Hannah Betts The trouble with elite dating sites

Ihave long expounded the theory that Britons require only 10 days’ worth of clothing to get them through an English summer; abbreviated to three or four for the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish.

This summer has finally confounded me. And now we are promised not only a clement autumn, but four more years of “anomalously warm” conditions. Accordingly, 2018’s expenditure can be billed not as an indulgence, but an investment.

For what a joy it has been – the shopping part, at least; the actual heat has left me cowering indoors like the vampire I am. Regardless, where the long, hot summer of 1976 yielded punk, so this year’s incarnation has brought us dresses, dresses and more dresses. (I speak for the fairer sex here, and that nice man who carries the “Jesus” sign around Victoria station.)

Zara has produced some corkers. Indeed, I’ve been frock-spotting there so doggedly that one of the assistants declared “I haven’t seen you for ages” when I took a 48-hour break. And these are not just any dresses, but, long, floaty “Mom” dresses – floral, cheerful in hue, and all-encompassing in a way less flattering than relieving.

I say “Mom,” but perhaps it should be “Mummy”, since I have found that these garments exert a peculiarly rousing effect on middleclass chaps in their 30s and 40s, whose mothers sported little else in the Seventies and Eighties. My boyfriend behaves strangely whenever I don one, following me about like a child, saying things like: “You’re a nice girl.” He reserves a similar passion for cardigans.

When I was resplendent in one heinously unbecoming number, a male colleague, whose behaviour had been routinely austere, informed me that I had never looked more beautiful. Women should take heed: real devotion is secured not by the come hither, but the “come to Mummy”.