There is a risk, I know, of once again annoying all the Christians out there by making another deliberately slighting reference to their joke anti-lives.
Not much of a risk, as I know from the last set of letters - forgiving, understanding, disappointed, all swimming with the big brown hurt eyes of a kindly labrador you've accidentally kneed in the temple. Occasionally, there's the refreshingly snippy one, asking why it's seen as fine to sneer at Christians but the height of bigoted intolerance to criticise Islam - and so, for the record, let's remember here that modern Islam is a comprehensively more cruel and stupid religion than modern Christianity, its more inadequate adherents (of which there are many too many) significantly more capable of twisting the psychobabble of their laughable 'scripture' into a lip-flap of parroted justification for crazed prejudice, medieval self-delusion and psychopathic moronism than any number of dancing fools in cassocks - but in general the Christians just get hurt, rather than trying to hurt me back, so I'm terribly sorry to do it again but the phrase 'so horribly Christian ' was the one I first thought of this week, reading about this nasty internet dating stuff.
According to one report, one in five single adults in Britain now uses dating services. It's tosh, of course, statistically; it was put out by someone's lying marketing department and so originally read one in 5,000 or 50,000 or something before some bright lying marketing spark said hey guys why don't we just lose the zeroes that would make it more like, you know, what's the word, true - but still, even one in 5,000 makes for a lot of worryingly dysfunctional people in the country.
The main reason to loathe and fear online dating, and worry a little about the continuation of the human race, is the idea of compatibility. You can find out, even before you meet your inamorata, even before you see a picture of them, what you both like and dislike, and pick accordingly, and - here's the thing, the thing they get wrong - for some hideous misguided reason they think the answer is go for the person who likes the same things.
Wrong: tragically, lovelessly wrong; christianly wrong. In the same way that you can't really ever set out to look for love - it comes almost always when the one thing you're actively doing is not looking for it, when you're backing away from someone else and bump into it and even then don't recognise it until you're in bed grinning at each other - you certainly can't plan how it will go by just liking the same things. I want fights. I want, one day, the wonderful feeling of success, after 10 years of arguments, for her to turn round suddenly and say: 'You know, you were right all along: Dido is dreck.' I want, by her, to be made to read things, to think things, I'd never have read or have thought in my stuck old ways. I want nothing in common apart from a vague sense of kindness and a fierce sense of lust.
This time last week I was, pleasantly enough, sitting in the bar in Rio where 'The Girl From Ipanema' was written, having a drink with ... a girl from Ipanema. Tall and tanned and young and lovely, she was. I managed to do rather good small and white and old and ugly. QED: could there ever have been a more perfect match?
