Alex Forrest

Too Late, Mate?

A Daygame Memoir

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 Copyright © 2019 by Alex Forrest

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distribute it by any other means without permission.

Second edition

Editing by Harry Althoff

Proofreading by Danielle Anderson
Illustration by Nate Fakes
Cover art by Rebeca Covers

This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

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 Contents

The Author
My Grateful Thanks To
Prologue
1. Dreary Sunday
2. The Scrapyard of Regrets
3. A Door Opens
4. The Bonkers Bootcamp
5. Reality Strikes Back
6. The Wing
7. Dating Oksana
8. Roberta
9. Bansko, Bulgarian Spies, & The Secret Video
10. Brave New World
11. Going Solo
12. The Ring
13. Hobbit, Essex Boys & “The Text”
14. Frame Control, Scallops & The “C” Word
15. Elusive Hotties
16. Zakopane Hell
17. The Battle of Lancaster Gate
18. My Eastern Bloc Graveyard
19. Warsaw Spring
20. Sweet Summer Fling
21. Return to Selfridges
Epilogue

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 The Author

Alex Forrest is a lawyer and writer who was born in Colchester, Essex in
1967, the son of a wealthy local businessman. He moved to London,
graduated from London University with a First Class Degree, was admitted
to The Bar in 1993 and thereafter embarked on a successful career as a
lawyer. Surprisingly, no one took the trouble to explain to him that there
were, in fact, better ways to get into bed with beautiful women…

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 My Grateful Thanks To

Danielle Anderson, Nate Fakes and Slaven Kovacevic for actually

managing to hit a rather tight deadline and to hit it rather well! And thanks
to Harry Althoff for manfully persevering through a debut book, full of all
sorts of editorial challenges.

Thanks to Ian and Tom for their wholehearted encouragement.

And of course…

Andy Yosha and Daygame.com.

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 Prologue

This true story charts my journey into the world of women and dating via
“Daygame.” Daygame is a method used to approach women in the daytime,
whether on the street, in shops or cafes.1 It could also be called “daytime
approach”, to distinguish it from the many other ways of approaching
women and getting dates.
The word “Game” is of course itself loaded and immediately arouses
associations of pick-up artists using tricks to seduce women, which they
then peddle to clueless men for a price. But whilst I certainly met some
colourful characters during my adventures, I found that most of the guys
who got into daygame simply wanted to get a handle on women and dating.
They felt disillusioned, even alienated, by the conventional wisdom in this
area. They realised there was no quick-fix but that they probably needed to
do some work on themselves. It was a rite-of-passage for them, not the end
goal.
As for me, at the time I discovered daygame I was a 46-year-old guy
who truly believed that I was at the end of the road in terms of being
successful with women. I had been a relationship virgin all my life and was
desperate for a girlfriend. Apart from a brief period of accidental success at
University (in common with many men) my dating record was parlous.
Over the years since leaving University it got worse and worse until it dried
up altogether. In the 15 years prior to writing this book, I simply had no sex
life to speak of. This was in spite of success in other areas.
 So I was really desperate. I was on the way to 50, and I had tried
everything from life coaching and counselling to meditation and group
therapy. I even ended up with a spirit medium in conversation with the
ghost of my dead step-father! I had had countless conversations with
countless friends (many married or in long-term relationships) and had
begun to feel like a real misfit. I had hit on so many women and been on so
many dates with so little success that the whole thing had started to become
almost comical (albeit a black comedy). Nothing seemed to work to fix the
problem and I eventually became convinced that nothing could change. I
was doomed. I was clearly just “not one of those guys” and never would be.
I began to identify completely with my status as a sad, sorry character. I had
“issues,” clearly, that marked me out as a loser in this area. I became
fatalistic and started to conclude that I had better just suck it up and get on
with life.
Of course, one advantage of being at a low point is that you are willing
to try anything. It may be desperation, but the willingness to try something
different is nevertheless there. So it was that I stumbled onto pick-up
artistry.
But here was a problem: as an intellectual with a good education and a
career as a professional lawyer, I was firmly part of the establishment and I
was deeply entrenched against the very idea of the pick-up community.
Whilst I was aware of books like Neil Strauss’s The Game, where guys
learned skills and tricks in order to get laid, and whilst I had of course
surfed the internet and YouTube, it all seemed way too seedy and sketchy
for me. These guys were losers, surely? Reading The Game during my
search for solutions only fortified me in this belief. The book pilloried these
guys, portraying them all as nut jobs.
 Still, as I said, I was desperate. And I had exhausted all other options.
So, rather gingerly at first, I started to dip into this world.
And so it was that I stumbled on Andy Yosha, Tom Torero and
Daygame.com. Daygame.com was a company with a strong online
presence. They taught men how to approach girls during the daytime and it
was all quite different from the night-gamers depicted by Strauss. They all
seemed surprisingly normal. Daygame.com sold the concept as a rite of
passage that men needed to go through. They explained that the ideas and
conditions prevalent in modern society prevented men from ever going
through this rite of passage. Worse, society had hoodwinked them. It was
reminiscent of the film Fight Club: guys who were into this stuff lived in an
underground world, feeling that society had let them down and that they
needed to acquire a secret knowledge that others lacked.
These guys might be colourful geeks, misfits, or eccentrics, but they
were not the pick-up artists ridiculed in the media as sketchy narcissists
who preyed on women. Most of them were regular dudes who had turned
their lives around in this area, having become frustrated with their own
terrible dating histories, and were now teaching it professionally and even
with a certain missionary zeal. Many of them were really smart and spoke
articulately and intelligently as if they were somehow part of a shadowy
dating academy. (Society would never have allowed them university-
status.) They lectured other dudes, saying that guys needed to know this
stuff and had been handicapped in life by being kept from the knowledge.
Men needed to reclaim this lost area of their manhood.
It was then that I began to realise that there was more to this whole
thing than going out and hitting on girls and getting laid. I was about to
embark on an uncomfortable ride in terms of having to swallow some
difficult truths that clashed with those socially-conditioned ideas
promulgated by society and accepted by a lot of men (and women) without
a second thought. In the process I would find many of my own, dearly-held
ideas dismantled.
As decades of fixed thinking came under attack and I took action it also
actually seemed—in terms of the challenge of my particular journey as a
guy in his late forties—that the impossible might become the possible.
I might be able to transform my life and become successful with
women. Even at my age it might not be, “too late, mate”.

1 The “London Daygame Model,” as it is called, is the technique that I was taught.

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 1

Dreary Sunday

My story begins one Sunday afternoon in January 2014. I was sitting in my

gloomy office on Southwark Street staring out of the window at a couple of
pigeons pecking at the grey pavement, twiddling my mobile phone in my
fingers. Should I call?
I had been battling with the pain of my latest “girl problem” by burying
myself in my work, without success…

Gotia was a pretty, petite Polish girl, and I had been trying to date her for
the best part of 18 months. I was on to Date 10 (at least!) In all that time I
had not even kissed her, let alone had sex with her. I had of course bought
her gifts, taken her to the theatre, and bought her dinner. And strangely, in
spite of all these excellent gestures of interest and commitment, she had not
reciprocated with physical affection. And even more strangely, it felt that
with each passing date it was becoming less and less likely that she
would…
It had all seemed so perfect, and I could not understand why we weren’t
planning our honeymoon, or even choosing the curtains and picking out
wallpaper for the kids’ room by now.
 I had met Gotia at The Swan Pub on Blackfriars Road where she
worked as a bargirl. My office at the time was next door. Over a period of
visits, I had managed to get her number and made one or two (what seemed
to me) bold moves in order to inspire her interest. On one occasion I
remember spontaneously jumping in my car and going round to the pub,
illegally pulling up on double yellow lines and walking in, planning to
make some bold declaration of interest. She wasn’t at the bar. I asked her
manager where she was. The manager smiled and led me downstairs where
Gotia was on her break eating dinner. I actually sat down next to her, behind
the bar so to speak, and had a conversation. And then I left without making
any sort of move.
On another occasion I was in The Swan and came round to her side of
the bar in order to show her some photos on my phone and our fingers
touched. Wow! It was electric.
Eventually I got her out on a date and tried to impress her by taking her
to see an intellectual play at a theatre in Islington about Galileo. I had a
nose-bleed during the play and she had to grab some tissues from her
handbag. If my recollection serves me right, I think I may even have paid
for a box.
After the play I took her to a Lebanese bar and we sat together on a
sofa-chair. The mood was perfect. It was a Byzantine scene. There were
candles and wall friezes and funky furniture, and we were sat side by side,
with the lighting low. And then I froze.
In this context, “freezing” actually meant doing a lot of nervous talking
and asking her a lot of questions. There she was, this lovely girl, sat next to
me, presumably wanting me to do something - anything - but also possessed
with the patience of a saint. I floundered. I felt that something ought to be
done, that action should be taken, but I was in a deep fog about what that
might look like. I had watched hundreds of romantic comedies, and so I
assumed that perhaps just eventually the mood would be right, it would
“just happen,” and that perhaps there would be a romantic moment at the
end of the date at the bus stop, outside her flat, or under a lamp-post.
Eventually the conversation dribbled out and I said, “So, shall we go?”
Fifteen minutes later I was continuing to flounder at the Islington Tube
entrance, even more puzzled, wondering how on earth I did this.
Should I just kiss her?
By now it felt we had spent so much time together this was just a
massive step and would just be weird, coming out of nowhere.
Perhaps I should invite myself back to her place? Or perhaps I should
invite her back to my place?
And then I thought to myself, Good god, no. That’s way too forward.
In truth, I did not know what to do. The years of doing the wrong thing
over and over had formed a bad habit that I simply did not know how to
break. Shards of old advice from across the years lodged themselves in my
mind:
“Tell her how you feel.”
“Be yourself.”
“Set a romantic mood.”
“Get drunk.”
As I saw her disappear into Islington Station, I kidded myself that the
lack of physical intimacy with Gotia was a good thing, and that in fact we
were building a firm friendship, the basis of any successful long-term
relationship.
 And yet there was this terrible, corrosive disappointment buried deep in
my bones.
I simply had no idea how to “do it,” whatever “it” was. I had no idea
how to bridge the gap from friendly companionship to sexual intimacy.
Although there might have been an element of self-sabotage, a big part of it
was that I had no idea what I was doing. Men labour under the expectation
that this stuff comes at birth, and they find the suggestion that it needs to be
learned and can be taught anathema. A leopard is born with spots and a man
is born with an instinctive understanding of how to mate with women,
right!?2 Gotia felt like the sort of girl who would be perfect as a long-term
girlfriend. She was both attractive but also honest and direct, like a lot of
Polish girls, and she was good company. She was independent and self-
reliant, but also sweet and interesting. She also had a little of the “tomboy”
about her, and this was endearing and felt congruent with my nature. It
really did feel as if we would be a perfect match.
Furthermore, she had every reason to be attracted to me from the get-go.
I had great social proof: I was a lawyer, earning a reasonable income, living
in a nice apartment in London Bridge, and I had a wide social circle and
plenty of outside interests and hobbies. I remember on one occasion I took
her to a friend’s film premiere at Waterside in Hammersmith. A ton of my
friends were there, and she mingled and chatted with people. She must have
thought I was a properly respectable dude and perfect boyfriend material.
After all, she was just a poor, sweet Polish girl who would die for the
chance to bag a well-spoken British lawyer… right?
We went on another date, this time a bus ride to a fancy, funky market:
East Street Market in Bethnal Green—Hipster Land. We rode on the top
deck on a Sunday morning and sat in an old, trendy, exposed-brickwork
antiques shop and café and we chitchatted.
Afterwards I bought her a Chinese meal. We sat across the table from
each other. It was close to the entrance to London Bridge Tube, and so
naturally I led her once more to the station entrance, flapped around a bit,
and said goodbye.
And then we went for a walk together in Greenwich, where she was
now living…
And then we went salsa dancing together…
And then the dates became more sporadic…
And then she got a job with a small venture capital company in
Shoreditch, doing translation work…
And then we met for lunch in the city, Moorgate, and she told me about
her new boyfriend…
And then she started a new, exciting job in human resources for
HSBC…
And then she came to my office to ask for advice on an employment
contract…
And then she started to confide to me about problems with her ex-
boyfriend…
And in all that time I had not “made a move.” It was over two years. By
now I was sending her messages at Christmas and on her birthday (on
Facebook) still assuming that eventually it would all fall into place.
It was on her birthday, in fact, that I finally decided it was time for a Big
Romantic Gesture and I simply had to man up and lay my cards on the
table.
 I arranged for a present to be sent round to her office at HSBC at
Canary Wharf. I threw in flowers. I took care in giving a very precise
message to the florist, along the lines of my undying affection for her and
ever-lasting friendship and how I really liked her:

