The second most dreaded holiday of the year is approaching, from a clothing perspective – skiing. Trying on ski gear is trumped only by bikinis for inducing depression. When I put on Salopettes my legs always look like 2 giant Clonakilty Puddings, particularly when compared with the ski bunny girls who wear Lycra gear so tight you could count their body hair, if they had any.

Men of course manage to look much more attractive in their ski gear. During a lesson last year I was with this tall, ski tanned bloke with black spiky hair and super cool gear. Later that night, one of guys beside me at diner started chatting away. He had balding brown hair, northern European blue skin, was average height and wearing a brown, ribbed, zip-up cardigan. I was curious why he was so familiar until he mentioned how much he enjoyed skiing with me. The Connect 4 line joined in my mind.

Turns out the black spiky hair was a “fun� ski hat (I blame snow blindness) his skin appeared tanned because of the tint in my ski goggles and the height was due to massive boots and bindings. I could have forgiven almost everything about his off slope look - except the cardigan.

I now know how guys feel when they wake up in the morning to discover the stunner they met the previous evening is more Bett Lynch than Pamela Anderson. A woman can be a crafted artifice of fake hair, nails and eyelashes combined with skillful make-up and Houdini underwear that makes parts of the body appear and disappear at will.

The same level of attractiveness can be achieved with far less effort and cost by alcohol. A girl that is a 5/10 at 9pm will be 7/10 by midnight and 9/10 at 3am, but a bloke will only increase by around 1 point irrespective of alcholol consumed by the female. Proving that women should be buying men a drink if they want to score and not the other way around!

So as long as everyone is good and drunk at the ski resort no one will care what I look like in my ski gear. I suspect it was a women that invented Apres Ski !

After a pretty successful date with ‘The Waxwork’ last week, I have started to reconsider my dinner date types. In my experience they break down into the following types:

(strongly recommend reading the comments, there are some crackers! )

Mr. Kobe Beef - well bred, exclusive and generally very bloody rare

He will probably run his own company or some multi-national. Chances are he will just have jetted in from east coast America, before running off to check his new operation in Eastern Europe. Most of your dinner date will be spent watching him check his Blackberry, while you furiously text your friends about how fabulous he is. He will of course pay for dinner ( expenses ) and you can coyly offer to ‘get it next time’ on the very off chance he is ever in the country long enough for another date.

Mr. Shepards Pie - comforting, balanced but you just don’t give a flock.

He probably has a nice pensionable job, goes out drinking once a week ( never more than 4 pints ) and phones his mother every other day. On a Tuesday he plays 5-a-side with the lads and can quote long passages from Fr Ted. A small compensation for the general lack of a sense of humour. You know exactly what you’re going to get with Mr. Shepards Pie – that’s the problem.

Mr. Abrakebabra – a bit of beef and lots of sauce, briefly satisfying but instantly regretted.

At 3am in the smoking area of Copper Face Jacks Mr Abrakebra will seem pretty appealing. He’s probably over from the UK working on the sites and lives in a bedsit somewhere in Rathmines. Most of his cash is sent back to the UK to support his 7 children by 4 different women. He fills the hole, so to speak, but you’re unlikely to go back for seconds.

We are all familiar with the concept that certain women are attracted to certain types of guys, some like blonds while others insist on tall, dark and handsome (chance would be a fine thing ). What is also true is that certain types of guys are attracted to certain women. Take my friend Lady M as an example. As the name suggests she has a natural effortless charm that always makes you feel like you are chewing straw and tying your trousers with bailing twine in comparison. In theory you should dislike her for being so pretty, smart and successful but you can’t because she’s just too nice. ( In blog terms think Annie )

Due to her general loveliness, Lady M attracts a lot of male attention. But the type of guy that she attracts is ALWAYS married. She doesn’t seek them out but they flock to her. Worshipping her in a ‘divorce the wife and pack the kids off to boarding school’ way. She is a deity in married man land.

Naturally over the years she has become very cautious in establishing that the boys she meets are indeed single, which can be challenging as there are a lot of DUD’s out there. In fact the Galway races seemed to be populated with little else, they were as common as Cryptosporidium and just as hard to get rid of. So when Lady M was chatted up late on Thursday night she was very careful to ensure the guy was single. She asked the usual questions, checked for tan lines and was satisfied that he was single. At last a decent unmarried bloke!

After the bar had closed, sometime around 6am, he invited her up to his suite for a drink. Lady M was suitably taken and decided to accept but had to do the emergency run to the bathroom for a pre-flight check. While she stood in line waiting for the girls to emerge from the cubicles like animals from the Ark, all 2 by 2, she decided to Google her new beau ( I told you she was smart ). A few GPRS packets later and there he was. A wonderful article about him, his business, plus his wife and two children, the youngest was just 4 months old.

Dejectedly she marched back upstairs and informed almost lover boy that she wouldn’t be joining him for a drink. He eventually relented on trying to convince her and instead pitched for a lunch meeting. Just as Lady M was about to refuse she stopped and said;

“I’d love to meet you for lunch tomorrow and will ‘insert name of wife here’ be joining or is it just me and you?�?, with that she turned on her heel and walked off.

To all the mobile phone companies out there, forget the snazzy ads for music and sport. Just build your pitch for mobile internet around this story. I think you might get better uptake.

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Well I was out and about last night, as you do on a Wednesday and I came across the most delightful boy; a big strapping lad, nice and chunky, just the way I like them. However his most impressive feature was his captivating brown eyes. Now they weren’t that crappy cheap Easter egg chocolate brown. No, they were deep Belgian 85% cocoa brown. Were it possible to lick them I probably would have. He couldn’t have been more attractive if were in fact covered in chocolate, but that would have totally blown my Weight Watcher points for the day.

Sadly like many things in life there was a but(t) that would rival Mary Harney’s derrière. He was American. Now I like American guys and have dated a few. In my experience they always treat women pretty well. Some of them are of course complete b*stards but at least they are bastards with manners. Chuck had impeccable manners. The only issue was the conversation. No matter how much I babbled on in my Irish twang and cultural references I couldn’t knock a smile out of him. Equally his frat stories were completely lost on me. We were separated by a common language. It was heartbreaking.

So, as the lights flashed last orders and I drained my G&T it became clear that even with his Belgian 85% cocoa brown eyes I still couldn’t f*ck Chuck. Did I make the right decision?