Netting the wrong sort of lover

Barney didn't make friends easily. His job held him back. Being a cartoonist is a lonely business anyway; being the cartoonist on Tarpaulin Manufacturers Monthly was somehow lonelier still.

As Barney half-heartedly sketched his action strip, Cover Girl, detailing the latest adventures of heroine Tara Palmer-Tarpaulin, his mind would often drift off. One minute he would be sitting at the drawing board in his poky flat, the next he would be back on the sands at Scarborough.

It was a magical school trip. He could still see the glow of the moonlight on his white body as he went skinny dipping with Julie. She was Head Girl. He was head over heels. He was also head of art.

Perhaps the relationship was doomed from the start. It certainly was when Miss Troughton spotted them. His teaching career imploded in the same instant.

So the art master became a cartoonist. And he had made a pretty fair fist of it, too, winning the graphic artist award at the Tarpaulin And Canvas Goods People of the Year dinner. A particularly dramatic representation of a pond lining at sunset had swung it for him.

But that was his last night out, all of six months ago.

He sighed, then inked in the last frame of that issue's Cover Girl: a triumphant Tara had trussed up the evil Slasher Smith in a lorry side curtain, proclaiming: "I hope that's 'taut' you a lesson, Slasher!" The job done, Barney set off to find his social salvation.

The computer he bought with his new storecard (APR 62.4%) came with all the kit. A few hours later, it was sitting proudly on the wipe-clean Formica top of his kitchen table.

As soon as the modem was connected he clicked on the Internet icon and was hurled for the first time into cyberspace. He had planned his next move for months. After spending an enjoyable half hour at the Carol Vorderman virtual reality gallery (he lingered particularly over a picture of her rampant with power drill), he entered a cyber chat room.

It was just as easy as Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan had made it look in the film. Soon he was conversing with George from Montana and Suzy from Hong Kong.

This was the way to meet people! No blushes. No stammering. No mayonnaise stain on your fly which you only notice after four hours trying to impress the launderette woman.

Soon he realised he needn't even be Barney in Tarpaulin. He became Mitch the Mechanic. Over the weeks he developed a particular attachment for Gina, the six foot water ski instructor from Tenerife.

"Dear Gina," he wrote, in his tenth e-mail to her of the afternoon. "You asked me to describe myself. Well..." He paused, looking down at his pale, puny frame. "...I am 6ft 2ins tall, broad, and muscular from all that lifting of engine parts. Sometimes I get oil smeared over my six-pack stomach, but I don't always notice because of my tan."

Barney scratched his bald patch with the mouse. "My luxurious, shoulder length, dark brown" - he stopped, and deleted the last two words - "coal-black hair is hard to control, and my dark stubble is constantly thrusting its way on to my jaw."

An hour later and his computer was telling him: you've got mail. Eagerly he opened the virtual envelope.

"Hi, Babes." It was Gina! "Wow, you sound a proper Heathcliff. Just the sort of man a Caprice double like me would look good nuzzling up to.

"And guess what - I'm in England next week. Let's meet at that Groucho Club you told me about."

When they did meet, at a Little Chef off the A19, Gina turned out to be Margaret, a 55-year-old clerk at an Oldham brickworks. They stared at one another in silence. Barney dropped a dollop of mayonnaise on to his trousers. Back, he thought, to the drawing board.

01/03/99

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