Dear Gotia,
It has been great knowing you these two years and I wish you all the
happiness on your birthday. You will always have a good friend in me.

I hesitated…
“And I really like you,” I added.
I thought twice about scribbling that out. But then I thought I would
have to go and buy another card. Or could I draw a line through it, maybe?
I hesitated once more…
No, that would look needy, I concluded, decisively.
Having checked that the florist had the correct address, I then rang
HSBC and checked with them that Gotia worked there. That proved tricky,
and then I thought that perhaps I was overdoing it, so I rang back the florist
to make sure they had her full name and that it was all spelled correctly, and
then that was that.
I waited.
It was a Thursday afternoon.
She did not respond. Strange. Perhaps the florist had not delivered it to
the correct address? I had paid for same-day delivery and I had used that
florist before, so it could not be their fault. So I texted Gotia to make sure
she had received it. She had. She replied with a brief thank-you.
 I heard nothing more. Where had been my response to the Big Romantic
Gesture? Now here I was, on that dreary Sunday afternoon in January,
buried in my work at the office, trying to ignore it all. But I was twiddling
my phone in my hands. I looked at it. I decided that I had to tell her how I
felt. This was it! This would be the coup de grâce …
I dialled. It went through to voicemail. I left my message: “Gotia, hi. It’s
Alex. Will you be my girlfriend?”
I hung up. I put the phone down and went back to work. And then after
a few moments the phone vibrated! Yes!
I jumped up in my excitement and quickly inspected the message. It
read:
“Alex, I think we need to talk.”

My shoulders slumped and I put my head in my hands. It was a long time

before I eventually roused myself. I tried to get back to work but couldn’t
muster the energy even for that. I wandered aimlessly over to the window
and stared out at the pigeons again.

2 The problem is, of course, that this innate skill seems to have been lost.

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 2

The Scrapyard of Regrets

My childhood involved a broken marriage (the norm rather than the

exception these days), and I found myself with a surrogate father: my
alcoholic stepfather, Copper, who died of an epileptic fit when I was 8, after
he decided to try and quit the drink, and it—and life—rather dramatically
quitted him. I loved Copper, even though his drunken outbursts got violent
at times (furniture, not human beings). The night before he died we played
football in the garden, and it’s still a very happy memory. Copper had
passion. He was a redheaded Scot with daft, ‘60s sideburns.
I remember coming back from school the next day and my mum
appearing at the top of the stairs and telling me, in her calm and detached
way, “Copper’s gone.” That was it. I guess she went and made me my tea
and she carried on as if nothing had happened. Then I recall a funeral at
West Mersea Church and people in black, and then I was sent off to
preparatory boarding school.
Whilst pretty brutal at first simply because of the emotional wrench, this
actually turned out to be great fun because I spent a lot of time with other
kids at weekends, larking about, the whole school grounds and facilities at
my disposal.
 I then went off to public school—Haileybury College in Hertfordshire.
By now I was age 13, and the first few years were fun. I played the cheeky,
likeable, witty kid of whom other guys were protective. No, not
homosexually—although I was a cute kid, believe it or not, with blonde hair
and blue eyes.3 Still, it was not entirely orthodox and would raise eyebrows
these days.
I might have created my fun, cheeky persona in part because, having
arrived a term late at Haileybury, I was the new kid on the block and needed
to adapt quickly to fit in. Our dormitory was a long room with 50 beds, 25
down either side, and each bed was separated by a waist-high wooden
partition so there was not much in the way of privacy. “Postings” were
frequent, in which other kids would come up to you at night and lift your
bed into a vertical position… with you in it, obviously. My point is that I
became a cheeky chap in order to curry favour, which worked. I was liked
and I survived.
Haileybury had at that point started to take girls, but, bizarrely, only in
drip-feed fashion: there were girls in the sixth form, aged 16–18, but no
girls from 12–16. So you had a situation in which there was a public
boarding school full of 600 randy boys and 50 girls. There were about ten
boys’ houses and one girls’ house. Consequently, girls fell into one of two
categories in our imaginations. They were either Goddesses or, as we
endearingly termed them, “Mooses.” I was actually quite attracted to one of
these “Mooses” at around 15. Even though she was plain, she had nice legs
and looked great from behind, which is where I tended to find myself,
trailing in a tactical position out of Chapel in the early morning each day at
8.45am.
 Now, one of the “Goddesses” was a girl without equal and had all the
attributes you would expect to inspire a boy’s wet dream. Her name was
Jenny Woodhouse and she was splendid. Blonde, buxom and with blue
eyes. Just fabulous. She was not trampy. She was voluptuous. She had a
motherly quality, and she smiled a lot at the boys and made them feel good
—and loved, I guess. If you rolled Mary Poppins, the Girl Next Door, and
an American Cheerleader all into one—that’s Jenny. And, like a beatific
saint, she dispensed haircuts to the younger boys for 50 pence.
Haircuts from Jenny were the high-water mark of my life at the school.
And it was a pure, idealised love I had for her, not the scandalous pick-up
artistry I was to learn in later life.4 She was an angel who had stepped out of
a Botticelli painting to mingle with us. She walked among us, her long,
blonde hair flowing around her, looking after her young, handsome male
brood. We were her pretty choirboys, and she was the guardian of those
pure tender years on the cusp of puberty, before we became mad vikings
and hungry wolves!
When I made it into the sixth form, having chosen, of course, those
subjects most likely to attract the majority of girls (duh), I was dazzled.
There were a lot of fit birds in the History and English classes and now we
were equals, or at least so it seemed. I remember playing the clown more
than I had before. But the strategy that I had evolved to deal with my
environment four years previously now no longer worked. Of course, I did
not know that then.
I can recall one girl, with a dreamy name like Annabel or Rebecca.
When I think of her I just remember the colour pink and the smell of talcum
powder. I had a seat next to her in History. Once there was a bee in the
room and I stood on my desk and climbed about, swatting it comically in
order to try and impress her. She laughed, as did the rest of the class. I could
get away with this sort of behaviour—partly because the History teacher,
Jim Wright, was a liberal American guy, but also of course because I was a
lovable, cheeky chap.
Of course, I had no idea how to do more than flap about comically in
front of these beauties, like a puffed-up male pigeon doing pirouettes in the
street whilst the female pigeons just ignore him and peck at the pavement.
But then I did get a break with a girl called Rachel. Or a mini-break. Or
rather, the door opened a tiny crack.
I was into the sport of fencing at that time and had reached a reasonable
standard. I came back from a fencing competition one Saturday night and
was all sporty and animated and, I dare say, attractive to her. It was at the
bedsit of an ugly, redheaded, brutish guy called Roger Alexander, who was
a thug on the rugby field and was the sort of character who rubbed the
heads of younger boys with his knuckles and grinned at them. But he was
friendly enough to me, and from time to time he held parties in his room.
To my surprise my entrance generated some interest and after some
banter with the room about my exploits, Rachel insisted that she take me off
to the girls’ house and make me supper as I had eaten nothing all day. So I
was whisked off. I now visited the girls’ house for the first time. It was
called St. Albans and it was like some sort of American sorority house. She
made me some toast in the kitchen and played David Bowie on the hi-fi
whilst other girls walked about, relaxed and not fully dressed, as if I was
not even there. Later, as she walked up the staircase to her bedroom, I
waited for the last moment when she was framed at the corner of the old,
wooden staircase, her beautiful profile showing (actually, she had a bit of a
big nose, but still), and I said, wistfully, “Rachel?” She turned and smiled.
 I hesitated. I had managed to summon up the courage to ask her a
question. I wanted to declare my love. Or did I? I wanted to do something.
I hesitated, not sure what to do or what the next step actually was. But I
knew I had to take one. But what was it?
I carried on hesitating. She smiled innocently. Finally, nervous about the
growing length of the pause, I blurted, “Er… nothing.”
She disappeared round the turn in the stairs and was gone.
Next term she was getting properly rogered by Roger Alexander.

