‘Next thing he’s sending you photographs of his shlong’ | Hilary Fannin

‘It’s a dick-fest,” she said lightly as she dyed my eyelashes with a kit she had bought in the pharmacy.

“Your first encounter, your introduction, is pretty harmless. You know, ‘Hi, how are you?’ kind of thing, ‘I saw your pictures’, whatever. And next minute he’s sending you photographs of his shlong.”

“Really?” I asked. “That fast?”

I was lying in her garden, head back on a vaguely mouldy, low-slung deckchair, pads of damp cotton wool clamping my eyes shut, sooty black dye seeping into my cilia, while she, a friend of mine in her mid-20s, told me about her experience on the dating app Tinder.

Tinder has been the subject of a ripple-in-a-teacup type of controversy recently, with the site defending its reputation against a witty Vanity Fair article that painted New York as a city awash with Tinder Kings and Tinderellas engaging in the kind of behaviours more usually associated with bunny rabbits.

Personally, although I wasn’t labouring under the illusion that Tinder was something used to start a fire (other than in the most metaphorical of ways) or that the website was for swapping your favourite tagine recipes or tips on cultivating your ragged hibiscus, I had assumed it was mainly for young thangs. “It’s nothing to do with age,” my friend told me. “It’s to do with whether you’re single or not.”

According to estimates, about 50 million people use Tinder every month, swiping through about 1.6 billion profiles and making an average of 12 million matches a day. (Someone should harness the power of all those swiping digits to bump up the national grid – who needs wind farms when you have all that flying genitalia coursing through the stratosphere?) But for those of you who’ve been too busy trying to find your glasses or cleaning the goldfish bowl to keep up to speed with the vagaries of online romance, and for whom the aforementioned statistics are entirely meaningless, allow me to elucidate.

Tinder, more or less, consists of photographs of endless potential matches who are, depending on which side of the debate you fall, either looking for love, romance and companionship (with maybe a little bit of sex thrown in) or simply for sexual hook-ups, with the potential to have myriad partners whom you can add to your scoresheet and then try very hard to forget, remember, regret, or indeed cover in butter-cream icing while wearing your reinforced Marigold rubber gloves.

Swiped off your feet

“Tinder is about what you see. If you like the look of someone, you swipe to the right; if you don’t, you swipe to the left,” she explained.

At this point, an online conversation may ensue, which could, should you both wish, lead to a meeting. Were we all living in an Audrey Hepburn movie, this might involve a scintillating chat over a bottle of Chianti before you delicately unravelled your headscarf. Hell, even an assignation under Clery's clock, followed by a knickerbocker glory in Macari's, would hold a certain frisson of intrigue and unpredictability. Presumably Tinder dates, efficient and expedient as they may be, are equally fascinating in their own way.

“What kind of things do people say about themselves before they decide to meet?” I asked my eyelash-dyeing friend from under my sticky lids. “Help, I love picnics? Can’t bear line dancing? Enjoy a spot of decoupage?”

"No," she responded wearily. "Nobody says that. If you want to picnic in the hills and share your art-and-craft basket, try a small ad in the back of Sock Knitters' Monthly.

“In my day,” I told my young friend, causing her to sigh long and volubly, “we just thumbed through the phone book, trying to remember the name of that bloke with the grandad shirt we met in a smoky bar the night before after far too much Dubonnet and red lemonade.”

“Fascinating,” she replied.

As my friend began to wash the superfluous dye from my eyes, I asked her: “Do all the chaps you meet online send you pictures of their genitals?”

“Not all,” she said. “Sometimes it’s classier not to. Okay, you’re cooked.”

She left me on my deckchair to go and get ready for a date with a balding vet.

I put the cotton wool in the bin and let myself out. I wandered home with my blackened lashes, hurrying a little to put the washing out in the unexpected burst of sunshine.