I recently went Cajun dancing with a couple of friends, who also happened to be single. I realised I had made a big mistake the minute I stepped inside the room and saw the dance hall dweebs who were fending off their mid-life crises by learning how to line dance.

After my initial dismay, I began warming to dancing with my single female friends. Then, as if from nowhere, the sea of unfashionably dressed men with outrageous nasal hair parted as a striking man strode over and asked me to dance.

I had always liked the idea of an older man and this one could have been nearly a decade older than me. I got an email from him a few days later asking to meet and the following evening, there he was, looking not nearly as handsome as he had done in a room of ugly men, but hey, I thought, give the guy a chance.

We sat down and did the usual life swapping stories and I was impressed by how much he had fitted in to his years. He seemed to have done an awful lot. He was also a keen Roller blader and went out with his buddies for four-hour 'rolls' most days. So a pretty interesting guy with thighs of steel. How nice.

And then, nonchalantly, just as I'd finished imagining moving into his place and getting a cat together, he dropped his birth date into the conversation and my myth about fancying older men came crashing down.

He was born in 1952 in Brooklyn. Everything after that just took on a different tone. I was seeing him afresh and began scrutinising his face, doubting his hair and teeth were his own and imagining myself being born just as he hit 20.

Were those white hairs on his chest and what was he doing out Roller blading at his age? In the space of one sentence, I had gone from a woman who appreciates the seasoned man to an ageist old boot. I got other emails from him after that inviting me Cajun dancing but I quickly deleted them, and him, from my young (ish) life. The moral of my date with the ageing roller-blader? What you like and what you think you like aren't always the same thing.

Two new surveys last week found that good-looking people tend to be happier than ugly ones and that people inordinately value physical attractiveness. The studies at Liverpool University showed that just standing next to a fat person can lower people's opinion of you. Who on earth is devising these studies?

As someone with a big nose and long flappy ears, am I less happy-go-lucky than my button-nosed counterpart? Looking at my giant nose and ears makes me laugh, which would make me a happy ugly person. So I have proved the survey wrong. Ha.