Low life | 1 January 2011

I weighed myself in India. There were scales in the hotel bathroom and I stepped up out of idle curiosity. I’d lost weight. In the three weeks since I’d met Cow Girl on a dating website, I’d lost three-quarters of a stone. I hadn’t even noticed.

Later I rang her to report a conversation I’d overheard in the hotel gym. A perspiring English banker was telling the polite gym attendant how marriages were arranged in pre-industrial Japan. After the relatives had got together and made a match, said the sweaty banker, the prospective couple met once or three times, but twice never. This was because old Japanese culture understood that if two people liked one another enough at the first meeting to want to meet again, that was that: the third meeting would be at the marriage feast.