Now I’m playing an active role in trying to get people dating in order to get my superb – but single – friends off the market, I am concerned there’s no effective way to get them to actually meet one of those few, elusive catches who certainly exist out there.

There are a host of pretty mediocre options, but mediocrity never won the day and many of my friends are so accomplished in their professional lives that they’ll never settle for anything that doesn’t automatically enhance their success.

After all, the sad fact is that the old-fashioned ways of falling head-over-heels just aren’t working.

Asking any number of my single lady friends how they go about meeting a man, and they all report back that there’s nowhere ‘out’ that they’d ever go with a view to meeting a potential mate. Nightclubs are full of lobotomised berks, restaurants are full of simpering couples, and bars are full of sweaty creeps who think nothing of bodyswerving the initial rites of courtship in order to head straight for the lunge.

My impression of online dating is that if a woman is already scarred from a few bad experiences, it’s probably unlikely she’ll want to try it again.

I mean, when you’ve been cheated on, lied to, strung along, left emotionally damaged and broken hearted, the last thing you’re going to want to do is encounter two hundred men a day, all sending messages written with less dexterity than you’d expect from a family pet.

Trust me – I am reliably informed that many men on these dating sites think one of the best first impressions they can make is to send along a picture of their private parts.

Now, I’m not fully versed in modern dating as such, but getting one’s ‘chap’ out has never been one of my first plans when meeting a woman.

So, if we’re not resorting to online dating, where best to sort through the alternatives.

Arranged dating nights, be they speedy or slow, are a fine idea, but they’ve sadly become tagged with a social stigma which makes many women fear them unless they’re en masse.

Interestingly however, and delightfully so, I hosted just this week a friendship and dating night called Mates ’n’ Dates for people with learning disabilities and it was, quite simply, one of the most enjoyable events to which I’ve ever been privvy.

No social stigma, no awkwardness, just people genuinely wanting to find someone they enjoy spending time with, all blended nicely together with real romance, unbridled chivalry and a lot of unabashed joy.

Indeed, in this particular case, I wonder if those with learning difficulties aren’t the ones without any difficulty at all (certainly they could teach the rest of us a lesson or two in the politics of dating...). And before I move on, just let me thank the volunteer helpers who helped make the evening such an extraordinary success.

I was in truth beginning to wonder if the answer might simply lie in joining those groups who celebrate similar interests, such as running clubs or hillclimbing gangs. But then, Tinder came along.

It’s a newly launched app that you can get on your smartphones. It’s shameful in its simplicity and shallowness, but it seems to actually work.

All it does is show you a picture of someone from their Facebook account and you can either like them or discard them.

The more skilled users can skip through oodles of potential suitors in a matter of minutes, and the opposite sex, naturally, will be doing just the same. And if you both like one another, they connect the two of you.

It’s shockingly effective: a single ladyfriend of mine has already vetted every available man in Oxfordshire.

She seems to find, on average, a potential suitor every 30 minutes. Consequently, she’s putting out a call for more chaps to sign up and I’m doing the same to the ladies in order to put this to the test.

Problem seemingly solved then – a socially acceptable way of dating, albeit utterly based on looks, but is that such a bad thing...?

I look forward to seeing you all on Tinder.

Juicing is my very latest fancy. It’s supposed to be the best way to get your five a day, but the way I approach it, it’s my way to getting my 25 a day.

Admittedly it’s often incredibly messy, but a glass of juice and a bowl of something sweetly akin to muesli makes you feel ever so smug on the road to work. It means you can ditch the healthy lunch and perhaps even enjoy a glass of wine – I mean, life’s too short not to.

Between a good female friend and I, we have two juicers which have to be the equivalent of the Ferrari and Lamborghini of the grocery world, but since it was bought a few years ago, mine has lain dormant in the corner of a kitchen cupboard. That is until recently...

When enjoying slumber parties at hers, we have always enjoyed the morning-after juice, and I’ve since become addicted.

For instance, this morning’s (as I write) is a lemongrass, spinach, grapefruit, lime, apple, pear and cucumber concoction, which tastes incredible. You can’t mess it up. So keep a fridge full of celery, carrots and cucumbers, and a fruit bowl topped with oranges and apples. As for the other ingredients, it’s simply playtime.

I don’t use a recipe book, just a good eye for a ‘Best Before’ sticker when I’m doing my shop. That way you end up with a trolley full of goodies and that delightful feeling of spending less than a tenner on a hoard of shopping that looks like you’re planning to feed the five thousand.

But, some advice – don’t bung too much celery in: it becomes muddy.

And don’t go citrus crazy either or you’ll be buzzing all morning.

And finally, don’t use any squooshy fruit – strawberries, raspberries and bananas are all for the smoothiemakers of this world (similar, I guess to the way skiers look down on snowboarders).

But a word of caution. The one thing they never tell you in the adverts is quite how much fruit you’ll need, even for a few glasses of end product, so have a compost bin to hand.

However, I swear each time you throw away another twenty kilos of peel and pith, you’ll be buzzing on just how good that small drop of nectar tastes.