My family background was perhaps on the more spiritual or religious side,

insofar as my grandfather was a vicar and so is my uncle, whilst my father
became involved in the sixties with a spiritual school that practised
meditation and followed Eastern philosophy, which was at that time very
new to the West. I think he sailed through the sixties without even realising
they were there, but he was not a prude or religious or bigoted. He was a
man of action who wanted to be a fighter pilot but due to his poor eyesight
ended up running a successful manufacturing company in Colchester
instead of joining the RAF. He was never a ladies’ man, never really knew
much about women, and clocked up three marriages. By the end of his life,
he must have learned something about women, though, as the last marriage
was very successful.
I do not think my mother, his first wife, was particularly attracted to
him. When I asked her once why she married him she said, “Because he
asked.” She was very cute when she was young, and he was clearly a man
of accomplishment—or set to become a man of accomplishment. She was
responding to his air of status, perhaps.
 He was a leader of men, but he would never have made a good teacher
of sexual education. The one time we did talk he drew me a diagram of a
vagina. That was it. Still, I learned a lot more from his old films that I
stumbled upon in the attic one summer holiday. Wow! I had no idea he was
such a pervert!
I wrote a lot of letters to my mother whilst at Haileybury. I did engage
in manly activities, such as yachting and skiing, with my father, who, of
course, excelled at both. My father was obviously an important role model,
not least because I was not living with him and so I may have put him on a
pedestal (along with Jenny Woodhouse). Perhaps that, as well as the fact
that Haileybury was a very sporty school, led to me thinking that sporting
prowess was the key to success with girls.
For the record, it is not, but that is certainly one of many mistakes in my
thinking that was formed during those early years.

So far it all seems a bit of a cliché, right? Young kid goes to boarding
school after a broken marriage. No girls about. Those there are he puts up
on a pedestal higher than the Duke of Wellington in Trafalgar Square. No
wonder he is sexually repressed in adulthood and cannot get a girlfriend!
Well, this is true enough, perhaps, but I did have a number of run-ins
with women after leaving Haileybury at 18 years old that I will tell you
about. “Accidental success”, let’s call it.
I had sex for the first time with a girl I met at the Leaver’s Ball at
Haileybury. Jacky was a year older than me and far more sexually
experienced. Her father was a blue-collar worker, who I later discovered
was a spot welder at my father’s factory. She was a friend of one of my
sisters who brought her along to the Ball. I was very intimidated by her
good looks. She got drunk at the Ball and had to throw herself all over me
before I took the hint. She first tried dancing with a friend to arouse me into
action and when that didn’t work she just sat on my lap. She asked me to
show her the boarding house where I lived and there we made out, in
darkness. She had led all the way. I had absolutely no game. No idea at all.
This was my first sexual encounter and she initiated and then followed
through on the whole thing.
I also stumbled on a bit of accidental success at London University.
Royal Holloway & Bedford New College was the very opposite of
Haileybury. The key selling feature was that the ratio there was nearly two
girls to every boy. Moreover, as a mature student I was able to capitalise on
those odds. It was there I got into acting and writing and I got all the good
acting parts. I was in all the plays with cute girls—often in cute costumes.
I remember Elizabeth, a really pretty girl with lovely curves and
beautiful jet-black hair. At our first meeting she was dressed in an
outrageous Louis XIV dress for a production of Dangerous Liaisons that
the Drama Society was putting on. She played Cecile, the cute, pretty one in
the play who gets “an education” from Valmont, the sixteenth-century
player who is the unlikely hero of the story. I was astonished that she took
to me (as was the bouncer at the club we had on campus, as I recall) and I
had some heady make-outs with her, although never full sex.
I recall the break-up with Elizabeth. It was whilst I was in Paris,
romantically painting watercolours of the city during the summer holiday,
where she suddenly arrived on a coach. After two weeks of romance I
noticed that her interest was beginning to fade. I pre-empted the inevitable
by ending it before she did. She was way too pretty for me to combat the
local French males anyway.
 Her next stop after Paris was the bed of one of my best friends! She got
off with him during the autumn term at University and ended up living with
him for over a year. She was too crazy for him, and after a year she came
back to me for a brief, romantic foray that, once again, she initiated. She
decided to look after my leather jacket during the performance of one of my
plays and then led me down to a secluded spot after the show. It was the
allure of being a lead actor in a play and she was unable to resist making
out with me again. I was unaware at the time that it was this borrowed
“aura” that she was chiefly attracted to.
This “social proof”5 grew in strength when a buddy and I took over the
running of the Drama Society and other girls began taking a shine to me,
especially when I started to write and produce my own plays.
It was also at that time that a stunner called Kara took an interest. Now,
everyone has their “tale of regret” and this is mine. I remember she had a
boyfriend who was not at the University. This meant I had a massive moral
objection to touching her, let alone fucking her. The irony was that she told
me once that she was thinking of becoming an escort.
I remember Kara bouncing into the library one day, full of smiles and
not looking at all like a student, dressed in a black mini-dress below which
flashed her shining legs. She had just come back from a job interview in
London (maybe she was following through on the escort idea). My head
was buried in my books as I had a deadline to meet.
“I’ll probably be here all night,” I said. “I really have to finish this.”
“Well, why don’t you stay in my bedsit? You don’t want to have to get a
late bus all the way back to Staines, do you?”
In her bedsit she gave me her bed and laid out her own bed on the floor
of her own bedroom. She took off most of her clothes, down to her knickers
and a tight t-shirt. Jesus.
I lay there as she talked to me in the dark. She talked for a long time.
What did it all mean? Surely she was just being nice and letting me sleep
over. After all, didn’t she have a boyfriend? I am going to treat her with
respect! I told myself. But really, I was scared and once more had no idea
what I was supposed to do or how to do it.
And that was it. I had taken her offer of a bed for the night at face value.
Poor girl. She could not have made it any clearer without actually asking
me whether I wanted to have sex with her. Which a girl will never do, of
course. It’s tragic. Women are constantly giving men hints but they remain
blind to them.
There were other adventures at Royal Holloway. When I look back on
them I realise I had so many opportunities that I did not capitalise on or
simply did not register as opportunities at all. Talk about youth being
wasted on the young. Girl after girl after girl gave me a “window” and I did
not leap through.
You just have to laugh or you go mad.6
You don’t need to be a detective to figure out that the common thread
with all these girls was that they initiated. Every time. So really those
golden university years were notable not so much for the fact that I had
some clumsy, accidental success but for the fact that it could have been so
much more. I had been in a candy store but not tall enough to reach
anything but the bottom shelf. If I did get anything off the top shelf, it was
because it had rolled itself off and hit me hard on the head.
I simply neither had the knowledge nor the skills.
It is also interesting to note that my acting life at University, which
seemed to irk my father, was actually achieving far more in the way of
opportunities with girls than he had ever enjoyed, and far more so than
during my future wilderness years as a lawyer once I had left University. It
suggests to me now that girls are turned on by rather more than just money
and career, in spite of what society would have us believe. There must be
many women in marriages to rich husbands who feel very little in the way
of attraction at all and probably wear the trousers. But more about the
problems of a woman’s “dual mating strategy” later.

