four weddings, four babies, one pair of lost knickers: celebrating 10 years of blind date

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d Saturdays even exist before the Blind date column? Not as far as I’m concerned. The start of the weekend was a joyless desert until, in 2009, Weekend magazine started sending two hapless (my words) strangers out for dinner in the hope that three courses, a bottle of house white and the terror of appearing in a national newspaper would be the accelerant a romantic spark needs to go full inferno.
I have been obsessed with Blind date for most of its 10-year existence. Its simplicity is deceptive: what the daters say leaves plenty of room for interpretation. On the surface, the questions are formulaic – somewhere between inane smalltalk at a stranger’s house party and the sexless interrogation of a dietary questionnaire from your GP. But in the context of the column, they are traps – and I love to see the participants fall right in, revealing themselves via the short aside that they shared a pudding with their date. And let’s not forget that score out of 10. Brutal to have adults rate one another, you might say. Delicious, I say.

The key to its success? It’s relatable. I used to write an anonymous dating blog as The Guyliner. I know what it’s like out there. I have sat at deathly dull dinners with the king of halitosis talking about his loft conversion. I have taken sneaky glances at my watch as a partied-out zombie talked me through his negroni-inspired accumulator hangover. I have also dropped clangers, watched my date’s face plummet and realised that my half of the bill is no longer an investment in a bright future, but a tax on my stupidity.

This is why I love Blind date so much. But its two slim columns in the middle of Weekend, barely 400 words a week, weren’t enough for me. Every Saturday, I would dash to social media to debrief with other devotees. The disasters! The fairytale endings! Even the kind of “meh” ones where two clean-shirts spent two hours saying, “No, after you” over a dish of calamari – we discussed them all.
In July 2014, after years of writing about my own dates, I was coupled up and looking for something new to write about. It occurred to me that it might be fun to look deeper into Blind date, to read between the lines. In the same way that the Guardian’s episode recaps of Line Of Duty or Game Of Thrones are must-reads for fans eager to dissect their favourite dramas, I wanted to put Blind date under the microscope.
Thus my blog, Impeccable Table Manners, was born, taking its name from the stock reply given by many daters to the “Good table manners?” question. The tone is light snark, with greater savagery deployed occasionally for some of the biggest shockers. I try not to get too personal; I’m critiquing what people say, not who they are, and I invite dates to get in touch if they want to give their side of the story. To my surprise, the blog’s po[CENSORED]rity grew and grew. Soon, every Saturday morning, my Twitter mentions were full of people asking when the review was going up – sometimes as early as 7.30am. (Guys, it’s Saturday.)
The idea was to take the daters’ answers and run with them. Sometimes, quite far. Almost every column inspires me in some way, and if I get speechless, well, there is always an animated gif of Joan Collins rolling her eyes close at hand. And while this bit is fun, every week the date throws up a deeper topic for me to chew on. I have touched on loneliness, snobbery, racism, misogyny, masculinity, poverty and kindness. An awkward answer about who gets to pour the wine can get me going on just about anything.
The blog has developed running gags of its own – my readers and I react very strongly to lateness (no!), negronis (yuck!), daters worrying they talked too much (you are on a date, hun; talking is the point), chopsticks (always a disaster), sharing food (no, thank you), people who say, “I think my friends would be too much for them” about their crew of magnolia acolytes and, of course, the dreaded “impeccable”: find a new word (except don’t, because I love it).
There have been occupational hazards. One guy I reviewed is now my editor at GQ magazine (awkward). Another woman was halfway through doing my makeup for a photoshoot before mentioning she had had the Impeccable treatment (she still made me look good). And I have been stopped in the street on numerous occasions by daters and fans of both the Weekend column and Impeccable Table Manners. The cult of Blind date is bigger than you might think.
They say you should never meet your heroes, but the completist in me wanted to find out exactly what goes on behind the scenes. Despite my readers’ frequent frustrations at the “algorithm” that puts daters together, it is not a supercomputer that does the matching. Nina Trickey, Weekend’s resident cupid, has been hooking up readers since 2012, curating the entire process: sifting the romantic hopefuls’ applications, matching them, booking the restaurant and compiling their answers. She has the perfect credentials for the job: as a favour to her friend Anna, her predecessor as cupid, Nina appeared in Blind date No 2.
She got on OK with Niall, 26. They scored each other an 8, but when asked if she would meet him again, Nina replied: “Not romantically. Also, he didn’t compliment me and I did him (on his shirt),” thus setting the tone for the hundreds of daters who would follow.
You need the precision of a heart surgeon to play Blind date matchmaker. Nina admits it can be hard. “I can’t match someone 100% of the time on what they say in that first email,” she says. “Some give you loads of information, but with others it’s just two lines. I have to get them in, see them for myself.” Daters are invited to have their photograph taken before their date – individually, of course, or where’s the surprise
Sometimes applicants are too similar; the column is always running short of straight men, older couples and people outside the M25. While there may seem to be a Blind date “type”, anyone is welcome to take part and the goal is to make the column as diverse as possible.
Is there ever a risk of being set up with someone who is merely available, rather than a decent match? Nina shakes her head emphatically. “No, there has to be something there.” Some daters wait quite a while – up to a year. “I do feel bad for unmatched people still sitting in my inbox, but I never forget them,” she says.
The meal is on the restaurant, in return for the honour of being featured; daters get three courses and one bottle of wine. Regular readers often bemoan dates that happen on a “school night”, which often prevents anyon

