I want a date. A nice, simple, no-frills, no-trauma date.

I shall wear a little black dress and Bronxx heels, and a coffin-shaped handbag (my favourite).

Not too much makeup, not too little.

My hair will neither be bouncy and big nor flat and sad. It will do its job and look as if it's always been on my head.

I shall not fret about being either too thin or too fat.

I'll probably stop wearing night-blue nail polish and take refuge in safer colours. Possibly even matching my lipstick.

I want a real date with a live person who will pick me up in a car which has no added-on spoiler or fancy sideskirts, a huge exhaust pipe or chipped engine. Not a Ferrari, or a Lamborghini. Not a Cinquecento or a Skoda. A car in which he will look as if he's driven it for a while and is not paranoid about clipping the curb or scratching the paintwork.

I want to be taken to a real restaurant where I shall probably forget my mobile phone, ladder my tights and drop the cutlery on the floor, and he will not tell me off or look at me disapprovingly.

I want to have a real conversation and hear his real voice with any regional mark he may have, and he will pretend that I don't have a foreign accent, my life is not a shapeless mess and that I know exactly what I am going to do tomorrow.

I want him to talk to me about Arsenal, and tell me that he goes to the pub with his mates every Friday night, occasionally gets drunk but becomes rather cuddly when he does. I shall smile through the glass I am holding, and wonder exactly how cuddly he is going to get.

He will also tell me that he likes Schiele, Toulouse Lautrec, Baudelaire and the great Greek philosophers of the V century BC. I shall tease him about his hatred for Shakespeare and we will both laugh about how boring numbers are.

I want a real date which ends with a kiss, and to see him walk away with half my lipstick on his lips. And he doesn't care.