After University I started to become extremely “respectful.” Friends and

family—the female ones, at any rate—would tell me that I was a nice guy
who knew how to treat women well. I had started to become more and more
involved with my father’s Eastern philosophy school, and so perhaps my
monastic attitude to women arose as the result of and was congruent with
that teaching.
But deep down I think I was engaged in avoidance. I was fearful about
being hurt and became really angry with myself, to volcanic levels, at my
inability to escalate with girls. Opportunities started to evaporate.
Anywhere they arose, they were reminiscent of that “Rachel” moment on
the stairs at the girls’ house at Haileybury. University had afforded me
something of a fresh horizon, but even then I had had no skill at all; I was
just the right guy in the right place at the right time. Even my longest
girlfriend, of three months, Elizabeth (the beautiful Cecile in Dangerous
Liaisons at University) had had to rub her bum against my crotch whilst
dancing in her black miniskirt at a Leaver’s Ball to make it crystal clear that
I should escalate on her.
Escalation. I had no idea that a girl’s attraction waxed and waned
according to whether a guy escalated or not. I had no idea that even clumsy
escalation was going to make you more attractive than no escalation at all.
My worldview was that girls were either attracted to you or not. Period. It
was a fixed scenario, just as I was attracted to them or not. The idea that
things are not fixed in this way for girls and that they are not led primarily
by physical appearance, but that it changes according to their moods and
your behaviour—this was really inexplicable. It’s like those physicists who
talk about the probability of something at a subatomic level existing or not.
It was that level of inexplicability! Certainly for someone who had
comprehensively and resoundingly failed all his science “O” Levels. I
certainly felt like I was inside a hadron collider: crazy, spontaneous,
unpredictable female events happening at incredible speed around me, and
if I was not awake, I would miss them. And I did miss them.
I was of course using my own yardstick of attraction (physical
appearance and charisma) to make wrong assumptions about a woman’s.
After University I decided not to go to acting college but instead to
become a lawyer. (My father heavily disapproved of my dramatic
aspirations, “Hrmf!” he said, whenever the topic came up. Other than the
occasional, “Hrmf!” he maintained a very conspicuous silence on the
subject.)
The next 20 years afterward were a write-off.
I do not exaggerate. It all went cold.
Into deep freeze.
I trained as a barrister and was surrounded by clever people, both
cleverer and stupider (but also more ambitious) than me. During those
wilderness years, I just went into my head with the law and was too
intellectually arrogant to think that I needed to change anything. Besides, I
was convinced that you could not change anything; either a girl liked you or
not. The only real choice you had was to show her your real self. Act
yourself. Be yourself. Blah, blah, blah!
There was one particular nadir that involved an Australian girl that I
met on her visit to London one Christmas. She was also in the eastern
philosophy school. I really fell for her and I sent loads of romantic letters to
her afterwards.
I finally got to visit her when I was invited to a wedding in Sydney a
year or two after having built a relationship as her pen pal. I drove up to her
place after the wedding. It took days to get there. She lived in the Outback
in a small town called “Wagga Wagga.” Her home was about 50 hectares of
wilderness! Her pride and joy were her horses. And they were not just any
horses, but trained polo ponies.
By this point I had had enough immersion in my father’s spiritual
school to idealise women and marriage and to formalise my thinking along
these lines; this experience had solidified society’s conditioning. I was
convinced that I was there to win her over and that I was doing the right
thing in making her my friend first. This was all a natural precursor to a
successful relationship, surely?
Imagine my surprise when, after a couple of days in her company
building a “friendship,” she announced that her boyfriend was coming
around later. The conversation went like this:
“What were you thinking of doing tonight?”
“Oh, my boyfriend wants to see me.”
“Oh. Right… ”
I died inside. What the fuck?! She had invited me to visit her hundreds
of miles from civilisation, after all of those romantic letters, and had not
decided not to tell me she had a boyfriend?
 I was clueless as to how the conversation should now go, except to
maintain a stiff upper lip and bide my time before I could find a hole to
crawl into and die there.
Later we went out on the ponies and rode around her backyard, which
was the size of Wales, basically. We rode in silence and then eventually I
asked, “What would he think if he knew I was here, I wonder?”
“He would come right round on his horse in a flash.”
“He’s very jealous,” she then added.
Of course, there was no need for him to be jealous. I was so far from
being capable of escalating on her it was impossible.
I stewed that night. I felt that familiar corrosive disappointment.
I’m fucked, I thought to myself.
And yet still, the next day, hope burned that somehow she would see
how great I was, and I went riding with her and humoured her and was nice
to her. Inside, all the while, I hated myself. I raged, Why can I not have
her!?
I did not see that it was not me; it was what I was doing, or rather, not
doing, that was the problem. Later we drove to the capital, Canberra. It was
a ridiculously long drive, just the two of us, but I hardly said a word. I had
gone into lockdown. When I did finally talk, I was rude. She put me on a
train at the end of the trip and that was the last I ever heard of her.
She was a strong Australian woman, and what is so interesting is that it
was she who once told me that, “Women are like fishermen and men the
fish. We reel you in, take a look and throw you back again.”
She had no qualms about enticing me out those hundreds of miles in
order to take a look. But in truth she had by then not only thrown me back,
probably without consciously doing it, but she had also made me into her
long-term, long-distance man-friend. I did not realise it at the time but by
the end of that trip, I had become her “Gay Best Friend.” She could hang
out with me, share fun times, ride together, and complain to me about her
boyfriends.7
Gay? it occurred to me. That’s a thought…
Now commenced a prolonged period of naval-gazing: Was it me?
Was it my childhood?
Was I born with the problem?
Was it simply a lack of status, money, looks, or sporting prowess?
Or…
Was I G.A.Y.?
I turned to therapy in order to check up on my sexuality. I am not proud
of it. Group therapy, no less! I spent a whole year of drama-therapy
weekends in a house in Hampstead, which culminated in a long weekend
excursion to Devon in a country house. It was there that I re-enacted
traumatic childhood events. I got in touch with my feminine side, of course.
It was exhausting. And apparently revelatory, as far as the psychotherapist
who ran the course was concerned.
In the kitchen after the session, whilst I was getting a drink, he quietly
approached me away from everybody else and mentioned, “You know, I
know a lot of people in the community I could put you in touch with. If you
wanted.”
He paused.
“What community?” I asked.
He hesitated, before whispering, “You know. The gay community.”
As a result, I spent the next couple of years thinking that I was probably
gay. This seemed to make sense of all my difficulties: “Of course! I had just
been backing the wrong horse!”
I remember talking to a family mentor about it. We met at a pub in
South Kensington and we sat there as I told him that I had started to have
fantasies about other men. I was sure that something was up and that I was
now faced with the difficult decision of revealing to my parents that I was
gay.
“What would my father say?” I asked, rhetorically. “Hrmf!” I answered
my own question. But actually, he would have probably responded with a
shocked silence for this one.
“I see,” my family mentor said, floundering and revealing that he did
not see at all. He was an old-fashioned man’s man and may have been
afraid I was about to make a pass at him.
I also used a life coach for a while. I never met him but had sessions
over the phone. He eventually lost patience with me and blurted out, “Why
do you hate yourself so much?!”
Of course that worried me. I started to identify myself as a “self-hater,”
whatever that was. It must exist as a category, I figured, in any self-
respecting compendium of psychoanalysis. I went around thinking, Oh my
god! I hate myself. How terrible—and so hating myself!
Of course, it was just an emotion around not being able to perform in a
certain very important area of life that was getting me down, not that I
literally “hated myself.” I was in that trough of disillusionment where you
cannot accept that you have been doing something wrong or that there is
any possibility of change.
I even ended up right at the kooky end of the spectrum. I attended a
session or two with a lady who put me in touch with the spirit of my dead
stepfather, Copper. I had my Chinese astrological chart done, and I was told
that I was sawing at the branch of a tree with my mother and father at one
end. Apparently I did not realise that I was sawing the wrong side of the
branch. I am still trying to figure this metaphor out.
I should perhaps mention that one counsellor had been useful. He was a
dating and relationships specialist called Andrew Marshall who had written
a book called The Single Trap. I had stumbled on a London radio interview
with him online. He was quite well known, and eventually I had a series of
sessions with him. One of the great things that he had introduced me to was
a book called Iron John.
But like so many others, whilst Andrew Marshall was able to identify
the importance of a rite of passage in a man’s life, and was astute in his
recommendation of the book Iron John8, it was merely advice and insights,
and it did not address the core issue in a real practical way. You see, my
conclusions of the self-help industry where women and dating is concerned
is that it erodes a man’s confidence rather than builds it. Knowing what
your problems are is useless. It just gives you an endless stream of reasons
not to “man up.” I might even go so far as to say that men are feminised by
participating in it, which really is the opposite direction of where they want
to go, as that is of course exactly what women do not want! (Really want.)
They are looking for masculinity, not femininity, in a prospective partner.
In short, over a period of nearly 20 years, the “Friend-Zone” mindset
had been set. Properly set.
As the years rolled by, I had more and more of these Friend Zone
relationships, one after another in sad succession, which I thought were
leading to a relationship or marriage, but were invariably just leading to
more friend-zoning. I became more and more frantic, collecting friend-zone
relationships with pretty girls, a long string of them. I would meet them,
take them on a romantic dinner or to a play, and pay for it all. They would
take the money, and the friend-zoning would continue indefinitely.
Eventually it would end up in a desperate romantic note, poem, or
declaration. Eventually they would tire, meet someone, and even the friend-
zoning would end. Then there would be another girl and another period of
friend-zoning.
It was as if I had become a nice little harbour or port to bask in for a
while until a great ruddy pirate ship hove round the cliffs and fucked them
senseless.
All those girls. Melanie, Lucy, Liz, Kinga, Jane, Rachel, Gotia…
Remember Gotia?
“Alex, I think we need to talk.”

3 My mother actually put me on the catwalk at one point, in a childrens’ clothes fashion parade.
Mmm…
4 Talking of pick-up artistry as “scandalous” may be ironic to me as I write now, but before I got into
daygame it was sincerely felt.
5 Social proof is an attribute like any other, and one that can enhance your sexual attractiveness. On
this occasion it was the fact that I had high status from being in my second year and running a
society, and so being “the boss.” A girl is automatically drawn to status, of course.
6 You can also write a book, of course.
7 Once again, guys do not see this, as that famous car scene in When Harry Met Sally illustrates.
Women would love to think that men and women can be friends. After 25 years of denial I have
finally come to accept that it is rarely possible, if at all. But the idea presents a great weasel for men
to avoid fronting up and for women to enjoy the attention that they so often crave, without having to
give sex in return.
8 And I rolled my eyes into the back of my head when I told one or two friends about the book, and
they immediately encouraged me to go on a course. Apparently there are now “Iron John” courses,
where you can go and bond with other men in the highlands of Scotland and so on. People do not
seem to understand that life is their course, the world is their course. That is where you need to take
action and to develop. Not in a hermetically-sealed world.

