How dogs NA are the key to my dating success

Lucy Cavendish was struggling to meet new men in the countryside so she got on a train to London with her dogs)

IT STARTED with a yearning to move back to London after nearly three decades living in the countryside. Mainly because living in the countryside when you are single is not for the faint-hearted. I now feel I have been away from a city for so long that I’ve grown roots into the earth and that all my city-living friends are having fabulous, interesting, connected lives and I am not. This worries me.

Also, the countryside is a bit of a closed shop — it’s full of couples and it’s a very clubbable place and I am not a very clubbable person. It’s particularly difficult over Christmas as everyone gets invited to wonderful Christmas parties — the ones you see in John Lewis adverts — and I never get invited as I am not coupled up. I got divorced more than a year ago and have gone on plenty of dates in the countryside but I’ve reached the point at which I need to expand my circle. I tried apps but met nobody I really fancied. After all, it’s not easy dating in your 50s. It seems particularly difficult when you are dating in the countryside.

I moved to Oxfordshire and then Buckinghamshire when my eldest son was four — he is now 26. We were living in Camden and then moved with his father to Manhattan but after we broke up I came home, back to where I grew up, and somehow I stayed there. But recently the yearnings to return to the capital were starting to keep me up at night. So I have taken to coming up to town a lot more just to feel part of something bigger and more vibrant. And, primarily, to meet new men.