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always wanted.’
    ‘Well, yeah, Tel, but all I’m saying is you shouldn’t size up every bird you meet as potential life partner material. You’re
     setting yourself up for a fall every time. And with this Charley bird especially. I can tell you that for nothing,’ Jason
     told me, as good as his word, for nothing. ‘Just enjoy it for what it is and don’t go twisting your knickers into knots over
     what it isn’t because at the end of the day you’re only going to shoot yourself in the foot before you’ve filled your boots.’
    I think I got what Jason meant, although he could’ve just been trying to sell me his spare Toe Tecs again.
    ‘So you reckon she’s not properly interested, then? She’s just after a bit of something else?’
    ‘Oh no, I’m sure birds like that always go searching for future husbands down the dogs, Tel. When they want to get their hands
     on a real good one like,’ he smirked.
    At that moment Tony the barman came over and asked if we were ready for another drink. I was disheartened enough to go for
     several more barrels so I pointed to the Stella and stuck a hand in my pocket.
    ‘What d’you think of posh birds, Ton’? Old Prince Philip over here reeled in a bit of a plum-sucker last night and is wondering
     what his chances of long-term happiness are like,’ Jason asked the Lamb’s resident expert on everything.
    ‘Has she got money? I’d love to meet a bird with money. Get me out of this shithole,’ he said without even having to think
     about it.
    ‘I couldn’t tell you,’ I replied. ‘Maybe.’
    ‘Yep, posh old rich bird wants you to go and live in her mansion rent free you jump at the chance,’ was his advice.
    I promised Tony I would, then told him to send over a half of stout for old Stan in the corner before pocketing my change.
    ‘Look, I don’t know what this bird of yours is like but if you ask me she’s probably just up for a spot of Lady Chatterley’s
     with old ditch-digger McArse-Crack, so try not to go building her up in your mind because it probably ain’t going to happen,’
     Jason laid out. ‘Never the twain shall meet, as my old man used to say.’
    As depressing as this all sounded, I’d come to much the same conclusion on the train ride home this morning. We might meet
     up again. We might get on like a mansion on fire. We might even go to bed and make sweet squeaks together but when all was
     said and done, we weren’t going to be picking out baby bonnets in John Lewis any day in the future.
    Perhaps Jason was right. Perhaps I shouldn’t handicap every date with these sorts of lofty expectations, but it’s hard not
     to get carried away when you meet someone you like after a year and a half of eating fish and chips off your lap in front
     of Deal Or No Deal .
    Like I said, I’m not really the bed-hopping Jack the lad in tight trousers that some of my mates like to think they are.
    I’m just a normal bloke with normal aspirations and normal desires. I’d sown a few wild oats back in my twenties and as much
     fun as that was back then, it’s not the sort of thing that would have me dodging the altar for the rest of my life to go on
     chasing it around discos into my sixties. I’d see old Stan in the Lamb every time I came in for a pint, and it terrified me,
     the thought that I might turn out like him; no wife, no kids, no family. No nothing. Just a half of stout and a seat in the
     corner.
    ‘That’s old Terry’s stool that is,’ I can hear them saying in thirty years’ time. ‘You can’t sit there, he’ll be in soon,
     the poor mad lonely old bastard.’
    No, I’d like to get married and settle down and have a family.
    Sorry if that lets the side down, lads, but that’s just the way I was built. So if I met a girl these days and I liked the
     look of her, I’d ask her out because I wanted to see her again. If I didn’t, then I wouldn’t, even if a few carefully spun
     compliments could’ve probably won us both a roll