OceanofPDF.com
 3

A Door Opens

I was still staring out of the window, looking out at the pavement and the
pigeons. One of them had stopped pecking the pavement and was now
pecking its buddy, for some reason. Were they mating? Or fighting? I was
distracted from my funk by the sound of my mobile phone vibrating. This
time it was a message from a friend, Chris.
“How did you get on with Hobbit?” he wanted to know. Hobbit was the
nickname of another girl I had been dating and had also ended up in a
Friend Zone with.
I ignored the message. Not because I did not like Chris—the reverse
was true, and I was actually pleased to hear from him—but because I was
brooding about the whole thing and did not want to admit to having been
brushed off yet another girl. It would only be like rubbing salt into the
bruises of my already fragile ego.
“She sent me a message saying she liked me but the age difference was
too big for her and she didn’t want to string me along. She hoped I
understood.”
“Mmm…” said Chris, pondering this, in a very neutral and curious way,
as if to probe the inner meaning of what she had said, when it seemed to me
there was nothing much to ponder. It was over and that was that.
 Sometimes Chris annoyed me the way he always seemed to be trying to
figure out things, as though there were a solution, when my fatalistic
temperament just took it for what it seemed to be: another rejection or
failure. For him though it was if he were working out a crossword puzzle.
As if women and dating could be figured out in that way.
After the call I found myself reflecting on Chris and what he had said
for a few moments. And then I wondered, Could it be figured out? Reduced
to the status of a difficult puzzle? Was Chris right and I was wrong?
What a weird thought. My funk momentarily lifted.
“It’s a ridiculous idea. That it can be resolved as if it were just some sort
of Rubik’s cube.” I snorted to myself, dismissively.
But for the rest of the afternoon the idea would not go away. I had given
up on any attempt to go back to work, after all. And the naval-gazing
eventually morphed into serious reflection. Was there in fact a skill or
method involved? A formula? Like in any other pursuit in life. It reminded
me of a couple of other events in my life that I had led to epiphanies. One
was discovering that with a good teacher I could learn to ski properly, in
spite of never having learned as a child and having struggled to ski most of
my life. The other was a course on how to give up smoking, “The Allen
Carr Easy Way”. As the result of that experience I completely lost the
craving for cigarettes simply by going through a day-long immersion in
which it was explained in great detail that smoking was nothing more than a
mental gremlin that, once understood, was easily banished.
I was till feeling pretty negative but I now started to look beyond my
own “mental set-up” and at the way other people looked at the world.
Chris was a very interesting character. And I actually realised that it felt
very positive to have his support. His thinking was so scientific and
mechanical. To him even hard-wired childhood and emotional problems
were just challenges, that might be tricky, but could be solved if you applied
yourself and figured it out. In the journey of life there are some people
leave you uplifted and somehow inject a positive charge into your soul.
Chris was one of these guys. In fact, he had taken a real interest in my
struggles and had become an ally in helping me to face them. He was a
neighbour, living next to the flat I lived in at the time on Borough High
Street near London Bridge, and we had struck up an unlikely friendship. He
seemed have no real emotional baggage, certainly around the area of
women and dating.
It was an unlikely friendship because he was so different from me. He
was a logical guy who was not religious or into the spiritual world and he
was practical, fastidious even. Above all, he knew about social dynamics.
He had built a successful business providing online security and knew a lot
about sales and he was a good example of a guy who seemed to have
“gotten his shit sorted.” He had a beautiful Columbian wife who was
intelligent (but it should also be noted that she did not wear the trousers). I
do not know what happened behind closed doors—no one really knows that
sort of stuff—but what was clear to me was that he was not under her
thumb or anything like that and seemed to call the shots. And when I say
that what I mean is not that he was a dominating character, which was not
his style, but he had a quality about the way he conducted himself around
women and a confidence in dealing with them.9
Anyway, he had taken an interest in my dating struggles, and what was
fascinating about him was that he was a real Mister Spock (from Star Trek).
Indeed, that was his nickname at school. He saw a problem and, as I say, he
did not see the emotional charge in it, but just became intrigued by how to
solve it.
At the same time, whilst he seemed to be very good with women, I
could not understand why. Frankly, he was not exactly an oil painting to
look at. He had scruffy black-brownish hair that stuck up as if in defiance of
the hairbrush industry. He was average height or perhaps on the short side,
and he was not an impressive build. Further, he had a terrible voice
problem: he had had an operation on his throat as a child, and the scar was
still there and his voice was really hoarse and low. It actually sounded
painful when he spoke, as if it were some terminal disease or cancer,
especially in a noisy bar or club, where he would have to raise his voice to
be heard. How on earth could he have chatted up girls?
I knew that he had had success in this area, though, because eventually
he told me about it. He was too modest to speak of it for a long time, but he
did when it became clear to him that I needed to know his credentials
before taking any advice from him. He had been rather a player in his day,
and the key to it had been his understanding of social dynamics.
Interestingly, sales were a big part of his job, and he had a lot of experience
in and fascination with that area. When he went jogging, as he regularly
did, he would listen to Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Successful
People or some new scientific study on humans and primates or perhaps dip
into Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People in the
Digital Era.
Now, he was the first person in my life who did more than just give me
aimless advice over a beer—he actually sacrificed quite a lot of his time to
help. He would routinely check in on what was going on, and he also set up
situations in bars and clubs to help as a wingman. He was there for me
when I needed help with a next step with a girl or how to reply to a text.
Most of all, he truly believed it was just a case of being wired wrong
with bad habits, and that with intelligence and hard work, the situation
could change. He did not just say this to be “positive” or encouraging. He
truly believed it and loved to fix things and see it operate in practice, which
is perhaps another reason he took such an amateur interest in me, because
he wondered if it would be possible to help me change.
So when I got the call from Chris on that grey and dreary day, it gave
me hope. However down in the dumps I was, to him it was “not the end of
the world.” It was just like a mechanic might feel when a screw goes into
the wrong fixing; you just figure out how to unscrew it and put it in the
right way. The metal might be rusted or corroded but it was not impossible
to fix. And it sidestepped so much of the self-help and personal
development industry, which encourages excessive naval gazing into the
past rather than taking action solving problems in the future.
I think it was as the result of the time I had spent with Chris and the
efforts he made towards helping me out that I started to feel that change was
possible. It was his conviction that I took encouragement from. Gingerly, I
started to entertain the thought that it might simply wrong thinking and I
could be re-wired. It was not some irreversible curse of fate or fatal flaw of
personality. Of course the emotive melodrama of those old and negative
ideas still continued to play in the back of my mind like an old vinyl record
that continues to play on the turn-style well after the track has finished,
crackling away:
Could it really be possible to solve this? Surely not! These sorts of
problems were in a whole different category - incurable “personal”
problems. And anyway, are you really telling me that people actually
change, like in a Hollywood movie? No, you just have to suck it up. You
have to play the cards that life has dealt you, after all. Some guys are born
good at sports, some guys can play a musical instrument and some are born
good with women. You were born bad with women. It’s all down to
childhood problems at the end of the day and they are incredibly hard to fix.
And besides, I’m too old. It’s “too late, mate.”
But now I became aware of these thoughts and resolved to at least
question them as to their validity and truthfulness. I started to reflect on the
very idea of ideas themselves and the way that, over a lifetime, ideas
become welded into our subconscious through constant repetition. Perhaps
this was all that had happened? I had let the needle run in the same grooves
of the vinyl record for decades and it had become embedded there. Logic
said that if the needle had become stuck, then surely there might be some
way it could be un-stuck. It might take time. It would not be easy. But it
could be done.
And so it was that I felt inspired to take action and to drag myself out of
my funk. I should not give up but try to figure out some sort of different
path out of the dark and dismal woods where I had been lost for so many
years. I had no idea where to start.
So what did I do?
I went onto the internet, of course.

THE (ONLINE) JUNGLE

The metaphor of a jungle may sound belaboured in respect of the women

and dating industry, but I do think it is a metaphor that works. In fact, I also
feel the need to put mirrors into this jungle, by means of which the unwary
are deceived into heading in completely the wrong direction, when it seems
to be, so clearly to them, the right direction.
There are essentially two different ends of the spectrum in the women
and dating jungle. One end is the self-help sector, which I touched on in the
previous chapter, and the other end is termed the “pick-up industry.” Having
already failed to find answers in the self-help sector, I now turned to the
latter.
Within this realm and especially online there is of course a great deal of
“clickbait” out there. Online advertising and marketing in this area can be a
real evil. It generates a lot of extra work and you have to inspect it closely
to see whether it is any good or not, as on the face of it appears attractive
and desirable. Later on, when you have experience and confidence with
women, you could supplement your knowledge by looking into this stuff.
That then becomes an interesting fresh vein of discovery. But at the
beginning of the journey, it’s much more likely to be a distraction than a
help.
In America advertisements are typified by those long-winded American
sites with rolling credit sequences that go on for ever and ever, giving you
loads of free knowledge in the hope that by the end of the 15-minute
cartoon you will click “Buy.” You know the sort of thing:

“We tell you the THREE SECRETS to MEETING GENUINELY

ATTRACTIVE WOMEN and being able to go up to and TALK TO
ANY WOMAN with real confidence. Are you a guy who has had zero
success with women and has completely lost his confidence? THESE
THREE SIMPLE TIPS WILL REVOLUTIONISE THE WAY YOU
 THINK ABOUT YOUR DATING LIFE. How do I know this?
Because I WAS ONE OF THOSE GUYS…”

And this spiel goes on and on—the length of the credit sequences of Star
Wars.

