Cloudy with a Chance of Love: The unmissable laugh-out-loud read. Fiona Collins

dressed as Amy Winehouse, her hair back-combed to hair heaven and brushing against the lower reaches of an antique chandelier; my mum would be saying, ‘you’ll have someone’s eye out with that’. I felt a right twit that I wasn’t dressed up. I was already feeling uncomfortable as it was and wished I was drinking tonight. What the hell was I doing here? I’d never been to this sort of thing before; I’d never been on any kind of dating scene – I hadn’t had to. There had always been Jeff. I’d met him when I was twenty and he’d shown my brother round his first house (Jeff was an estate agent. That’s how he and Gabby conducted their affair, at lunchtimes, in furnished show homes and double beds under feature walls) and had been with him since. Prior to Jeff, I’d met boyfriends here and there – usually in clubs, like everyone else. I’d never had to do online dating, speed dating, singles’ nights, murder mystery nights which were really cop-off junkets, none of it. I really wasn’t sure it was an arena I wanted to enter. I was taking my life in my hands and I’d probably trip over spectacularly and drop it. Right down Gaga’s bacon-y cleavage, probably.

      I re-swivelled the waistband of my skirt – this skirt always twizzled round – and tried to hold my stomach in, to no avail. Sam was often suggesting fitness DVDs to me; she was currently extolling the virtues of some American woman called Kimberley Lake-Payne and her ‘amazing’ 60 Day T&A Blast DVD, as well as Cardio Power, Storm-Ripped Body Pump and Tummy Shrink Showdown. Did I want to borrow any of them? I always declined. Maybe one day I would stop eating so much chocolate and start shaking my sizeable booty in Lycra, on some kind of fitness drive, but I liked to eat. I enjoyed not counting calories or working out.

      ‘Last time I came to one of these I burnt six hundred calories on the dancefloor,’ pronounced Sam. ‘I was wearing my Fitbit, inside my bra.’

      ‘You’ve been to speed dating before? You never said.’

      ‘No, well, it wasn’t a huge success. It was when I first split with Graham.’

      ‘Did you meet anyone?’

      ‘Sadly, yes, a bloke I dated for two months. Jacob – he was really nice, at first. Except it turned out he still lived with his mum and– worse – that he was Chief Swords Person in medieval re-enactment thingies in Richmond Park, every Sunday. The mum situation I could have lived with – if you excuse the pun – but it was the muddy bayonet in the backpack which was the deal-breaker.’

      ‘I bet it was!’ I said. ‘You could have told us. It would have given us hours of fun.’

      Sam shrugged. ‘It wasn’t my finest hour. I’m hoping for better tonight.’

      ‘So, what happens after we register?’ I said, twizzling my waistband again. ‘Do we get name badges? I don’t want a hole pricked in this blouse.’

      ‘No, we don’t want any pricks!’ laughed Sam, and the girl in front of us turned round and smiled wryly.

      ‘Good luck with that,’ she said.

      It didn’t exactly restore any confidence. I had a sudden desire to go home and put my jammies on. Sam must have read my thoughts.

      ‘Come on, it’ll be fine. There are some nice men out there, there has to be! Sometimes they’re right under your nose.’

      I caught the eye of the other Michael Jackson – complete with red leather Thriller jacket, white socks and black slip-on shoes – and he gave me a wrinkly wink. I really wasn’t sure about that.

      After we’d registered, and I’d got four whacking great holes in my blouse courtesy of the girl on the desk who might want to invest in some reading glasses, we stood among the expectant crowd waiting to be told what to do. Sam ran through the list of questions she had for prospective suitors, written in the Notes section of her phone. They included: ‘What do you like doing at the weekends?’; ‘What is your view on the healing power of crystals?’; ‘Do you know how to operate a washing machine?’ and ‘Have you ever, or will you ever, own a status dog?’

      ‘What on earth is a status dog?’ I asked.

      ‘A scary dog. You know, like a bulldog or something. The ones men walk down the street with, in order to look hard. It would be a deal-breaker. I don’t like dogs much as it is.’

      I laughed. ‘Right. Okay.’

      ‘You have to break down your criteria,’ said Sam. ‘I know you think I’m away with the fairies half the time, but I can also be completely practical when it comes to men.’

      ‘I know you can,’ I said. Sam had been known to come up with pie charts detailing her compatibility with the men she was dating.

      What were my criteria? I wondered. I hadn’t had to think about them for a long time – Jeff and I had just stumbled into going out and then getting serious, having a baby and getting married. I don’t remember ever trying to match him up with a list of criteria. What qualities would I absolutely have to have in a man? Deal-breakers? Once again, I came up with four things: nice, kind, good sense of humour, won’t ever cheat. It wasn’t really much to ask for, was it?

      Finally, after the crowd of icons (and me and Sam) had got increasingly noisy and restless and keen to just get on with the bloody thing (or was that just me?), a man in a bright yellow jacket and slicked back hair, looking like something out of a holiday camp and introducing himself as Nigel Smith-Fortescue, took to the mike on the tiny stage at the end of the bar.

      ‘Welcome everyone,’ he boomed. ‘You all look amaaaaazing! Well done, people!’ Oh god, he was one of those. Sam was already grinning and silently offering him a rude, derogatory signal, with her left hand, behind her bag.

      ‘Stop it!’ I whispered.

      ‘Well…’ she said. He was awful, already. He was doing that thing where you point your finger and doff it at people in turn, with an annoying look on your face.

      ‘You people may have read in our natty little flyer that here at Icons Speed Date we like to shake things up a bit, make things a bit more interesting.’ He laughed very loudly, as though appreciating an invisible joke. Here we go, I thought. What on earth was it going to be? Group-chanting? Line dancing? Twister? ‘We have three rounds,’ he continued. ‘Three innovative, super trendy, date-tastic rounds.’

      ‘Hurray!’ shouted out the clearly already-pissed Buddy Holly, his glasses steamed up. Everyone laughed and Nigel Smith-Fortescue gave an over-charming smile.

      ‘Thank you, my friend. Thank you.’ He cleared his throat. ‘The first round – that’s Round One, people! – which you’ll adore, I know you will, is non-verbal communication. Vis a vis: miming.’ Sam nudged me. She did a Marcel Marceau box-making mime thing. I rolled my eyes. Miming! Oh gawd. If I’d wanted to not speak to anyone I could have just stayed at home.

      Nigel warmed to his theme. ‘You’re not allowed to taaaalk to anyone, you must communicate only by gestures, gesticulation, the power of miiiiiime.’

      A lot of the men looked quite cocky, and were very obviously looking the women up and down. They were imagining what gesticulations they could muster to impress the ladies, no doubt. I wasn’t hopeful I’d be impressed by anyone as I looked from one disappointing, often overly made-up face to another.

      ‘The second round – that’s Round Two, people! – is the round we call The Eyes Have It. Do you like that? The Eyes Have It? I thought that one up, didn’t I Isobel?’ A lady in the wings, in the Madonna ‘Like a Virgin’ get-up of short, white wedding dress and long white lacy gloves, gave him the ‘A-OK’ sign, with her gloved hand. ‘You have to stare across the table into each other’s eyes for two minutes. Really look into each other’s soouuuls. We reckon it will sort the birds from the bees, the wheat from the chaff.’ He looked so delighted with himself. Isobel was laughing in the wings, her teeth catching the light. She must be his significant other, I thought. Rather her than me.

      So far, the whole thing sounded excruciating. I never would have agreed