I advise 400,000 women on how to date - this is their most common mistake

How can anyone make a considered decision about Daisy from Putney when Julia from Richmond is a thumb-twitch away? And somewhere behind Julia, surely, is someone even better. After years of swiping, the patient zero of our interminable romantic misery, the apps, are finally in their death rattle. If they achieved one thing, it's uniting the world against them.

With the apps came dating insanity. I've had my fair share. One match popped up with a gallery of elegant, charismatic photos and a profile Jane Austen could have written. She turned out not to be in her late thirties, as the beautiful prose suggested, but in her mid to late seventies. How did she get away with it? Simple. She'd used her daughter's photos because, in her words, "I get more matches that way."

Can't argue with that. Over the froth of my seemingly never-ending cappuccino, I asked: "But... does it work?" "Oh yes," she said. "I've had loads of fun with younger men." To be fair to her, the sex was fantastic. And she wasn't even the strangest. There was the beautiful woman who took me back to her Surrey mansion, where her husband was waiting in the hallway, in a leather armchair, naked from the waist down.