Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band


Daniel Carey

A MAN was in Centra in Fairview, Co Dublin last week when he overheard a 12-year-old girl announce, completely deadpan: “I just have to text me husband”. As my friend mused in a subsequent text message: “They grow up so fast nowadays”.
Presumably the child doesn’t actually have a husband – unlike the woman who got a mention in a Mayo café the weekend before last. “Some poor crathur was getting married,” one of the diners reported, and there were sympathetic murmurs all round. “Been there, done that,” one lady said with a chuckle. “You never shoot the leg of a dog twice.”
Samuel Johnson famously described remarriage as ‘the triumph of hope over experience’, which might also have influenced some personal ads I saw recently in ‘Buy and Sell’. Perhaps the one that carried the most modern echo of Johnson came from a woman in the south of the country. It read simply: “Heidi, West Cork, sick of men, would like a nice girl to have a good time with”.
A similarly all-encompassing attitude was clear from the notice placed by John, aged 46: “Bi guy, likes cross-dressing, married but can accommodate”. Which surely raises as many questions as it answers. Most of the advertisements sought fun, companionship or more, but other set their bar rather lower. “Mark, 30, looking for guys for texting” was one such effort.
If this is a typical week for the free-ads newspaper, a book of their best lonely hearts ads can’t be far away. Three years ago, David Rose produced such a collection from the London Review of Books, entitled ‘They Call Me Naughty Lola’, inspired by an ad placed by a ‘run-of-the-mill beardy physicist (M, 46)’.
If that didn’t tickle your fancy, other memorable contributors were frank (“Romance is dead. So is my mother. Man, 42, inherited wealth”) or amusingly self-conscious: “I’ve divorced better men than you. And worn more expensive shoes than these. So don’t think placing this ad is the biggest comedown I’ve ever had to make. Sensitive F, 34.”
Of course, before the era of online dating, there were all kinds of ways to meet your future spouse or partner. Operation Overlord, for one. At a wedding in New York last month, a woman told me that her mother was a German war bride; her dad was in the American army during World War II, and they came back to the States after the conflict was over.
The woman’s English language skills were passable but not perfect, and she was very nervous the first time she met her in-laws-to-be. They all sat down to a meal in a sprawling country house, and were just about to begin eating when the German woman spotted she had only a knife.
“Can I have a fu**?” she asked, and everyone else in the room collapsed into laughter. The woman, not realising that she had asked for something more intimate than a fork, was mortified. Hopefully a long and happy marriage followed.