A WEEK last Wednesday, I went out on a date. This has stuck in my mind for so long because the last time I dated was in my mid-teens when I took April Fogg snogging in Bramhall Park, Cheshire, on a Saturday night. After that period, people went straight to bed or lived together, obviating the need to spend any length of time together fully clothed.
My date 10 days ago was having none of that. She was the current Miss World, another reason why the memory of that evening will live through accelerating brain cell death for some time.
To be honest I was as nervous as a mid-teen schoolboy. Julia Alexandrovna Kurochkina is, at 1.85 metres (6 feet 1 inch), the tallest Miss World yet and the title's first Russian holder. I was going out with history.
Not that Miss World was expecting anything of an escort just old enough to be her father. I was warned she would be chaperoned, fiercely, and under rules forbidding drink, would not become a mid-evening piece of ''software'' in my arms.
She would not be allowed to bet either, even though I was taking her to Happy Valley races into the box of steward Alan Li Fook-sum, whose distinguished society guests would doubtless flock round her and flick me aside to the relative familiarity of the bar.
We were to meet in the lobby lounge bar of The Ritz-Carlton where she had arrived off a Moscow flight. The general manager, Eric Waldeburger, went behind the bar and mixed me one of his staggering martinis. It was meant to calm me and indeed the little wheel of the mind was still slowly turning round although the hamster had quite disappeared.