My mother always hoped I'd apply for a job at Copperas Hill post office. In November 1990 she was especially enthusiastic about it because things had been hotting up between Saddam Hussein and the Kuwaitis and a war at Christmas is always great news for postal delivery services. She was convinced that, if I played my cards right, I could make assistant manager one day.

Naturally, every other Thursday for the past eleven years -- copy deadline day for London Review of Books personals advertisers -- I've wondered where I might be now had I bothered filling in that application form. Not working at Copperas Hill post office, that's for sure; they had wild-cat strikes and massive layoffs towards the end of the nineties. But as my life meandered away from fighting the home-front against Saddam, only a wizard could have anticipated that I'd spend the most fruitful years of my life agonising over word-counts with soup-perverts:
I put the phrase 'five-header bi-sexual orgy' in this ad to increase my Google hits. Really I'm looking for someone who likes hearty soups and jigsaws of kittens. Woman, 62. Berwick. Box no. 7862.

Of course, I would never have become the angst-devouring loveconduit through which Britain's most romantically awkward eggheads play out their weird and frequently disturbing sex rituals. Life would be much duller, although I'd have fewer bad dreams and wouldn't have to shower quite so often.
An ancient Czech legend says that any usurper who places the Crown of Saint Wenceslas on his head is doomed to die within a year. During World War II, Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi governor of the puppet Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, secretly wore the crown believing himself to be a great king. He was assassinated less than a year later by the Czech resistance. I have many more stories like this one. I will tell you them all and we will make love. Man, 47. Box no. 6889.

Since the LRB personals began in October 1998, I've dealt with the phone calls, emails, letters, faxes and -- always less welcome -- occasional personal visits from within a very incongruous set-up. While the offices of the magazine have remained very firmly in Bloomsbury, London, the nerve-centre of the personals section was, for the most part, a water-logged shed in Liverpool. Really it was the back of an illegally built garage, but we'll call it a shed because no motor vehicle ever went in there and its main function was the storage of rusted Woolworth's power tools, an assortment of lawn-patching compounds and my (now deceased) mother's oxygen cylinders (she had dodgy lungs and we kept these in case we ever needed to re-inflate her).

When it rained, the un-insulated corrugated roof made it sound like a clown was firing a machine-gun at a sad robot. There was a power supply that was so precarious I once got an electric shock eating a trifle. And in the corner lived a nest of badgers. Before that the personals were managed from a flat above a bankrupt florist south of the Thames. Recently it's been in a Brooklyn office shared with a very serious publishing outfit who never reciprocate a round of drinks, hardly ever say hello and rarely smile unless someone has made a very hilarious remark about Adorno. Which happened only once and it wasn't very hilarious.

When someone asks my advice about what to include or exclude in their personal advert, these have been the common conditions under which I've responded -- noise, damp, Adorno, badgers. Truthfully, had I worked in surroundings befitting a Zurich-based insurance company, I couldn't have offered any better advice. I was once asked by the Jewish Community Centre for London to be part of a panel discussion about dating. I'm not Jewish, which surprised everyone, but also I know absolutely nothing about dating. Those early phone calls I received from potential advertisers, full of typical British insecurity and selfdeprecation -- people worried that all they could say about themselves was that they had exceptional liver function and knew from years of looking after their aging parents how to keep a glass eye sterile -- seemed good enough to me. I mean, I liked these people. They were fun to talk to; painfully honest but also engaging, witty and clever. Why not just throw it all out there? At the time I'd been working at the magazine for less than a year, and working in advertising for just a little longer. Not at the rock 'n' roll creative end of things, but in sales -- selling space in car magazines before I moved to the London Review. People asked my advice as if I knew what I was talking about -- as if, rather than working in ad sales, I was a relationship counsellor. It didn't matter when I'd explain I was just a very junior sales guy, these people innocently trusted me and every inquiry would end with 'What do you think?' or 'Do I sound like an idiot?' or 'I'm not sure I should make it read like I'm a serial killer':
Everyone. My life is a mind-numbing cesspit of despair and selfloathing. Just fuck off. Or else write back and we'll make love. Gentleman, 37. Box no. 5369.

All I could ever tell anyone was 'it's great, just do it'. Partly out of my own English awkwardness, partly out of a fear of not making the sale back when my targets were impossible and I had no clients, but mostly out of sincerely getting a kick from what they'd written. This wasn't how other lonely hearts columns operated.

On a flight from Glasgow about a year after the column began, where I'd been on a BBC daytime show about lonely hearts with a rogue's gallery of dating experts, advice columnists and women's magazine psychologists, I gave a copy of the LRB ads to a woman who ran an agency that produced the personals sections of many broadsheet newspapers. Other publications tend to contract out their personals sections to specialist dating firms rather than ad sales companies. Usually people phone a premium-rate number and they're asked pseudo-psychoanalytic questions such as 'With which historical figure do you most identify?' or, 'If you were part of a celebrity coupling, who would be your ideal partner?' The answers are then translated into a personal ad. In occasional attempts to be more professional I've tried this approach on LRB advertisers, but with less than encouraging results:
I am more like Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich of Russia than anyone else who has ever advertised here. Man, 54. Box no. 5349. You're Helen Mirren. I'm Will Self. One half of this century's übercouple-to-be seeks tousled fems to 50 for weekends full of recondite wines, obscure blandishments, and winning references to abstruse 11th century sexual practices. No loons. Box no. 7936.

The personals sections managed by this particular agency were full of gorgeous, healthy, intelligent people. Each presented a paradigm of human excellence, albeit infused with a somewhat eerie sense of eugenic urgency. Naturally, she was appalled by the LRB ads. 'These are awful', she said, 'you can't let people say these things about themselves', and then she offered to take over running the section.

I've grown used to this kind of response, but it's still exasperating. Even if the advertisers in other columns haven't been coerced into a clumsy rhetorical liposuction of all the junk of their lives and were genuinely Nietzschean Übermenschen (notwithstanding their appearance in -- sotto voce -- a lonely hearts column), the existence of such characterless people can only be depressing for the vast majority of us jaded, cynical, out-of-syncwith-the-world types:
I hate you all. I hate London. I hate books. I hate critics. I hate this magazine, I hate this column and I hate all the goons who appear in it. But if you have large breasts, are younger than 30 and don't want to talk about the novel you're 'writing' I'll put all that aside for approximately two hours one Saturday afternoon in January. Man, 33. Box no. 7810.

Of course, there's no need to feel intimidated by the shining beauties occasionally sprinkled across small ads sections like glitter on a dog turd. Significantly, one of the most revealing and often unquoted statistics about personal ads is that the commonest complaints are to do with advertisers rarely being the way they describe themselves in their ads. Such instances of advertisers not being altogether candid -- or, more accurately, lying -- are probably the cumulative results of dating agency spin, being delusional about their sense of self or simply a fear of not being interesting enough. It's not a complaint we get at the LRB. Although we have occasionally had concerned phone calls from respondents surprised that certain adverts weren't, after all, intended ironically --
My hobbies include crying and hating men. F, 29. Box no. 8620.

I'm not convinced personal ads tell us anything about human behaviour other than that our ideas of what makes us attractive to others are based on very arbitrary assumptions. Speedos aren't a good look for anyone. Knowledge of circuit training and which protein shake is best for a post-squat-thrust warm-down isn't going to win you points in the 'great to talk to' league. In this sense, the personal ads in the London Review of Books are very liberating. Their strength comes from resoundingly rejecting those archetypal elements of attraction that press so heavily on our insecurities but that few of us actually possess. Bespectacled and melanin-deprived, the LRB personals tell us not to be ashamed; to relax a little and enjoy what's out there without feeling threatened by it. We can read them without ever having to suck in our gut:
Young, charming, thoughtful, attractive, sporty, zesty, intelligent. None of these are me, but if you'd like to spend an afternoon or more considering alt...