A similar, more sophisticated type of clickbait are the online video courses,
pioneered I believe by the one pick-up artist that I had previously dipped
into—David Deangelo and his “Double Your Dating.” I had his boxed set
shipped from the States at some cost. I watched them. I was fascinated, and
I really enjoyed them. But I hardly put any of it into practice. I just ate up
evenings and weekends watching videos. So here you have the problem of
watching loads of videos on a topic without actually doing anything (like a
golf enthusiast watching the US Open on television and thinking that it
might help improve his handicap).
Now, even more insidious than all of this is the danger of watching the
online material of female pick-up artists. This is what I mean by mirrors in
the jungle.
One of the most preeminent female PUAs online (certainly in terms of
hits) is Kezia Noble. She is beautiful and great to look at and you can spend
hours watching her videos thinking that you are learning something,
whereas you are just looking at her tits. I cannot help thinking that a lot of
guys book counselling sessions with her and sign up to her courses because
they are sold on the very subtle and insidious idea that they will be able to
have sex with her if they do. She will jump to her defence, no doubt, by
saying that she has trained tons of guys and helped them to become good
with women, but I cannot help but think that the majority of her sales are a
very subtle form of online porn. She is a very good businesswoman and has
successfully promoted herself on television. So she has the veneer of
respectability that so much of the pick-up industry lacks.
You see, I was to learn that the big danger along the path to becoming
good at women and dating is “weaselling out,” which means not biting the
bullet and doing the hard work but just treading water by watching videos,
going on courses, and having counselling sessions on the phone or Skype.
Or even of having coaching sessions out in the street but never spinning the
straw into gold by going out into the world and applying it all yourself. The
knowledge then festers and can actually be corrosive.
Now, the irony is that a lot of what Kezia Noble says in her videos is in
large part on the money and true. But there is something worrying about the
delivery mechanism. She is like a Greek siren, beckoning men towards her
with the promise that they can get her. In other words, she is one of the
mirrors in the jungle, because she seems to beckoning men in exactly the
right direction. And believe me, it works! I have watched quite a few of her
videos. It is of course a vicarious kind of pleasure that is not ultimately
satisfying. Once again I should emphasise that she may know her stuff, but
especially for a beginner it is simply not the way to go.
Moreover, there is rather a lot in the truism that if you want to know
how to catch fish, you should ask the fisherman and not the fish. Take the
example of personal trainers: plenty of guys get an attractive female
personal trainer, which is a sort of a subtle weaselling-out. Rather than
finding a really good male trainer who will keep you focused on what you
need to do in the gym, a female personal trainer is in danger of being a
distraction. Men are incredibly good at deceiving themselves in this area,
telling themselves that they are taking action when they are not.
 This is not to say that you will not learn anything from Kezia Noble or
that you will not learn anything from a female personal trainer, but the point
is that there is a really big danger of losing focus and being deceived into
going in the wrong direction. Especially when you are just starting out.
Eventually I started to localise my searches and to make sure I was only
surfing coaches who were actually living and working in London and who I
could therefore meet in person. I found a number of slick websites with
handsome-looking guys who had been interview by GQ, The Daily Mail,
and other similar publications and they offered weekends where guys could
go out at night to bars and clubs and get coaching on how to be good with
women. I seriously considered these guys, in spite of the eye-watering price
of some of their bootcamps. They had photos on their websites of them
looking dashing, with a bow-tie slung around an open-collared white dress
shirt and a woman draped over their shoulder. They all had great
testimonials on their websites, and often videos with their successful
students. But they were a little too slick and they felt more after-shave
commercial than committed coaching and I somehow doubted their
motives. They were just a little bit too glossy for me and I felt something
was “off.” I moved on.
I then made my first proper discovery. I stumbled on a series of talks on
YouTube under the umbrella of an organisation or a conference called “The
21 Convention.” The talks hinted at an almost secret untapped knowledge
that most men had never come across. Whilst one or two of the speakers
were of the glossy variety - dressed in an overtly masculine way, wearing
open-necked shirts to show a bit of chest hair - a surprising number actually
looked and acted like Regular Joes. In other words I identified with them.
And they were talking about the topic of women and dating in quite a fresh
way. They were talking both about the psychology of it as much as the
skills and techniques, and they were talking at length. For them it was
clearly a very important subject and they were passionate about it, as if it
should be an important topic on the school curriculum. It was like a
teacher’s conference, if a somewhat socially-unacceptable one. Some of
these lectures went on for hours. They could have built a university faculty
around it.10
The more I surfed and watched these videos the more it seemed that
there really was a sort of underground world out there that had been driven
to the fringes of society in which intelligent guys discussed this stuff. They
were not like the PUAs online video products that I had previously come
across and nor were they dry academics talking to a lecture hall. They were
men who actually went out and approached girls, and they were fascinated
in the subject from a very practical perspective. It was clear that, whilst they
were of course getting their names out there and so generating interest for
their businesses, they had a wider or broader vision and were not just purely
trying to sell stuff. They were creating a sort of community and trying to
redress the balance and fight the good fight against what they saw as the
feminisation of men.
This was a completely fresh discovery to to me, in spite of my 46 years
and my previous adventures and explorations.
I now dug deeper into the YouTube world and hit upon a really
interesting dude, an English PUA called Tom Torero. He was producing
plenty of insightful YouTube videos, and he was here, based in London. He
was someone with whom I could completely identify. In appearance, he was
pretty average looking. In fact, he was downright ugly: a beanpole with
narrow shoulders, a David Cameron face, and wonky teeth. Although he
was from Wales, you could hardly detect his accent, and he sounded as if he
was very English and a bit posh. And yet he had this street vibe about him.
He evoked a renegade quality that made me think of the anonymous street
artist, Banksy. Like Banksy his habitat was the back streets of the city, the
anonymous parts of the city. He went about unseen without anybody
realising what he was up to or caring. And he was a hustler.11 He was
clearly not into it for the money. Whilst he was proud of not being in debt,
he was equally proud of being able to live on a shoe-string. He was a
maverick.
In one video he gave a talk to a bunch of guys, a loose-knit organisation
called “Saturday Sarge” in a back street around the Leicester Square area of
London. He spoke about approaching girls in the daytime. And as I
listened, it was extraordinary. He virtually told guys that they were wasting
their time in bars and clubs, and that they should not buy into the generally
accepted wisdom that the only time to meet girls (at least new girls you had
not met before) was at night, in the nighttime social environment. There
was another way. And he was talking to these guys about growing a pair of
balls and approaching girls in the street. Cold. Approaching them, taking
their numbers, and getting them out on dates.
Was that really possible? I thought to myself.
I could not believe what I was hearing. He ran off what his students
should be doing and why they had been failing at this area all their lives up
until this point.
“Don’t hide your dick,” he would say. “You’ve got to stop her, politely,
of course. But confidently. Call out the fact that what you are doing is a bit
crazy, but stop her properly. And then pay her a compliment. And then
don’t be asking her loads of questions about who she is or about her job, or
worse, talking about who you are and your job, but make some assumptions
about her and exaggerate.”
And he would go on:

“Tease. You’ve got to generate attraction, don’t forget. And you

have to show your intent. You are sexually attracted to her and she
needs to see. Look out for that point when she hooks. You know the
signs—she crosses her legs, plays with her hair, starts asking you
questions. Then you can dial it down. You’re not some crazy street
artist or performer. You’re not a night-game dude like Mystery from
The Game, you have to let her know you’re a normal guy. Ground
it. So when she gets home and talks to her friends and they say, ‘He
sounds like a crazy street performer! She can say, ‘No, he’s an
ordinary guy.’”

This was fascinating. There was something that struck home for me in what
he said about being sexual and showing your intent. It made me suddenly
conscious of all those painful past collisions with girls over all those wasted
years and that huge scrapyard of regret! The one thing that connected all
these dots was that I was always looking to try to be the girl’s “friend”.
Vainly believing that this would ultimately lead to Pussy Paradise.
I consulted with friends about my discovery. One girl who I had known
for 20 years and who was now a psychotherapist (and who I had hit on
when I was much younger—without success, eventually befriending her)
told me,
“You know what,” she said, “I’ve always liked your company and I
think you’re great socially and intelligent, witty, funny… but in all the time
I’ve known you, I don’t think that I have ever felt you behaved sexually
around me. I have never felt that you were a sort of sexual presence.”
She might have said “sexual threat” if it had not been politically
incorrect to say so. It was now becoming clear to me that it was not
anything that you have just in your looks; it has nothing to do with that. Or
whether you are a sporty jock. Or whether you are a socially-proofed guy,
high up in your social circle as far as status was concerned. No, it was about
exuding your sexuality and showing your intent. Lucy knew all about
exuding sexuality. Why did I have trouble with mine?
I intuitively knew what she meant and that she was right.
What was especially interesting about what Tom Torero was saying was
that meeting women did not just have to happen during the night-time, at
bars and clubs. A guy who was owning his masculinity and behaving in a
certain way could have success with women anywhere. And in fact, having
the balls to approach a girl during the daytime was of itself a powerful
expression of masculinity and sexuality. Indeed, he avoided bars, clubs and
online dating. He was pioneering a new way to meet women - during the
daytime.
Tom Torero was in fact part of an organisation called “Daygame.com.”
And it seemed as if there was even a proper company and a community,
locally, in my home town of London. The brainchild behind this was a guy
called Andy Yosha (they all had these daft pseudonyms). He was a bit of an
online geek and a young entrepreneur with a flair for marketing, and he had
really hit on something. He had a few guys, mostly British, who were
involved in his company and were really good at approaching girls during
the day.
 In transpired that the inspiration for daygame was a guy was called Yad,
and he was a already a legend in the field. He was a shaggy, dog-ugly
character, a bit Jewish-looking, with a big nose, a lot of charm, and lovely
long black hair. He was credited with having pioneered the technique
whereby you stop a moving girl in the street, someone who may be in a
hurry—it was called, of course, the “Yad Stop.”
And then there was a suave, good-looking guy called Jon Matrix, who
apparently had been an terrible introvert and had spent his life previous to
getting into this stuff earning a living from late-night, online poker.
Andy himself might have been a self-professed computer geek who
loved to play stupid online games but in spite of this he had “owned” his
masculinity and had become extremely successful with women. Some of
these guys had looks, but most were frankly not oil-paintings, Tom Torero
and Yad especially. Looks hardly seemed to matter.
I watched online videos, fascinated, and watched these guys stopping
girls, opening up a conversation with them in the street and taking a
number. And the girls were clearly attracted. In one or two cases, the
camera actually caught them kissing girls in the street, in broad daylight. It
was crazy. It seemed somewhat sketchy (or even a breach of privacy laws)
but I could not deny that it also seemed as if their hearts were in the right
place. They really believed in what they were doing and had found a
platform - the internet and YouTube - to bring this message to the masses of
disenfranchised, lonely men. They seemed more evangelical than anything.
Their website was very well produced. It exuded a sort of casual, cool
indifference to success. But they were not guys marketing hard and offering
up the usual clickbait-spam. They produced these weekly radio-style
podcasts in which they would just gas on about their lives, loosely around a
central topic related to women and dating. They were young and irreverent,
like street buccaneers and a bit “rock and roll.” During their radio podcasts,
which I routinely started to listen to before going to bed, they would
interview dudes who had been on their bootcamps and talk about the
success and the “conversions”. They told stories of run-ins with the police,
security guards, irate boyfriends and muslim parents. It all felt irreverent,
mischievous, and dangerous.
These guys were young enough that they had not been seduced by
money and in fact prided themselves on being able to live on a shoestring—
daygame nomads who were resourceful, self-reliant, and able to travel the
world with their laptops, their wits, and their seduction skills and set up
shop anywhere. Guys were encouraged to get out of their comfort zones and
to “unplug from the Matrix.” To go on a wild and crazy adventure. It
reminded me a little of a Billy Connolly gag in which he tells the story of
his first visit to a tattoo artist who, after he had completed the tattoo,
announced in triumph, “One more of us, one less of them!”
It was not a charity of course. They had produced their own online
products,12 much like others in the community, but it was so much more
than that and it felt more like a movement to get guys out into the streets
and take action, rather than a marketing drive for a conventional business. I
discovered that Tom Torero and Andy moderated a secret Facebook group
of guys who had been on the bootcamps and, like the podcasts, did this
entirely for free. They were putting a lot of free product out there and
seemed to love the idea that they were not purely a profitable money-
spinning enterprise.13 There bootcamps seemed really popular.
Bootcamps? I thought. Indeed, their site offered these bootcamps in
which six guys would pair up with two or three coaches and spend a whole
weekend together learning daygame.14 These bootcamps took place all over
Europe, from London to Berlin to Prague to Oslo…

Doubts now resurfaced.

