Don’t think for a minute your new potential love interest isn’t comparing you to your predecessors. There’s every chance she will ponder all her lovers past and present, and maybe put them all into a little imaginary competition with group stages to work out who is, in her opinion, the strongest out of all of them. Maybe she holds a little draw in her head too, some posh gathering in Monaco – these things always seem to be in Monaco – and all us guys, past and present, get seeded and put into two groups of four.

All you can do as a man in that situation, if you’re not going to win such a contest, is ensure you’ve done enough not to come bottom of that group. Such imaginary contests are probably not weighted in favour of the likes of me, voracious reader, non-driver, recovering rhinoplasty addict. If like me, you plough your own furrow, the best you can probably hope for in this imaginary competition would be to score higher than expected on all criteria, to make up for your alpha-male, pint swilling deficiencies and scrape through the group stages.

If you can do that, then it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that you might make it into the knock out phase. Being the joker in the pack in those final stages might made her take notice of what you bring to the table and for a moment they might forget all the things missing in your armoury.