I'm going on a blind date next week. A friend of mine thinks I'm just too passive to ever get myself sorted out and that I have reached an age when I have to go out and market myself.

Hmm. It's not that I don't welcome her efforts but I'm worried because she's only ever met my blind date once herself.

When I brought this up with her she was adamant. "He's going to Kenya in a week for work and he could meet someone out there. You HAVE to meet him before he goes," she said.

Apparently, he's amazing. He is a successful person in television, is modest, interesting and a good listener. I can't believe, with all those astounding qualities, he has not been snapped up. Unless he has a terrible other side to him.

I have a rather suspicious attitude towards the whole business of blind dates or any organised dating systems, such as Internet sites and personal columns. Perhaps it's the outdated romantic in me that just hasn't caught up with modern living, but when I have kids, I don't want to have to tell them I found daddy from an advert. That would be too tragic.

Blind dates are not quite so bad but they're still pretty painful. You're both in a terrible situation, neither knows what the other looks like or whether they have anything more in common than an eager friend who wants to see them together.

And I've been bitten once. I agreed to go on a blind date because a friend, who, admittedly, was a bit bonkers and who obviously didn't know me very well, said she'd met a lovely man who reminded her of me.

So I found myself outside Farringdon tube station waiting for this guy. We'd agreed to meet at a certain entrance and both would be carrying the same newspaper. I saw a man in a cheesy suit looking around apprehensively and thought: "It's not going to work".

Snap judgement, I know, but read on. He spent the evening talking about this new self-improvement group he was involved with and told me how I could be 100 per cent happier than I was. But it was only when he started saying we should go to a West End musical next time round that I started to think of excuses not to see him again.

I just didn't fancy a night of Les Mis with this bloke, or with any other for that matter. Anyway, he must have been having his own doubts because he pressed the eject button quicker than I did. He got a phone call from a "friend" who needed his computer mending. Urgently. At 10pm. Now. He had to go.

If he hadn't blown me off then, I would have gone off him totally when he didn't even offer to walk me to the tube station, in spite of it being dark.

I had been joking about getting a friend to phone up with a pretend emergency to bail me out of the date myself, but the difference is I had only joked about it.

I went home feeling sore, not so much at him, but at my friend who evidently didn't know me at all. I vowed never to go on another blind date again - it's just not good for your friendships. It seems that blind dates are nothing more than the depressing realisation that your friends either don't know you very well or that they are more desperate than you are to see you paired off. I wonder what awaits me this time round...