Dating agency requires 'professional Cupid': tact required

One dating agency, Mutual Attraction, is currently advertising for a “professional Cupid” (AFP/Getty) (AFP/Getty)

“This is not a skill that you can learn at university,” says Caroline Brealey, the founder of the Mutual Attraction dating agency, which is currently advertising for a “professional Cupid”. Brealey has so far received more than 100 applications, but will be keeping the vacancy open for any interested readers of this newspaper.

Before you apply, you might like to know that Mutual Attraction is not like other dating agencies. In place of the endless sifting through online photos and profiles etc, Brealey gets to know all of her clients individually and then decides who they might best hit it off with.

So, what skills will the ideal candidate need? “Outstanding customer service and passion,” says Brealey. “They have to be confident, they must love getting to know people and they must not shy away from challenging conversations.”

Challenging conversations? Tell me more. “I once went to meet a woman in her late thirties. She was a professional lady and she seemed perfectly pleasant. When we got to the bit of the conversation where she had to tell me what she was looking for, she made it clear that she would never consider anyone over the age of 25. I had to gently and tactfully suggest that Mutual Attraction might not be the best place for her.”

Apply online here

Grave new world

As anyone who has been anywhere near the Tottenham Court Road area in the past few years will know, that part of London is the subject of massive redevelopment to make way for Crossrail. For live music venues in London, there have been many casualties: the Astoria, the Metro, the 12 Bar and so on.

Not to worry, though, because a video was being widely shared on social media last week that allows us to glimpse the future, a place where buildings will be called Now and Outernet and a world in which people will actually use QR codes (go to scottradnor.com to view the film in all its dystopian horror).

Even worse than the sight of things to come is the language the film uses: this is a world, apparently, where “the real and the virtual blur into one”, a world “which now welcomes a new dawn for meaningful brand engagement”; and a world in which we can “interact with the brands we love in exciting new ways”.

As a Twitter-user called Daniel Maier commented: “Well, the death of Denmark Street is a small price to pay for increased brand awareness opportunities.”

Blow more than the candles

The experience of the parents of the five-year-old boy who were invoiced for his no-show at a friend’s birthday party last week was an economic inevitability, apparently. Writing in Slate magazine, the finance expert Helaine Olen says that “you can blame it on what Cornell University economics professor Robert H Frank calls an ‘expenditure cascade’.”

What happens is this: rich people decide to spend a lot of money on things such as buggies and birthday parties. The likes of you and me see this and it raises our own expenditure and expectations. Hence, the average cost of a toddler’s birthday party in the UK is now in the region of £200 with about £40 being spent on what used to be called “going home presents”.

“People spend, then other people spend more,” Olen concludes in her entertaining piece explaining expenditure cascade. Didn’t we used to call this keeping up with the Joneses?

Lost in translation

In an attempt to update his predecessor’s “squeaky bum time”, Manchester United’s Dutch manager, Louis van Gaal, might have scored a linguistic own goal when he told his players he was “twitching his ass” this season.

Idioms are famously difficult to translate. So it was fun to read a recent blog post from the TED Talks team which asked the volunteers who render the talks into 105 languages to translate idioms from their own tongue. Here are a few favourites:

German: Tomaten auf den Augen haben. Literal translation: you have tomatoes on your eyes. What it means: you are not seeing what everyone else can see.

Croatian: muda labudova. Literal translation: balls of a swan. What it means: something that’s impossible.

Swedish: att glida in på en räkmacka. Literal translation: to slide in on a shrimp sandwich. What it means: somebody who didn’t have to work to get where they are.

French: avaler des couleuvres. Literal translation: to swallow grass snakes. What it means: being so insulted that you’re not able to reply.

As for Van Gaal’s chance of winning the league this season, all I have to say is, als de koeien op het ijs dansen (when the cows dance on the ice).

No rhyme or reason

Another in a regular series of limericks based on recent events:

The new way our leaders compete,

Is to tell us what they like to eat,

Forget national debt,

Is it Nando’s or Pret,

That connects with the man on the street?

Twitter.com/@simmyrichman