Suzanne Portnoy

All hell may have broken loose outside, but inside my head the storm cloud has definitely passed. Pretending to be a stalker on Friday night really helped to convince me that a) I wasn’t cut out for the job and b) Mike wasn’t worth stalking. A good stalker would have gone to his flat that was just around the corner from the restaurant but I couldn’t be bothered.

Then yesterday I spoke to a friend of his, an incredibly good looking plumber. He had come around a couple of weeks ago to check out a faulty radiator in my house and was due to come back to me with an estimate for fixing it. When he didn’t, I rang him instead and with great subtlety (not my strong point, it has to be said) dropped in the fact that Mike wasn’t speaking to me anymore.

‘He’s an odd man,’ he said. ‘And he’s from Yorkshire. What do you expect?’

That cheered me up enormously, just knowing that someone else thought he was odd and that I wasn’t the only one.

On Saturday evening I putzed around London, meeting a friend of a friend for lunch. He took me to a fantastic, little Brazilian cafe on Bayswater, a real find. They serve traditional fare - beans, rice, stews. I loaded my plate up with carbs and took it to the cute, Brazilian chick sitting behind the front counter for weighing. She was wearing low slung jeans and had that great latin ass that I envy and a tiny waist. Bitch. She weighed up the food, wrote £5.22 on a piece of paper and handed it to me. Bargain.

Over lunch, my new friend and I compared sex clubs that we had both been to, chavs, designer flats and relationships before he took me back to his tiny, studio flat for a cup of tea. He tried to kiss me but I wasn’t having any of it and told him so. ‘I just don’t fancy you,’ I think were my exact words, that I spluttered out quickly as he lunged for me. I wasn’t being subtle then but he backed off. He was good humoured about the whole thing. ‘It’s just a kiss,’ he said.

‘Yeh, yeh,’ I said, sarcastically. ‘Just a kiss. NO.’

After lunch, I wandered around Whiteleys, bought a new, sexy and extremely cheap black pencil skirt from Zara before heading over to the East End. I had a dinner date at 7pm and fancied wandering around Brick Lane beforehand. The streets were full of kids, drinking and laughing and looking, well, very charity shop chic. It’s a look I can’t really get away with anymore. I tried wearing stripey knee socks with a denim skirt last week but my son refused to go out with me. I walked into a designer shop to look at some cute brown clogs but they were £120. Despite my love of shoes, I could never bring myself to spend that much on a pair of clogs. I tried on a pair of tartan trousers that didn’t fit and left. Wandering past the cafe windows, I noticed that everyone was sitting around with their Macs on their laps, surfing YouTube. How do you start a conversation with someone who is engrossed in YouTube??

I wandered back into Shoreditch House and sat around for 20 minutes reading the paper before my date appeared, an extremely dapper Scottish guy with a chequered history that made my life seem positively dull by comparison. After two hours of listening to him talk about his various wives and girlfriends I felt exhausted. My kids can attest that when it comes to listening, I’m a complete amateur. I don’t know if I have undiagnosed ADD or I’m just easily bored or I’ve been a publicist for too long. I expect everyone to sum up everything in a paragraph. I want the headline and then a bit of background. If you’re going to regale me with a story, it better be funny. Only humour holds my attention. A favourite line in my house is, ‘Can you just get to the point?’

I’m not really sure what the point was for the full disclosure my date felt was necessary on Saturday night. Maybe he wanted to see if he could scare me. Either way, after 3 hours together we ended up in my car… snogging like two Catholic teenagers. He had a forceful kiss. A bit too forceful. In fact he suddenly came over all dominant. I’m still on the fence as to whether I liked that about him or not. I can take it from one of my lovers that I’ve known for years because I’ve known him for years. When it comes from a guy who is almost a stranger, it makes me uncomfortable. Either way, I went home alone, feeling very proud of myself for showing such self-restraint.