Paul Colston is a journalist specialing in Russian and Eastern Europe and is director of the Rossia Consultants Ltd consultancy in London.

Twenty-four women in just over an hour!…That is what one of my friends boasted to me recently. I was in momentary shock (and a state of considerable envy, too). This particular friend is not known for his Don Juan prowess and is certainly more Thomas Graveson (the hard-tackling, bald Everton midfielder) than Tom Cruise when it comes to physical appearance.

Luckily the world had not gone mad, but rather my friend, let’s call him Tom, had gone on a speed-dating evening where he had met 24 young ladies.
“You get three minutes to chat to each date and then move on,” he explained.

It seemed to work for him. His feedback of seven positives was considerably up on his usual strike rate of 0 from 1 on the blind date trail.

While this speed dating experience may represent one extreme, it got me thinking of some guys I met on a plane in Ukraine earlier this year when the spring sap was rising. If Tom was in the FMCG end of the market, in the ‘speed dating’ section, their experience harked back more to Brezhnevite ‘zastoi’, or long-distance ‘snail dating’. Travelling to Ukraine to meet a girl known only through two translated emails seemed to me, at least, to be an activity more akin to extreme sport than the dating game.

Let me explain: While making an internal flight connection at Borispol airport in Kiev, I had come across two Englishman who were having great difficulty making themselves understood. “We’re going to a place which I can’t pronounce but which is a hell of a score at scrabble,” said the 35-year-old ‘Dave’ in a broad Teeside accent. He confessed he’d never heard of Dnepropetrovsk before and had great difficulty in booking a return air ticket at the Middlesbrough branch of Thomas Cook.

Internal flight transfer in Borispol, at least for those arriving from the UK, does not mean getting off one plane and taking a few steps onto a moving escalator walkway which seamlessly transports you to your satellite waiting room for the onward connection; no it means getting your baggage when it emerges from a rather dodgy-looking dark hole in the wall and hauling your case(s) through the slow-moving queues of customs and passport control. ‘Guilty until proven innocent’ would be a good corporate slogan methinks for Ukrainian customs and passport officers. Then, you go out into the street, past a few shabby stalls selling all the same selection of stuff (beer, chewing gum, cola, crisps, vodka, shoelaces(!) and up some concrete steps that would fail the disability access test in most countries, before entering a very different terminal that serves the internal air traffic with Dnepropetrovsk and Donetsk. No TV screens, no flight announcements. Unless you are prepared to join the scrum in badgering the surly staff, you will surely not get out of that terminal at all.

By this time, I had used my Russian to change money for the two amorous adventurers and bought a few items (you never know when your shoelaces might break!) and discovered that they had both come out courtesy of a Ukrainian introductions agency, to meet up with two lucky local beauties.

The agency, it seemed to me, was on to a winner, charging for membership, then for each separate email to be translated. Accommodation was also the province of the agency, where flats had been booked that included a ‘live-in’ interpreter for the duration.

As we sat in the dark as our flight progressed to the Eastern industrial heartland, Dave, a bus driver from Middlesbrough, confided that he had been married three times and rolled up his sleeve to show several deep lacerations on his right arm. Whether his interpreter was fluent in broad Teeside I don’t know, but I had an inkling that this Eastern encounter was unlikely to rival Tom’s for its speed of success.

While the British may yield to the Italians and French in the romance stakes, no one could doubt these fellows’ grit and determination. Dave’s travelling partner had clocked up three relationships in Minsk (all failed, but so what) and was in serious contention for the Belavia air miles champion of 2003!

So, I guess the mathematician would cast his vote in favour of the speed dating method, playing the percentages, so to say.

I, however, would cast my lot in with the lads from Teeside. The Ukrainian beauty that met Dave at Dnepropetrovsk looked fantastic (although it transpired later she had been rather economical with the truth – she was not a teacher or single as per profile, but rather a night club dancer with three children).
I saw Dave on the return flight. He was a shadow of his former self and his £200 spending money had disappeared on the first night out. He returned home philosophical, but willing to try his luck in the dating game again. Having seen the face of Ukrainian beauty, he was unlikely, I felt, to settle for your standard lass from the ICI factory floor.

Travelling East in pursuit of romance may not produce either speedy results or be the best organised trip on offer, however, Dave would never be lost for a story in his local pub, I can guarantee! He might even be swapping his pork scratchings for salo pork fat.
I would urge anyone intending on setting out on an Eastern romantic adventure to thoroughly check out the agency they are dealing with and to watch all the extra expenditures. Learning a little bit of Russian can also help you go a long way, more smoothly. And before any of you Ukrainian nationalists mail me to give me stick over the first state language being Ukrainian, I have a short comment on that, too. The air hostess on Ukraine International Airlines who made the flight announcements as we left the UK spoke first in English and then in Ukrainian. She promptly then put the microphone down and turned to her colleague and lapsed into her natural language – Russian!

Paul Colston