OK then, I have just finished the first in what I hope is not a long line of first dates. That’s my first first date in several years; an internet catch, no less.

Things I now know about this particular girl:

• She can name every plant in her front yard. (By species. She hasn’t actually named them all).
• She looks like my sister when she laughs. And I’m pretty fucking funny during sex, so … DEAL BREAKER.
• She has a really big front yard.
• She has read at least one self-improvement book because she uses my name in the vast majority of sentences. “… and when my mother was pregnant my Grandmother died, Dirk, and when I was pregnant with the eldest one, my great-uncle died.”
• She has a theory about the balance of life and that each time she or anyone in her family is pregnant, about to be pregnant, or has just finished being pregnant, someone in the family dies. And judging by the stories I’m hearing of her children, it would seem that she’s been more or less pregnant since Google started. Quite the death toll I imagine.
• Her daughter is ‘of age’. If I married this chick, I would be the step-father. I’m not sure of the step-father rules exactly, but I think that means I would have to molest her.

Halfway through dinner, she got up to go to the bathroom, where she must have racked up and snorted whatever the exact opposite of cocaine is. Back at the table, she was doing quadruple DSBs, her left hand was fiddling with a napkin more slowly than a napkin has ever been fiddled with before, and the botanical classification reached new levels of uninterestingness. The sound of my breathing was vying for my attention.

At least she’d stopped laughing.