"PEOPLE with an eye for such matters say she’s a bit like Brigitte Bardot,” volunteered my pal Brian, as he drew on the cunning of a stoat to persuade me to join him and his girlfriend in a foursome.

We were sitting cross-legged, like suburban Buddhas, on the floor of my bedroom, listening to a poet sing songs of suicide on the old Dansette gramophone.

But my instincts goosepimpled at Brian’s words. I sensed my more venturesome big-toe inching towards the jaws of a steel-trap. His forthcoming date with a beautiful girl hung on the gossamer thread of me being willing to offer my arm to her friend, whom he had seen, but I had not.

Yes, you could say that I was green to the ways of the world, but I wasn’t a complete chump, though some recalled my visit to a junkyard, where, in a darkened corner, there sat a forlorn three-wheeler car with a price tag hanging from the windscreen, saying, “Fourpence or nearest offer”.

I had threepence in my pocket and sealed the deal on the spot with a firm handshake. It was then he told me that the charge for towing the car to my home would be 10 bob (50p). To this dealer, an engine was an extra.

Anyway, I was sitting opposite the smiling Brian, as the singing poet on the gramophone made reference to a cold razor-blade in one of his breezier numbers.

“In what way is she a bit like Brigitte Bardot?” I asked. “Could it be the tilt of her nose, the texture of her skin, the curve of her hips, the flow of her blonde hair, her fortune?”

Silence filled the air, during which you could have imagined a keen garden-worm drilling his way to Australia, while stopping periodically for crumpets and to consult the map.

Then a muffled splutter broke from Brian, as he turned his gaze to the window, evidently in considerable discomfort, before recovering sufficiently to say: “She has a French O-level”.

By jove, I thought, so have I – we’re only a whisker away from Antony and Cleopatra.

In those days, blind dates were very much in vogue because many of the girls wanted to take a female friend along for security and so she would have someone to compare notes with in the ladies, which seemed to be their chosen habitat. This meant that the boy would be required to bring his male friend for balance.

It was at about this time in the social history of Britain that the expression, “I don’t like yours”, came into vogue, almost certainly used by both sexes.

Brian and I walked down the road to the place of our assignation. Suddenly there was a commotion, and two figures emerged from under a shop’s awning.

“Je suis votre fille,” said one, stepping into my path, hand held out. I was caught unawares and temporarily lost my sense of bearing.

“Je suis, I am a pot of jam,” I replied, remembering the rhyme used by some emotionally retarded teacher to introduce English children to the joys of French verbs.

“Tu es, thou art a fool,” said the girl, showing that she, too, remembered the rhyme. With that she threw back her head to guffaw, allowing her tooth-brace to catch the sun – the resultant flash providing Birkenhead with an answer to the Damascus Road. In convulsions of mirth, she stamped the ground outside the Flamenco coffee-bar with feet supporting legs feared on lacrosse fields across the North West.

As you have probably gathered by now, she quickly rejected me.

There will be much talk of pairing this week, as we approach Valentine’s Day, particularly in our house, as it also happens to be my wife’s birthday. We are both romantics. But in recent times, romance and sex have become hopelessly confused in the British psyche. It is true that one often leads to the other, but that doesn’t make them the same.

There was much fun in the rituals of romantic dating – meeting in the halls of the old picture palaces, the walls adorned with portraits of the gods and goddesses of the big screen. Then there was the usherette’s torch, the popcorn and the ice cream. The insistent “sshh” from the row in front, if you were making too much noise; and waiting outside, of course, were the street lamps and those smokers’ matches struck on the walls – as you walked home to part with a kiss at the garden gate.

We have that deeper romance, too, felt when the wind moans in the hollows of the old slate quarries, or when the brooding sea foams on the shore. Raise your glasses to romance.

LISTEN to David Charters on his picture podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk