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.'

In the beginning...

Welcome to my world....

Fake tan, fake orgasms and fake faces. Where a nice set of veneers means a set of very expensive teeth rather than a collection of polished table tops, and crows' feet only appear in freshly fallen snow, never around your face.

In my life women and men stick together so the long sighted ones read the number on the bus and the short sighted ones know when it's arrived. Together we decipher different bits of a menu, rather than just have the soup again. Feeling 21, we're like the smell of newly mown grass in the rain, a moment that is fleetingly fabulous but over far too soon.

I am 47. There it is in black and white. Damning, dangerous and downright unbelievable. I've lied about my age longer than I can remember, at first when I was 16 to get into clubs for 18s then when I was 20 to go out with a man who was 30 (he wasn't marriage material though he did build me a conservatory). Now in my 40s it's an Olympic feat to get a decent geezer at all. One with all his own pension.  Have you ever met a 50 year old bloke who really, truthfully, hand on heart attack wants to date a woman over 40? I was told on one blind date (aged 62 in guttering ) that men have their own formula for finding a woman - she has to be half your age plus seven.

50 -25 + 7 = 32

Geddit?

At 47 I'm divorced, broke and regretting how it all went wrong when I met the ginger minger.

Down I may be, but I'm not out. From this day forward, life is what you fake it. 

I have a date. Not with destiny, but Dave.

I just have to make sure the overnight carer arrives on time to look after mum and then I'm off out.

Watch out world.

Faking hell!