Instead I carried on with my project, my strategy for finding Mr Right. I had already feng shui-ed my flat; now it was time to get serious. I was ready for 'Phase I': blind dating. I thought hard about the mantra I would cite daily, playing with combinations of words. Finally, my new mantra for meeting Mr Right wrote itself: I am daring and dynamic, deadly and desirable. I launched Phase I at school. I strolled confidently into the staff room with a sense of hope. Surely some of my colleagues would have eligible brothers, uncles, exhusbands or sons who were open to a date with me, the newly crowned Ms Deadly and Desirable. Most of my own staff in the history department were middle-aged, married men with unattractive beards and bellies. There was nothing about them that suggested they would be at all helpful in my new quest, but as Peta had pointed out, teachers from other departments were bound to have single friends – connections to get me into 'The Club'. Conscious that some of the older staff members considered me a floozy simply because I was single, and that others probably thought I was a lesbian, because they'd never known me to have a relationship with a man, I was cautious about who I approached.