Tomas said “She looks extremely cool.”
I said “This is, basically, saying ‘I fancied her’ two questions in without coming across like someone who bought a top hat in 2011 just in case they got married some day.”
Tomas said “We talked about vomit, urinal etiquette, nude cycling.”
I said “I have this feeling that when Tomas proposes to Lizzie – next autumn, at a place that meant something to her as a child, using the engagement ring of a relative or an antique bought with a legacy from a favourite godmother – he’ll hide the ring inside a pudding or a pebble or something. Please don’t do that, Tomas.”
Lizzie said “It was really hot in the restaurant, so I kept fanning myself like a delicate Dickensian woman.”
I said “I don’t think she was fanning herself because of the temperature in the restaurant, do you, readers?”
Lizzie and Tomas’s date was published in a dark week, just after the Manchester Arena attack. This pair melted my icy heart because they were so unapologetically into each other. Every answer fizzed off the page with bubbles of joy, and their date was an emphatic double 10. What happened next?
“When I saw he’d scored me a 10, I felt all warm and fuzzy inside,” Lizzie says now. On seeing his 10, Tomas claims he thought: “She is a great judge of character.”
Lizziehad been inspired to apply after reading through all the past Blind date columns on a Megabus journey home from Bristol. “I hoped I’d meet my true love, but never for one second thought I actually would,” she says. Both read my blog, so buckled in for a roasting there. “We were spared,” Tomas says. “It made the Blind date experience even more joyous.”
Lizzie adds: “It really summed up our feelings towards each other. By the third date, I wanted to be with Tom for ever. No messing about.” Wow. There appears to be something in my eye. She wasn’t wrong – the pair got engaged in April 2018, and the wedding is this winter.
But if we are searching for downsides, even this romantic bliss has a dark cloud. “I wish I’d done something with my hair,” says Lizzie of the Guardian photoshoot. “You don’t realise that, if the date goes really well and you end up getting married, that bad hair day will follow you through the rest of your life.”
So, Lizzie’s advice: get your hair done. And from Tomas? “Apply! It’s great fun and you never know where it might lead Beautiful.

Benjamin said “We talked about our shared desire for a Georgian terrace house by Highbury Fields.”
I said “Did you go to the top of the page, as I did, and check their ages again? You turn up on a date with some smooth-skinned honey in their 20s and all you can talk about is wanting a house?”
Mark said “Introduce him to my friends? I don’t think the opportunity will arise.”
I said “Can anyone smell roasting flesh? Because, baby, that burns.”
Benjamin said “Mark in three words? Smart, musical, cute.”
I said “I am trying to imagine these two ‘doing it’, but all I can picture is two John Lewis gift cards sliding around on top of each other.”
Benjamin, a 27-year-old composer, and Mark, a 21-year-old editorial assistant, did everything they could to destroy my theory that Blind dates involving two men were always more raucous. Two old heads on young shoulders, they talked of Björk, operettas and property. At least they shattered a few stereotypes along the way.
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Looking back on it now, Benjamin concedes: “The evening was spark-free and chemistry-light.” He feels Mark may have been taking the date a lot more seriously than he had been expecting. “No one really goes on Blind date to find true love, right?” Mark’s take was more vinegary. “I could tell fairly well how it had gone,” Benjamin says, “but his first adjective to describe me was ‘punctual’ – brutal.”
Mark confesses he regrets his words a little. “I came across as cold and cruel, which was definitely not the intention,” he insists. “I had a good time, but clearly struggled to convey that.” He concedes that the friends quip was “savage”.
The thing to remember about going on a Blind date is that people you know will see it. And so will your mother. Mark said that reading my review of his date out loud to his mother was quite the experience: “I can hardly describe her face when you called me ‘something young and malleable’ and ‘a smooth-skinned honey in their 20s’.” Sorry, Mark’s mum.
Mark and Benjamin didn’t opt for a second meeting, but Benjamin is now happily settled with his boyfriend. “We’ve been together four years,” he says. “He’s wonderful, although I’m not sure what score he’d have given me on our first date.”
Best not to ask, Benjamin.