I saw Dave the Date today. We bumped into each other in Planet Tesco when I was buying suck in pants. Like most men, he was standing a safe distance from the mannequins, his face slightly flushed, staring at the double Gs. I had my painting dungarees on and no makeup. I desperately didn't want him to notice the painting dungarees.

'Hiiiiiii!' I say, hiding the fat pants behind my back.

'Hey,' he says, shuffling from one Timberland shoe to the other.

'Well!' I say, but without hands to express myself I almost topple over.

'Yeah,' he says, his eyes following my every wobble. He furrows his brow.

I panic. 'I'm in my painting dungarees.'

'That's why they have paint on them.'

'Yes!' I laugh too much. 'I'm painting my floorboards.' God I'm interesting. 

'Don't you like them sanded?' he asks. 

My mind goes blank. All I can think about is if I drop the fat pants on the floor will he notice?

'I could sand them for you,' he says, the corner of his mouth relaxing into a sort of smile.

'Really?!' I say as if he has just discovered a cure for cancer. I decide to go for it and drop the pants.

'I mean, if you want them sanded.' He has look at you eyes.

'God yes!' I say, like that actress faking an orgasm in when Harry met Sally.

'Okay then,' he says. 

'Fab,' I say. 

'I'll call you to come and have a look,' he says.

'It's a date!' I laugh. Hint hint have you forgotten, helllloooooo?

'Good,' he bends down. 'You dropped this,' he says, picking up the fat pants and handing them to me.

'NO!' I declare.

Now he looks embarrassed. 

'They're not mine,' I protest.

He is still holding them.

'They're always there,' I explain. 'I've been complaining for weeks. This store's so big it takes  forever to get from one end to the other. I'll find a manager.' I snatch the pants from his large hands. I can't look at him or the pants or the woman nearby who seems a bit on edge.  

'Bye,' he says but by then I have disappeared into the Home Baking For The Smug aisle. A teenage girl is stacking shelves. I smile. She smiles back. 

'They're supposed to hide your muffin midriff,' I say, burying the fat pants amongst the rows of paper muffin cases. 'Don't buy them they don't work, they just shove everything up so it looks like you're wearing a rubber ring.' 

'Sorry,' she says. And then by way of explanation, 'Everyone's gone off sick.'  

'No worries,' I say. 'All sorted.' 

I turn round and bump into Dave the date. He must have been watching all the time.

'I was just thinking,' he says. 'I'm free later on, after work. I could look at your floors then.'

I think, haven't you seen enough of my flaws in the last ten minutes. 'Terrific,' I say. '236 Alexandra Park.'

He goes. I know because I follow him to make sure he gets in his car. 

Now what?

 

 

 

Dave the Debtor isn't a looker. Think Woody Allen on a bad hair day. I fell too easily for the sports car, expense account and cottage on the coast. I thought he was smooth, he wasn't. Just old. And addicted to spending money he didn't have. Great combo eh?

Dave the Debtor can owe a million quid with no means of paying it back and not blink. But if one of his freckles looks less than pigment perfect, he's a wreck.

'Look at this,' he says anxiously over breakfast.

'It's an arm,' I say.

'Look!' he repeats, taking a magnifying glass from his old man's drawer full of used hankies and Germolene.

He studies his favourite freckles as if they are sprouting GM-like before his eyes.

'Hold it in the sun, ' I suggest in my best nurse voice.

He meticulously moves his arm nearer the window, following my instructions exactly.

'Angle the glass a bit more. That's it.'

'OW! It's burning' he says as the sun seers his pale wrinkly skin.

'Now you've got something real to moan about,' I say.

Dave the Debtor is one of those men who says. 'I'll always take care of you,' in that Rhett Butler way then shits on you from a great height. And he really doesn't give a damn.

I don't like to admit the Debtor hurt me. But he did. Sometimes I wished he'd slammed me against the wall and let rip. Then at least people would understand. But letting someone down? Happens every day love, get over it.

He still owes me a lorra lorra money. And he still has all his own freckles. But I did water down all the suncream before I left, so you never know.

Unlike Dave Le Van Dave, Dr Dave isn't orange. But he is my first love. The thing about first love is you're never really cured, only in remission. 

Dr Dave had just started Uni  and I was barely sixteen when we met on a rainy holiday on the Norfolk Broads. He was from the posh side of town and I wasn't. He didn't say much but there was something in his denim blue eyes that made me turn up at the hospital where he mentioned he had a holiday job as a porter. 

So? He didn't take my number. Which I didn't see as a problem rather a dating opportunity...

He screamed when I jumped out from behind the Red Cross Coffee Shop and yelled 'Surprise!' He was pushing a nice old lady to X ray who immediately gave up her wheelchair and suggested he sit down. I ran and got him a donut when he couldn't stop shaking. In my naive Jackie magazine world, this was because he was ecstatic to see me not that he was totally freaking out. 