I reminded myself that I was a 46-year-old lawyer with a strong social
circle and a certain status, and a part of me, the old fashioned Victorian-era
gentleman Dr. Watson, said, Mm! This is all a bit sketchy. These guys are
just randoms—no better than the homeless, or like hustlers, muggers, and
buskers. They are not respectable individuals with pedigree of any sort. Yad,
for instance, seems like some of homeless person, like a stray dog who lives
and breathes street life. He has no qualifications or career to speak of.
What on earth can these renegades teach me?
And worse, was it really acceptable to hit on girls in this way? As they
were going about their daily lives, minding their own business? It was a
breach of basic human rights, let alone a breach of privacy! At least typical
PUAs pursued women in clubs and bars, where the women were
presumably looking to have new sexual or romantic encounters and should
not be surprised if they were hit on. It was simply inappropriate, bordering
on harassment, to stop a girl in the street, for god’s sake! These guys were
narcissists at best, predators at worst. They took sex from girls and money
from shy, introverted guys to whom they pretended to teach their same,
shameful skills.
I consulted Lucy again.
Lucy’s view was, “You don’t need it, Alex, you’ve already got all the
social skills you need.” And to her it sounded sketchy.
I also consulted Chris. Chris said that I should definitely go on a
bootcamp. He thought that this was just the sort of “jolt” that I really
needed.
My excuse was that I did not need to learn how to approach people and
open up conversations, as I was already very good in social situations.
“Mmm…,” he mused. “I think you need to go on it. You don’t know
where it will lead. You need to just try something and take the plunge.”
How to decide? Well, you don’t take advice from the fish, you take
advice from the fisherman, right…?

9 Isn’t that what women want, a confident man in their lives to look after them? And yet you get in
trouble for even mentioning it these days.
10 It was surprising to me that they were “normal guys” because of the reputation the pick-up
industry had at that point, and of course Mr. Strauss’s The Game had a big part to play in molding
that reputation. He certainly played to the audience here by styling the pick-up artists in his book as
mentally unhinged. Just read the first few opening pages of the book.
11 Tom Torero was University educated—at Oxford no less—and he had studied with the famous
biologist Richard Dawkins, who was his tutor and whom he had gotten to know reasonably well. He
had married young whilst at University and it had not been a success. He then spent a few months in
a Greek monastery, of all places. He had clearly been a real “Anorak” during his early years and was
living proof that a man could really transform himself in this area of their lives.
12 Tom Torero himself had produced a whole online series called “The Girlfriend Sequence” in
which he imparted knowledge around dating, after having gone on hundreds of dates and slept with
dozens, if not hundreds of women. It has now been superceded by his book, Street Hustle.
13 Unfortunately Daygame.com no longer exists.
14 The London Daygame Model, as it should more accurately be called. I understand that the term
was coined by Tom Torero and Nick Krauser.

OceanofPDF.com
 4

The Bonkers Bootcamp

Before the bootcamp I was advised to watch a video product called “Date
Against The Machine,” in which the lead instructors, Jon Matrix and Tom
Torero, took you through the basics of the street approach. Guys were
encouraged to make at least three approaches and pay a compliment or two
to a girl in the street before coming on the bootcamp.
This video featured actual clips of both guys approaching girls in the
street. They showed footage but blurred out the faces of the girls. One
showed Jon Matrix stopping a Spanish girl. He ran round her and a good
few feet ahead, then gently put up a hand, a little like a policeman, and got
her to stop. He paid a compliment, saying that he had seen her walk by and
wanted to come and say how nice she looked. He then took a guess that she
was a student and guessed her nationality. It transpired that she was
Spanish, whereupon he talked about how a friend of his who had been to
Spain had said that Spanish girls were a little crazy—a bit wild, drank too
much wine, and danced on the tables after the sun went down. His manner
was confident and assured, and he stood his ground and just carried on with
the conversation, pausing for her to answer. Before too long she was
playing with her hair, had crossed her legs at the ankle, and was laughing.
After the ice was broken and they were enjoying themselves, he then
challenged her about her poor English and how she needed to work on it.
Although it was done with a smile, it was more of a blunt challenge than a
tease, and I was surprised that he would be so rude to her face! But yet she
started to explain herself, accepting that her English was not great and she
needed to work harder. Then, when she had barely finished speaking, he
told her that they should exchange numbers and meet up for a drink
sometime, and he got out his phone. She was eager to give him her number.
He walked off.
Outrageous. He had led and controlled the interaction and basically
shown her who was boss. Was that any way to treat a woman? And yet it
had worked. There was no doubting its efficacy. Moreover, she actually
looked as if she had enjoyed it and was not offended in any way. There was
a real internal clash. Surely the way to do it was to show a girl your winning
personality, tell a few jokes, and open a door or two. Or at least “be
yourself”? I pondered. Not to tell her that her English was rubbish and she
should take some lessons!

Well, I had made a pact with myself to go through with this. So I dutifully
went out into the streets with the goal of making at least one or two
approaches. I jumped on the Jubilee Line and went into busy Oxford Street.
Now, at the Bond Street Tube exit there is an inner covered area with a few
shops which people invariably use as a meeting point. And there I noticed a
cute girl waiting next to a wall. I hovered. “Date Against The Machine” had
recommended that you do no more than pay a compliment initially, just to
get your confidence up, and take baby steps towards the full interaction, but
even this seemed like a mountain to climb. My feet felt suddenly welded to
the floor. I glanced over at her a second time. She was cute, there was no
doubt.
Jesus! I said to myself. This is ridiculous. I’ve come into Oxford Street
for the express purpose of hitting on girls, and here I am on a Saturday
morning when I could be doing a host of more useful things anyway, like
going to the gym or work or other important stuff.
I felt my palms sweat, something that they very rarely do. I glanced
again. She was toying with her phone. I secretly hoped she might make a
call so I would have an excuse to back down, but she put it back in her
handbag. The inner monologue continued, not for the last time.15 No one
told me it would be this hard. Those guys in “Date Against The Machine,”
well… they’re obviously seasoned professionals in this area who are just
making money off of poor sods like me, or tricky street performers… I can’t
even—
And then I was in front of the girl. I could not believe it. I had done it.
The world spun, the mountains did a backflip, and I glared at her, wide-
eyed.
“Excuse me? Can I just say, very quickly, that I think you look really
nice?”
Back at the other end of the Jubilee Line, I emerged from the South
Tube exit, scuttling back to the safety of my hobbit hole. I finally relaxed,
casting my mind back at what had just happened, and paused.
She smiled. I paused. Did she? I asked. Yes.
A passer-by glanced at me as I stood, hovering after the turnstiles,
talking to myself. I did not care. I could not believe it. I had been in too
much of a hurry to get away to have noted her reaction. But my legal mind
did a bit of self-examination of the facts of the incident.
 I paid the compliment. I said she looked nice. I saw her smile. She
smiled. She definitely smiled. She said something! Yes, she said, “Oooh,
thanks!” Did she? Yes. She liked it.

My next excursion was a walk along the Southbank by the Royal Festival
Hall. It was a beautiful sunny day. Now the problem with the Southbank, I
was to learn, is that there are very few single girls who walk along it. As I
walked I saw just couples or two girls together, sometimes arm in arm.
Once again my kvetch struck up a conversation, like muzak or a radio on in
the background, What on earth do you think you’re doing?! A fully-grown
adult male (and a professional lawyer at that) running about like a mad
hyena, chasing poor innocent girls at the weekend! It was not just the
feminists who would disapprove, perhaps I would get in trouble with the
law, too! I was quite overcome with paranoia.16
I suddenly became convinced that I would end up finding myself in the
dock at Bow Street Magistrates. I was sure of it:

“So, Mr. Forrest,” the barrister would say. “You were hanging about
the streets in Central London, for a period of some time… harassing
women—”
“I wasn’t harassing them,” I’d argue.
“How long?” interrupts the District Judge.
“From 11.00am until lunchtime, sir.”
The District Judge scribbles a note.
“So you weren’t harassing them?” The barrister turns ominously
to his notes.
 “Let me read a note here from our witness… ‘He approached
me… I had no idea who he was… he came from behind… and I was
quite alarmed and shocked, and he put out a hand as if he were
going to touch me…’” He turns a page. “‘And then he just started
talking to me, rambling, seedy compliments—kind of—and then he
was telling me my English was no good. I was shocked.’”

I snapped back to reality.

