I was the world’s worst date when I was starting out. My lowest point was asking a girl in Naas to a dance at Lawlor’s Ballroom, which turned out to be a Fine Gael dinner dance.

Ballroom but no romance
We’re talking the 1960s here – flower power, Vietnam, revolution on the streets of Paris, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones. In the middle of all that, I take this girl to a ballroom full of lumbering penguins (I seem to remember a lot of dress-suited people). And man, they were old – nearly as old as I am now.

The relationship, I am afraid, never recovered from that episode.

Afraid to pucker up
I was also afraid to kiss girls unless they made it very clear that they wanted to be kissed. I blame this on the Christian Brothers, who told me that a girl was a Temple of the Holy Spirit.

Most guys, even back then, had too much sense to believe this nonsense. I, on the other hand, was idiot enough to let it worm its way into my subconscious and get between me and the objects of my desire.

So here’s a girl waiting to be kissed and my subconscious is saying: “No! No! No! She’s a Temple. You can’t kiss a Temple.”

I can’t blame myself entirely. I lived on a farm and I didn’t have a car. In the 1960s, we were just coming out of all the repression and codology and life-denying rubbish that went before.

Unacceptable reading
Indeed, only a couple of years before the Fine Gael incident, when I was still in school, all of us were required to write an essay on purity because a couple of guys had been found reading the News of the World in the toilet.

In a nearby girls’ school, several pupils had been expelled because somebody’s brother had come back from a rugby tour to the Continent with a condom and she had brought it in to show to her pals.

That’s why some people like me cheered when we heard about girls organising a debs in Cork recently who arranged to have condoms dished out along with the dinner.
No time for shenanigans
Anyway, you see where I was coming from. Where I was going to, quite often, was the Dreamland in Athy. This involved catching a CIÉ bus on the dark main road near my home between Naas and Newbridge, travelling 20 miles, dancing with girls and then dashing to get the bus before it left again at 3am or whatever the time was.

This didn’t leave you any time at all to get off with a girl. There was a girl one night, I remember… but I would have had to miss the bus. Do I wish I had missed the bus? Of course I do – and not for the sex of which, for all I know, there mightn’t have been any, but just for the sake of having had the gumption to miss the damn bus.

Lock jaw up the mountains
Even after I moved to Dublin, I was a bad date. I remember a girl telling me this once when we were sitting against a tree up the Dublin mountains (a long story). She gave out so much about my dating deficits that her jaws locked and I had to leave her in St Vincent’s Hospital for the night. For me, that’s not a bad memory. That’s a good memory – I mean her jaw locking, ha ha!

Still, you get the picture.

Getting the condoms out
By the way, and talking of condoms, the thing back then was that, if you were in London, you bought a packet of condoms (they were illegal in our paedophile’s paradise at the time) and they sat there growing old and never getting used. I was no different. I remember having dinner with a young woman in Wynn’s Hotel (this is worse than the Fine Gael dance!) and, when I took my wallet out to pay the bill, a packet of never-to-be-used condoms skittered across the table.

Well, that was the end of that. You know what? She must have been a Temple.