He was onto a winner landing that summer job with unlimited access to nurses and a supply of short white coats so they would think he was a doctor before he really was. Until some scraggy sixth former from a council estate comes along to be your very own stalker. Hardly Dr Kildare, more Dr Strangelove.

Our first date was in Dr Dave's dad's shiny blue Ford Cortina which was so clean you could perform surgical procedures in it. Dr Dave had to write down the mileage  and 'significant events' in a notebook that was kept in the glove compartment, along with a flare and an emergency bar of Kendall Mint Cake. I was thrilled to A) Have a boyfriend B) Have a boyfriend who could drive C) Have free paper and a pen.

After Dr Dave and me lost our virginity parked up in a local beauty spot to the sound of a rutting Stag also getting off on the Cortina's aerial, Dr Dave let me drive. 

'You've driven before right?' he asked, breaking open the Mint Cake and a can of Tizer.

'Sure,' I lie, believing that going on the dodgems every year when the fair comes qualifies me for the open road. He passes me the Tizer can, I take a sip, bite on the Kendall Mint cake and as the flavours mingle, realise what Ajax tastes like.

'My dad will kill me if anything happens to this car,' Dr Dave says, starting to lose his nerve. I kiss his pubes. He starts the engine. I adjust my jeans, my foot slips and presses down hard on the accelerator instead of the brake, not that I know which is which. 

It all happens very fast, a bit like the sex. 

And that is how I killed a Stag, how Dr Dave wished he too had died rather than have to tell his dad I'd totalled his beloved Cortina and how his parents grimaced every time my name was mentioned. Oh dear.

There are three Daves in my life: Dave the Debtor, Dave the Doctor and Dave Le Van Dave. The latter is a bright orange 1979 VW camper camper van I bought on a whim following my divorce. Some women get a sports car, I got dub.

To be honest, I thought Dave Le Van Dave would be bloke magnet. I envisaged parking up at dusk in a cool campsite next to a frothy beach in Cornwall, popping the camper van top up, breaking open a bottle of Chardonnay and waiting for the sexy singles to come a calling. I figured no man could resist the air cooled engine and one legged table that converts to a double bed. 

I hadn't anticipated the average age of your average campsite to be pensionable. Or that most would be morbidly obese. I soon discover they all have satellite dishes, microwaves and water tanks the size of the Hoover Dam and never leave their massive motor homes. 

The tent people are younger and their kids like Dave Le Van Dave. Small kids wave and squeal excitedly whilst bigger kids skip alongside just like Little House on the Prairie. Mums look away, afraid their husbands will want a Dave. The Dads eye Dave from a distance during Sausage Watch for the family BBQ. If they dare to venture over it is always under the careful gaze of a wife who has seen the envy in their eyes and given them the dog to deal with. A soggy dog threatening to shake itself over Dave's 1970s pale ale interior is not going to get the warmest of welcomes.

Some Dads persist and feel pressurised to say something mechanically manly. Usually it's 'I had a splitty once.' When I first heard this I assumed we were talking drugs and would later share some weed and a free pass for Thorpe Park behind the toilet block. Then I subscribed to Camper Van Weekly and realised it's shorthand for 'Splitscreen', the type of windscreen in the older vans. But I play dumb to make him feel better, just like all those Janet and John books said. The Dad is itching to climb inside but the wife is hovering and he knows he has seconds to re-live the drive to Greece when he was 21 with just a fiver in his pocket and a lithe Aussie bird in the back with a ready smile and tight ass. Then a child whines and the dog barks and the wife yells and he leaves Dave and me to our make our own memories. 

I am going to Primarni to get something to wear for the Dave date. It's taken two expressos to be here as I realise I've picked the day the new Oxford Street store opens. Every teenage girl in the world is waiting with a mobile cemented to her ear and a handbag the size of a small country wedged under an armpit. Attractive.

The doors open and I go with the rush of the crowd, forced inside even though my feet don't touch the ground. There are no men, except for burly bored security guards who must also be feeling a bit claustro as they're heading for the doors. Girls are everywhere, like ants in short skirts. This is a jungle, the taller Amazonian girls reaching up to the hangers on silver poles fixed high in the retail canopy, swinging them like marauding monkeys . Shorter pygmies such as me don't stand a chance, so I fight my way towards clothes made from the thinnest material known to man, thrown all around the ground. 

I am hot and regretting coming in. Dave is a nice bloke but not worth suffocating for. This will have to be quick. I see a girl, about nineteen, loads of eyeliner and scarlet hair, stroking a black lacy dress. I like it and she has style, so I feel I haven't quite lost my mojo. 

'It's a bargain,' I say, smiling, picking up the dress and holding it against me.

'I love the lace,' she says.

I think how great it will look on her with all that red hair and flawless skin.

'I can't resist' I say, smugly adding it to my basket, buoyed by the fact I am buying a dress a nineteen year old would wear. Take that Dave.

She smiles back. 'My mum will look great in it,' she says. 'Thanks for helping me decide.'