say things like:

"These young people often can't even read maps these days"

and

"Some people just blindly follow the sat nav, they don't even know where they're going"

I keep quiet and nod. I do not say "I am basically one of these young people. We can read maps but we choose not to because maps have been rendered obsolete by sat navs."

These older Men are particularly vexed by sat navs because they are yet another in a long line of gadgets, from the vibrator to the electric can opener, which have contributed to the Great Emasculation of Man. But they are especially riled because sat navs have revealed the great unspoken secret of driving which I will share with you all now: it doesn't particularly matter which route you take. Don't ever say it to a Man, particularly one over the age of 45 (the cut-off point, I find, for being able to trust that the sat nav is definitely going to take you to your destination and not another place three hours in the opposite direction which the Royal Mail has mysteriously assigned exactly the same postcode).

But if you don't believe me, try a little experiment one day when you have a little time to spare. Try taking a wrong turn somewhere on the route. Not just a little wrong turn but a flagrant wrong turn. Go down the A218 when you meant to take the B624. Or whatever. You'll see the ETA indicator on your sat nav creep up, sometimes by a few minutes. But - and I know you don't want to hear this, Men - the thing is it really won't go up by that much. Certainly not as long as you might spend faffing at your point of origin, say looking for a map, or discussing which route you're going to take.

“But sat navs can’t predict the TRAFFIC!” I can almost literally hear you cry. Wrong. They’ve figured that out now too. And besides, there might have been an accident on the road you were going to take – maybe someone was arguing with their spouse about the route they would take and got distracted at a busy junction.

If your new road is ludicrously wrong - as in, totally-the-wrong-direction wrong - you will need to make a U-turn, in which case the sat nav will, very sensibly, tell you to make a U-turn. But in most cases it will simply calmly take account of your decision to go down what is quite obviously not the right road and recalculate your route accordingly. Your ETA might creep up from 15:34 to 15:38. Nobody will die.

What is so refreshing about the sat nav's response to your changing journey plans, though, is the calm efficiency with which it will recalculate this alternative route. Unlike an actual human navigator (like your spouse for example) it will never be annoyed or even perplexed by your choice of direction, however obtuse. Unlike your spouse it will never send you the wrong way down the B613 because it had the map upside down. And best of all, unlike your spouse, if it persists in telling you you're going the wrong way you can quite simply switch it off.

* Men, please note that all road numbers are fictional. Obviously I haven't a clue where these roads actually are.

Why I'm not trying to be natural

So far 2014 has been a bad year for gays. Well, it's been a bad year for gays who care what Vladimir Putin, Jeremy Clarkson or Evander Holyfield think. So if, as I suspect, Putin is in fact a repressed homo, that's just him then. Still, it's been a bad year for him.

On Friday he told a group of Olympics volunteers that gay people would be welcome at the Sochi Winter Olympics, as long as they, quote 'leave the kids alone'. Yes, because what Vladimir Putin knows, (and a lot of people get confused about this) is that liking people of the same sex is basically just part of a sexual perversion which induces attraction to anyone and anything which is not the opposite sex. What Putin knows, from his extensive knowledge of language and stuff, is that the word 'homosexual' in fact derives from the Latin words homo, (meaning home) and sexual (meaning sexual) so a homosexual is, in fact, someone who is sexually attracted to anyone or anything you might find in a home. That of course includes men, but also children, animals, and even household furniture such as tables, chairs, kitchen utensils etc.

On Thursday, renowned satirically opinionated nobhead Jeremy Clarkson, posted a photograph of himself on Twitter with a banter-ish sign written whilst he was asleep saying 'gay cunt'. His PR brain quickly kicked in and he took it down with an apology to anyone who might have been offended, because actually Jeremy Clarkson doesn't hate gay people, he just hates minorities and people who don't understand what's interesting about a 2.8 valve engine (or whatever).

And earlier this month on Celebrity Big Brother (yeah, I know, apparently it's still happening) Evander Holyfield said being gay is 'not normal'. The first thing it's important to note about about Evander Hoyfield is that his name is an anagram of 'he'd find ear lovely', which is ironic, since Mike Tyson ate most of his. The second thing it's important to say is that he is an idiot. His argument comes very close to that most common, and most imbecilic, argument that I, as a gay vegetarian, hear a lot. That old classic: it's not natural.  These three words are often issued with a smug finality, by the sort of people who watch Mrs Brown's Boys or like James Blunt, as though they were the definitive end to all argument on the matter. It's not natural. So there.

At first sight the argument apparently makes perfect sense. Those things which are natural, like apples and dolphins and Zac Effron's bum, are good. Those things which are unnatural, like doner kebabs, and Sharon Osborne's face, and an interest in the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber, are bad. But think about this for more than the three seconds the Daily Mail readers who spout the philosophy are capable of thinking about any issue before their brains spontaneously combust, showering passers-by with anti-immigrant slime, and you quickly realise that this argument does not in fact make any sense at all.

Even leaving aside the obvious objection that homosexuality may be something built into an individual's make up, and therefore entirely natural anyway, the argument has one staggeringly problematic flaw: being natural is, quite obviously, not always good.

In the natural world, animals like human beings would fight - sometimes to the death – for a mate. And then rape them. Would these fans of all that is "natural" do away with Match.com and instead have queues of men dressed in animal skins tearing each other limb from limb to win the affection of their womenfolk, pinning them down for a quick raping and abandoning them to raise their offspring? In the natural world animals like human beings would abandon the weakest if they were slowing down the group and leave them to die. Would these people cut welfare support so poor people have to starve to death? Oh, yes, I suppose they would. Ok, but in the natural world animals like human beings would defecate on the floor. Do these people HATE TOILETS?

The point is, the wonderful thing about living in a civilised society is that we have moved away from that which is entirely natural to that which is... well... civilised. We have found ways to curb our natural instincts and level out the natural inequalities of life in the natural world. It's called development. And I am a big fan of it. Without it, there would be no Facebook, and then what would I do all day?

And if Vladimir Putin, Jeremy Clarkson and Evander Holyfield don't like it they should all go and tear each other limb from limb wearing animal skins, and poo on the floor. Actually, on second thoughts, they should do that anyway.