Hello Ian Again

Time flies when you're having no fucking fun at all.

The undatable man hits fifty in less than two weeks and today I run face first, smack-bang into yet another bloody Hello Ian day with all its attendant crappiness.

Only a couple of you are old enough to remember, but two years ago I launched the very first Date Dive appeal with this post.

For those who can't be arsed to click a link (that'll be all of you), this was when I fessed up to my predeliction for those spooky, kooky, sexy weemen in the pointy hats and set out on a fruitless quest to date one.

My deep and admittedly creepy yearning for the incomparably cute and sexy Willow Rosenberg you are all familiar with, but any old witch can make me twitch; be it twinkly-nosed Samantha from Bewitched or Connie Booth with a parsnip tied to her face in Python's Holy Grail; even Hermione "Chlamydia Disappearum!" Granger, now she's grown up enough to throw a decent strop can make me ache in alarming places.

But as usual on this particular day of each year I end up lamenting three all too familiar failings:

1 - None of the above are real (a tricky hurdle to get over on a date as I know from long and bitter experience);

2 - They'd never date me if they were; and

3 - The modern Wiccan is - in my experience of sitting with my latte and croissant, hiding behind the Guardian book review and watching the browsers at the "alternative lifestyle" section of my bookshop - lacking in that elusively sexy essence of witchiness that lures me Wiccawards at this time of year.

Today's browser at the witchy bookshelves appears to come in three unfortunate flavours, none of them even remotely Willow-like:

- First up are stupid tweenie kids whose exposure to the wonderful world of literature consists solely of the Harry Potter books.
Spotty or fat or otherwise "differently attractive" enough to need to hide from the world in sad fictional delusions, they come giggling into the bookshop in protective groups, scanning the shelves for spell books containing love philtres or a cure for acne or chlamydia (usually both, by the look of them) and totally unprepared for any form of reality.
God help them when they have to leave school and get a job and a life.
Or a date.

- Next up we encounter the vast majority of modern Wiccans; dumpy and frumpy middle-aged women with the slightly dazed expression of the terminally confused, wearing enough bangles to give them arms like stevedores and crappy lumps of crystal hanging round their necks.
They are invariably dressed in layers of long, flowy "gypsy" clothing to which the phrase "concealing to appeal" is horribly apt.
In their mirrors (as they trowel on fistfuls of mascara) they see a young Stevie Nicks but in the flesh they resemble mad bag-ladies.

- The sole exception to those two Wiccan flavours was one pale and interesting goth girl who glared disgustedly at me as if I were some kind of … er … creepy middle-aged man with a pervy hankering for a pale and interesting goth girl; which was remarkably astute of her.

So … the dating potential of these groups:

Tempting as it may seem to don a tatty cape and prey upon spotty, insecure and feeble-minded teenage girls, I may be desperate for a date but I am not an icky creep (well not totally, anyway), so the pædo option is a non-starter.

As for the deluded and lonely middle-aged women …
Sheesh!
Listen up, laydees:

(a) You are NOT Stevie Nicks. She dressed that way because she could, not because she had to.

(b) Crystals … For fuck's sake! They may be pretty to look at but they have no more healing power than any other lump of rock.
As you'll discover if you drop one on your foot.

(c) Astrology … Duh! Anybody who believes the relative positions of the stars and planets at the time they were born has any significance whatsoever is clearly delusional and probably deranged.
This means you.
I never, EVER date anyone who tells me their "star sign". Your average root vegetable will be capable of far more scintillating and intellectual conversation. And it will taste better.

(d) Use the word "aura" around me and you'll get a whack upside the head with that fucking spell book.

(e) The thought of any one of you flabby harridans dancing naked around a standing stone is enough to put me off sex for life.

Which leaves me with the goth.
I like goths.
That may have something to do with my own lifelong habit of spending sunny summer days skulking indoors with the curtains shut, listening to songs about suicide.
And dressing in black.
Or it may be simply that goth girls are usually gorgeous.
I have always preferred pale and interesting over brash and trashy.
My problem is that pale and interesting girls are never interested in me.
And my looming fiftieth birthday makes it increasingly unlikely that they ever will be.

So … Witches and goths are probably not the best places to look for a date.
Hey ho.

While I go dig a hole in the garden to stick my head in and cry, I'll leave you with this delightful ditty from the lovely Neil Hannon: The Happy Goth.



Anyone with the cheek to rhyme "goth" with "Hoth" (a cheer there from the Star Wars fans) gets my vote.
I particularly love the trippy-happy string section toward the end.
Hee hee.
Please excuse the appalling video but it was the only version I could find.

Happy Hello Ian from undatable Dive!