IWAS up early this morning to allow myself time to spend ages getting ready to meet Matt. He was the lovely, helpful man who answered my mobile phone which I had left on a train and promised to deliver it safely back to me outside a baguette stall on Victoria station.

Matt said he had be on the 8.18, so I plenty of time to shower and rummage through my wardrobe looking for something to make me look stunning and not like the sort of hopeless, absent-minded, untogether person who regularly leaves her belongings on trains.

The description I had of Matt, in order to ensure recognition at the baguette stall, was "tall and blond and brandishing mobile phone".

Enough, together with his generally helpful and friendly attitude, to allow me to fall in love with him. Not enough to stop we wondering whether every vaguely tall and mousey man on the train might be him.

Ihad a moment of panic when a blond athletic man from Hassocks sprang on to the train, smiled and proceeded to make mobile phone calls for the rest of the journey. I was not sitting close enough to hear the content of his calls or to discover whether my sneaking suspicion that he was the said Matt and was running up an enormous bill at my expense was correct or totally unfounded.

But he left the train and headed briskly for the Tube without so much as a second glance at the baguette stall.

However, I would have been willing to forgive him a large phone bill in order to strike up meaningful conversation and avoid being forever in debt to a man answering Matt's description who is devouring bacon sandwich outside the baguette stall.

In imaginary fleshing out of Matt's description as "tall and blond and brandishing a mobile phone", I had turned him into a cross between Robert Redford and Roger Black.

Although tall and blond would have been a factually accurate description of the bacon sandwich eater, tall and balding and verging on obese would have better summed up the picture of the man I now saw in front of me.

Itried to mask my disappointment as I approached him with a half smile and said: "You must be Matt".

"Pleased to meet you," said baldy, "but actually I'm Tom. Do you come here often?"

Icouldn't believe that I was about to get into conversation with a tall, blond, balding, paunchy man for no reason at all when a baguette stall woman chipped in: "If you're waiting for Matt, he's not coming."

"Do you know why not?"

"Something about a great party last night, I think," she said, obviously believing Matt was my partner and that he had really gone and done it this time.

"Drank too much or something and decided to stay up in London."

"Oh!" was all I could think of in response. After all Matt was entitled to do what he wanted and it wasn't his fault he'd been lumbered with my phone. I could call him later to arrange another meeting but, all the same, I must have looked disappointed because Tom decided to cheer me up.

"Never mind," he said "He's not worth it. Let me buy you a coffee."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.