London

Anna-Marie Crowhurst

Gallery dating
Anna-Marie Crowhurst at the Museum of London

My friend Frances is batting off the post-work heatwave when I turn up. ‘This is going to be AWFUL,’ she sighs. ‘We need to get drunk.’ We go to the pub and start swigging cider and whisky chasers.

Neither of us has been to a dating event before; we are not the sort. We are the sort to drunkenly fall upon friends of friends at parties, and take up with unsuitable whippersnappers in debauched Soho hoedowns. We wonder who (total losers with no social skills?) would go to a) a dating event and b) a dating event at a museum. ‘Don’t you think a satire exhibition is a bit odd?’ Frances says. ‘It’s not exactly romantic, is it?’ I say it could be heaving with hordes of delicious cardigan-wearing young men with librarian hair and old Penguin novels sticking out of their back pockets, who just happen to be single because most of their time is taken up with travelling the world for their cool job and visiting old people’s homes in between. Frances snorts.

Cider-tinged, we roll up to the Museum of London and collect name badges from the organisers. They are Art to Heart, who like bringing together art-appreciating singles to hopefully get it on. ‘Don’t be scared,’ says our host, Phil, as we shy away from the desk like unbroken-in dating foals. He gives us cards with our names on. If we spot a likely chap we can give him our card and he can contact us through the Art to Heart internet messageboard. My name is spelled wrong. Frances rolls her eyes. Feature continues

Anna-Marie mingles

Downstairs, in front of a lit-up Lord Mayor’s coach, women in high-street summer dresses and men in office shirts cluster around dishes of olives and rice crackers, glugging wine. We join in, and barely wait three minutes before ‘Dave’, who is about fifty, sidles up. Dave goes to Art to Heart events all the time. ‘So what do you do?’ says Frances, glancing from his sandals-over-pulled-up-white-socks combo to my heavily winking right eye. Dave affects a James Bond voice. ‘I’m… an assassin,’ he says, suavely. Frances looks stern. ‘You’re unemployed, aren’t you?’ she shouts. ‘Yes,’ squeaks Dave. We move off.

I talk to Bernard, a tall, earnest man who gets my attention by lurking silently at my right shoulder until I turn round. I enthuse about the Museum of London: ‘Yes there’s a garden right in the middle!’ He looks a bit baffled. ‘I’m looking to connect soul to soul,’ he says wistfully, so me and Frances go and hide in the toilets.

An unlikely pair hook up at Art to Heart

We have a look at the exhibition. A nice couple are playing with the dressing-up bit. They have just met and are laughing a lot. ‘Wow, you seem like you’ve known each other for ages,’ says Frances. They haven’t, and when the woman isn’t looking the man gives Frances his card. In front of the cartoons stands a man in Cuban-heeled boots. He is wearing a big ribbon in his dyed black hair, in the style of an eighteenth-century highwayman. ‘Believe it or not, I am a civil servant,’ he says pretentiously. I do believe it. He looks me up and down with such a minutely caressing glance I feel like I’ve been molested. Frances rescues me just as he’s telling me his look is inspired by Karl Lagerfeld.

At last I find two men in their early thirties. They are pissed. ‘I meet women all the time – this is just for extras,’ says one, laughing, while the other (who is Chinese) drunkenly repeats ‘Do you fancy a Chinese tonight?’ until I say ‘I had one last night, actually,’ and glide off.

‘You can tell if it’s gone well because people are snogging,’ confides founder of Art to Heart, Ranjeev. There is no one snogging and the museum is closing, so the event decamps to the pub, where the ‘real action happens’. Frances waves the five cards she has been given. The best was given to her by a man who scribbled on the back, ‘I did not have the courage to talk to you…’ ‘Bah!’ she cries, throwing it on the floor. ‘Everyone is so old!’ She is right. We go home.

For details of Art to Heart events visit www.art2heart.biz.