My dating tale is riddled with intrigue, lies and deceit and yet I find it all a bit of giggle in hindsight.

First of all you have to remember that we are going back nearly 20 years for the events of this story and dating was a little different back then. These days most people who are struggling to meet by conventional methods look for love via the Internet. I do sometimes wonder about experiences I would've had if this option had been open to me back in the late 80s.

The pictures that are used to enhance on-line datees chances just make the mind boggle. Some of the ladies practice their best sultry looks rather than giving a natural smile, the latter being far more appealing in my book. The men, meanwhile, look like their auditioning to be the next star of the next Diet Pepsi ad. Does seeing a guy's rippling torso really have a bearing on whether you call him girls? It does? I'll keep quiet then...

Back to my story. The date I'm going to talk about happened as a result of a lonely hearts advert I posted in the local paper. It was my regular routine for a Thursday for me to trawl this column to search a prospective date and I wasn't having a lot of luck. I was only about 22 back then and had never had a girlfriend so with hormones rampant, I decided to post an advert of my own.

This isn't as easy as you might think because you have to paint an image of yourself where you come across as an Adonis without sounding like an arrogant goon. The skill was to sum yourself up in about four lines using as many acronyms such as GSOH (good sense of humor) as possible. The danger is that you ad will end up just looking like a random set of letters.

So anyway, I placed my advert and waited for the messages to come into my telephone inbox and I was absolutely inundated: there were two. I rang the first but she cried off for some reason but the second agreed to meet.

Now, my advert gave an age rage of 18-21 which is quite narrow but I was quite young at the time remember and I also gave an indication that I didn't want any potential suitor to be taller than me. I can't say it would bother me so much now but clearly it did at the time.

Imagine my surprise then when I meet my date for the first time and she's a good four inches taller than me at 6ft 1". Perhaps more of a worry was that she was just 17. When I found this out during the date I was quite shocked that someone quite so young felt that they had to resort to this method so soon. Apart from anything

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