LITMIR.BIZ

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sculptures and began to gain a good reputation. At the age of twenty seven Aleks gave birth to Imogen who was destined to take after her Mum in the creativity stakes and Aleks’s life was complete.

      Seven years later however it all fell apart when Dan collapsed and died from a brain aneurism, casting Aleks into a life as a single Mother and instilling in her a belief that nothing lasts forever.

      She put on a brave face for Imogen and tried to make life as normal as possible, but it had been hard work. She moved down to Hampshire a few years later having decided that London held too many memories and she needed a new life for both her and Imogen. I met her one day when I walked into the gallery at Hartley Wintney to find an unusual piece to rent for one of our clients photo shoots and we became firm friends. I greatly admired her work and she began to build up a local reputation which at least gave her a steady income and enabled her to drive around in her battered red mini cooper and give Imogen the stability she needed.

      In recent years Aleks had started to go out on dates with a number of middle aged divorcees but soon realised that creativity has a terrible habit of working outside a normal nine to five routine and so more than one relationship had fallen by the wayside. Lately she has taken to dating much younger men in the belief that they have more stamina and so won’t be so bothered at her odd hours and are more than able to respond when the opportunity arises. However, judging from a few recent comments, I think she is finding that this experiment is not really working out as well as she had hoped.

      So those are my girlfriends (in a nutshell) and they have stood by me through thick and thin and when it comes to men there seems to have been more thin than thick (although they would claim that some of them were most definitely thick!)

      I know that they would love me to find a man to settle down with and have done everything they can to help me. They’ve lent me their husbands for the evening when I have had to attend some work black tie function and am in desperate need of company and that is great, but on the other hand it has made me realise that I am missing out on things since the end of my last relationship.

      Ah yes, my last relationship. Looking back on it I do wonder why I put up with him for seven years and that a three year itch would have been a good thing. I suppose Adam was pretty decent on one level but very selfish on another and had made it clear that he was not interested in the whole baby thing. As I was pretty ambiguous about the baby thing at the time I wasn’t too bothered, but it soon became clear that he didn’t want kids because he had no intention of having his status as number one in the house being usurped by anyone; not even his own flesh and blood.

      Obviously my friends were too polite to point out his faults, but I could detect their frustration at certain times; when he had a cold it was of course ‘man ‘flu’ but he once got into a rage when he discovered that I hadn’t cooked his dinner due to a bout of pneumonia. I perhaps saw the writing on the wall then, but it took another two years before I came to my senses. He made the assumption that his promotion at work to a job in Manchester (he was part of a large company of auditors) would see me giving up the company I had spent years building with Anna, in order to go and be his supportive wife. When I refused and asked him how he had even taken the job without discussing it with me he gave me an ultimatum; it was him or my business. Needless to say I found the choice surprisingly easy. He came home the next day to find his suitcases packed and on the drive. Luckily I had always insisted on us keeping our respective houses, so the split caused me very little upheaval, even emotionally, and after two weeks I realised I didn’t miss him at all.

      After two years in the relationship wilderness, I was beginning to feel that I was missing out on something and so that was when I started to look for a new man, but over the next twelve months I found very little that was on offer. It took me a while to realise that all my friends had found their partners in their twenties or very early thirties and that maybe the saying was correct; namely that a woman over the age of forty has more chance of being struck by lightening than getting married, or something along those lines.

      After three years on my own I am turning to them again to help me find someone suitable who will be the love of my life. The thing is how to find him when I have to finally admit that I do not have the allure of a twenty five year old. No matter how young I may feel inside the outside is most certainly showing signs of the ageing process and besides, I want to find someone who wants what I want and probably doesn’t want to have children. While they may have been a possibility in the past the thought of late nights and early mornings and nine months of physical hardship, along with the fact that I would be likely to be old enough to be the mother of most of the women at the ante natal classes, good sense told me that my biological need was not really great enough to consider having a baby at such a late stage in my life.

      A number of evenings were spent with the girls trying to work out if there were any men that they knew who were both suitable, single and that I hadn’t dated before, but we rapidly came to the conclusion that the answer was unfortunately ‘no’.

      Then Erica came up with this stupendous idea about the online dating scene and spent a dedicated evening sipping wine, watching Star Trek the Next Generation on TV, while multitasking on the internet doing what she called ‘research’ in the hope that something decent might pop up in front of her eyes.

      Finally she found a website called mygr8mate.com and rang to tell me the good news.

      I was initially quite horrified at the idea, based on an experience from ten years earlier when I put an advert in the lonely hearts section of ‘The Times’ and had been bombarded with mail from three continents, none of which were Europe and ended up receiving a stack of letters from men who seemed to be keen to marry me, despite a very limited ability to converse in the English language.

      However the internet dating scene had apparently really taken off in the last couple of years and this was the way to go. Erica had chosen a website that she felt would offer me a good chance of finding the man of my dreams and was determined to get me to sign up.

      This certainly seemed to be a dating site with a difference; it appeared that she had to write about me and basically promote me to the poor bunch of men on the website who also had put themselves at the mercy of their friends. This was to prevent the “mate” being too modest or telling out and out lies on their profile.

      Deciding that forking out for Erica to do the work was a good option I happily told her to go ahead, uploaded a photo of me (not overly flattering but do I want shallow appearance-obsessed men to be contacting me?) onto the page and waited for the emails to flow in.

      Two weeks later absolutely nothing had happened. Six moaning ‘phone calls later to a cross section of my friends and I decided to be that modern woman you read about in Red and Cosmo and take action myself. I spent an evening (well,forty-five minutes) trawling through the available men within a 10 mile radius and came up with the grand total of…….. two! I emailed them and sat back secure in the knowledge that they would be unable to resist my witty repartee and overall gorgeousness.

      Ten days later and neither of them had bothered to respond! So I expanded my radius to twenty five miles and found fourteen men. This time I decided to do a mass campaign (well I am in marketing) and emailed all of them, completely convinced that this pro-activeness on my part would charm the pants (or Y-fronts) off them.

      Three weeks later I was seriously considering demanding my money back as I had received zero responses.

      “What, NO ONE has written to you?” Erica gasped.

      “Correct”

      “Not even one response out of sixteen?”

      “Uh huh”

      “And no one has taken the initiative to contact you”

      “Nope”

      “Bloody hell, I can’t believe that. I wrote you such a good profile too. They are obviously a complete bunch of idiots”

      “Maybe,

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