Suzanne Portnoy

I met a 75 year old guy that I fancy. Yes, that’s right. He’s older than my dad. It’s not a serious thing. In fact it’s not serious at all. He’s a kind of client, celebrity type, except you’re unlikely to read about him in Hello or Heat magazine. He’s more of an icon than a here today, gone tomorrow modern celebrity. In fact, like me, he thinks the whole celebrity thing is really silly and stupid and mostly he wonders why anyone would want to speak to him. I found his complete irreverence a turn-on.

He doesn’t own a computer or a mobile. His voice is rich and posh and deep and comes from that bygone age when people with good education actually spoke as if they were better than everybody else, unlike now when everyone just pretends that they’ve grown up in the East End and went to a comprehensive. What’s wrong with being a snob?

And he’s tall and slim and dresses in crumpled up country clothes. Plus, he has those refined English features I just go crazy about - the aquiline nose, the high cheekbones, the silver hair.

I liked him enormously and we had a great day together as I drove him from one interview to another, both of us enjoying being grumpy about just about everything, from the London traffic to jobseekers that start their emails with ‘Hi’.

There’s not many people I can moan to about the over use of the word ‘Hi,’ especially when it’s written to me by a complete stranger looking for a job. Or the replacement of ‘you’ with ‘u’ (another one of my pet hates) or people who start a sentence with ‘i’ instead of ‘I’. I thought, ‘If getting old means being able to be generally grumpy about modern manners, bring it on!’

Then today I read Mimi’s post about her former lover, Rolly, another old bloke who sounds positively charming and caddish and eccentric. And it made me think that perhaps I’m barking up the wrong tree, trying to find a funny guy my own age.

Maybe I’m better off looking amongst the much, much older generation, who have gotten past caring what anyone thinks. I haven’t enjoyed myself like I did on Tuesday with my celebrity septuagenarian for a very long time. It felt so good to  spend a whole day laughing.