This was stupid. I had now been walking around for about 20 minutes
and had not approached anyone. What should I do? Perhaps call it a day or
perhaps change location?
I decided to press on. Changing location would just mean wasting more
time travelling. Eventually a head of steam built up, like a pressure cooker,
and I started to become anxious that if this went on, I would never approach
a girl again in my life. The pressure was building up to dangerous levels. I
could blow. It could be messy. I had started to walk around erratically and
imagined that people were looking at me. I had covered the same stretch of
walkway a few times.
That busker is looking at me, I thought.
There was a guy, a street magician, doing card tricks or something by
the British Film Institute Cinema. He looked like a shabby, shambolic
individual. Yet even he would be taking the high ground. A tourist watching
the tricks glanced over at me.
The busker said something. In my imagination it ran, “Ignore him. He’s
one of these guys who is no good with girls and walks around the streets
going up to strangers trying to hit on them. It’s pretty weird shit.”
I quickened my pace and looked around.
 And then I saw them.
Coming straight at me was a hockey team of girls, five of them, all
pretty hot and all dragging small wheelie suitcases behind them. Perhaps
they were actually a hockey team. They wheeled past, one of them glancing
over. They were laughing and chatting.
I turned and charged, wheeling round in front of them all and put out a
hand to stop them like a friendly policeman.
“Excuse me, I just wanted to say, I just saw you guys walking by and I
had to come up and tell you all… that I think you—all—look really nice.”
There was a pause. They had stopped, at least.
“Thanks,” said one of them eventually.
But what’s next? I asked myself. What now?
Eventually I said, “Yeah. You all look great. Really nice.”
One of them said, “Okay… ” She was now unsure. I could tell that there
was a risk that the whole thing was going weird, if it was not already there.
“Yeah. Cool. With those… suitcases on wheels. Neat. Yeah. Er—”
One of the girls started moving forward.
“Er—like a hockey team, in fact! Perhaps you are?”
They all now moved forward, the first girl who had glanced at me now
glancing once more as she passed. Was it a glance of attraction? Or was it
pity?
I kicked the ground casually and glanced round at the street magician.
He was still doing tricks in front of his audience of tourists, but he was
staring at me.
That was it. I was done. I was definitely not doing any more approaches
before the bootcamp.
That counted as fucking 20 approaches! I said to myself.
Bootcamp – Day One

On the first day of bootcamp, we all met at a Pret A Manger near Marble
Arch on Oxford Street. There were six of us and two instructors, Tom
Torero and Jon Matrix. We felt like new recruits to a platoon. And indeed
we did feel as if we were about to go into battle. We were anxious and
sweaty, and I think all six of us felt nervous and self-conscious in spite of
our efforts to dress up and look good (early signs of what is termed “the
spotlight effect”). And we did feel as if we were about to throw ourselves
out of an aeroplane, pretty much.
It was not just lives that were at stake. Our male egos were on the line!
Tom led the conversation and asked us to all introduce ourselves as we
sat round in a huddle with our coffees. He was cheerful and positive, whilst
Jon was more austere and said little, but when he did it was right to the
point. There was a range of guys. Some were just like me, though younger.
They seemed like regular, normal guys who did not want to become pick-up
artists, but just wanted a handle on this area of their lives.
We each told the others why we were there. Our stories. One or two had
done the bootcamp before and wanted to brush up on their skills. Most,
though, were newbies.
We drank our coffees. We grunted greetings to each other. We were not
there for long. Tom said that we should get out onto the street, and the first
thing to do was to get over our anxieties and just pay a bunch of girls
compliments. Then he would take us through the routine. I was reassured
by the fact that there was no long-winded classroom performance or lecture.
This was NOT a regular course on a topic; we were on a bootcamp and it
was living up to its billing. This was infield training! Some of us I think had
hoped we could sit back and drink coffee and spend more time gassing
about the reason why we were there rather than taking action about it—we
would be handed free coffees, pads of paper and pens, watch slide shows,
and listen to guys talk about it all.
In spite of the fact they looked like a pair of renegades with hardly an
official qualification between them, though, these guys felt like the real
deal. There was no fancy stuff. The approach was to basically push you in
at the deep end, and it was a refreshing change. And is this not what men
want? Is this not what distinguishes us from women? I started to ponder. We
want to take up arms and go into battle and take action. We do not want to
sit on the sidelines and watch others do it! So off we went in a pack,
running about Oxford Street like lunatics, approaching girls like pinballs in
a machine, colliding with attractive pedestrians and creating sparks… or
just painful collisions. We all said essentially the same nonsense to the girls:
“Hey, hi. Listen, I know this sounds crazy, but I just saw you walk past and
I had to come back and say that I think you look really nice. Have a good
day.” Tom encouraged us and pushed us into conversations, whilst Jon, the
drill sergeant, kicked us up the arse and made sure we approached if he saw
a moment’s hesitation.
My first approach was a shop-girl who stood at the entrance to a shoe
shop, and she was delighted at the compliment. I saw her a few minutes
later, staring weirdly, as she saw other guys running about in front of the
shop going up to girls too, approaching them just as she had been
approached. There was no question that this was distinctly odd behaviour.
Perhaps not the fact of it, because most of the girls seemed to like it (and
after all, we were a pretty harmless bunch), but the fact that we were
undergoing military-grade training in it? That was unusual. But as they say,
desperate times call for desperate measures.
It was only after we had thrown ourselves about and gotten over a bit of
our initial anxiety when Jon and Tom took us down a back street. We
huddled around in a group as they gave us a mini “Street Masterclass” in
cold approach in the street and the daygame method.
And so now they shared with us the magical secrets of this world, which
we all found fascinating. They broke the whole process down into distinct
steps or stages. I could not believe how methodical and scientific it was.
The basics of it were: Street Stop - Compliment - Assumption Stacking -
Attraction Phase - Hook - Conversation - Close.17
First was the street stop. This might not be easy if you are in a busy
street and she is walking quickly. You should not approach her from the
front, but actually come up from behind, jogging gently past her for a few
metres, and then wheeling round a good distance in front of her and putting
a hand up to stop her like a friendly policeman. Hopefully she stops. If not,
fine. You shrug your shoulders, take it on the chin, and look out for the next
attractive girl.
If she stops, it is then time to open up a conversation, as follows:
“Excuse me, I know this seems [crazy/random/nuts], but I was [waiting
for my friend/doing some shopping/waiting for a bus] and saw you walk
past and I had to come over to you and tell you that I think you look really
nice.”
Now, the words are not important, although certain phrases help. What
is important is that you (1) call out the situation as being unconventional;
(2) say some stuff just to give her time to orientate herself; and (3) pay a
compliment.
 Equally important, if not more so, is to make sure you do it with
enthusiasm—and being nervous and showing that was fine. And of utmost
importance: smile. A cheeky smile or smirk is good. If you do not smile, it
would probably not matter what you say—she would walk off. It is also
very important to simply own the whole situation and be comfortable with
what you were doing. Being apologetic (and English) about it was not a
good idea. You are a man approaching a girl, so it is very important that you
do not duck out of this aspect of the street approach and stop her in a half-
hearted way.
Guys who do not get this down end up becoming disillusioned with
repeated failures. Thinking of yourself as a friendly policeman (or a drugs
baron or the local “top dog” or pimp, if that was more your style) is
essential, and you need to plant yourself firmly in front of her so she would
have to actively walk around you.
Assuming she had enjoyed the compliment and you had her attention,
the next problem was how to draw a complete stranger into talking with
you. The key to this is to use a conversational technique called
“Assumption Stacking.” You might choose to notice something about her
that is distinctive (her walk/ethnicity/appearance) and make an assumption.
The conversation needs to be about her, but the last thing you should do is
start asking questions. Rather, make an assumption about her. They gave us
three examples, which were pretty much the only assumptions you could
make in the circumstances. The first is where she is from, the second is
what her job is, and the third what she is doing right now. So you might say,
“Hey, I couldn’t help but notice you loaded down with shopping bags.
You’ve been running up a huge credit card bill on Armani and Prada in
Selfridges, I bet. Or maybe you’re more of a Primark girl. Or Primarmi.
Haha.”
Or you could simply guess which country she is from:
“I couldn’t help noticing you’ve got these clear, blue-green eyes. I’m
betting you’re from the Baltic—come to the UK to steal jobs from the lazy
Brits, no doubt.”
Whether your assumptions are true or false, it provokes a conversation,
and this is the beauty of assumption stacking. If she denies it, that’s fine,
and you can riff on that and question her sincerity:
“Really?” you say, cocking an eyebrow. “I don’t believe you.” She
laughs and insists you are wrong. If you hit it right on the nail, on the other
hand, bingo! That works too, and you can start to riff on that.
A good analogy is fly-fishing. You are throwing your fly out on the
water, seeing which fish will bite and what fly is best. If the assumption
does not go anywhere and the conversation dries up, then you try a different
fly in a different part of the lake. What you are actually fishing for is a topic
about which you can then riff, teasing her.
This is an important next stage, and the key to this stage is to be
generating attraction. Once you have landed a topic, you have to go for it
and do your stuff. They explained to us that we are not there to have a nice
conversation with someone; you are there because you are attracted to her
and want to take that forward. So you might actually tease her about being a
crazy shopaholic but then tell her (with a cheeky smile, looking her directly
in the eyes) that you like a girl who dresses well and takes care of herself.
“I like it,” you could say in that case. “I find you attractive.” Intent is a
key part of the interaction and you certainly must make your intentions
clear by the end of the interaction. They told us that this is a big sticking
point with guys. A lot of guys will default to a nice, enjoyable conversation
to avoid having to “show their dick,” as they put it. You have to make it
clear to her why you have stopped her, and that you are attracted to her and
would like to date her. This is what the crude term “showing your dick”
truly means.
In short, once you find the topic you then riff on it, using that time to try
and sexualise the chat. For example:
“So you’re from Spain, in fact? I’ve never been, actually. Too hot. All
that sun—you must come out in blotches. I have a friend who moved over
there for work and he told me everyone lays about during the day, sweating
and dehydrating, and then at night the girls go crazy. You thought they were
nice Catholic types you could introduce to your mother, but after sunset
they climb on the tables, throw back whole bottles of Sambuca, and start
dancing and behaving like lunatics and howling at the moon.”
“No waaay!” the girl will likely reply. “You should visit. It’s not like
that at all!”
As well as teasing, challenging was good, meaning that you were
qualifying a girl and expressing doubts about whatever she was saying,
rather than agreeing with everything she said. This worked well for guys
who were more the strong and silent type. It was clear that Jon Matrix was
more in this category, as this is what he had done in “Date Against The
Machine.” Once you open up conversation and get the energy going, you
might disagree with her. A normal human tendency is to mirror someone, so
for instance, when a girl says she is from Spain you might be tempted to
say, “Wow. Cool. That must be great. I’ve heard Barcelona is amazing. I’ve
never been but I’d really like to go.” Even worse, if you have actually been
to Barcelona, now you start garbling on about the entire trip you took there
when you were 15. This is a dangerous cul-de-sac. You need to keep the
conversation focused on her.
Instead of doing this you might choose to challenge her and simply say,
“Mmm… Spain is one of those dry, hot places I have never wanted to
visit.”
Now, to this day I still find this counter-intuitive. For a “nice guy” it
feels rude to be so monosyllabic and blunt to someone you have only just
met. But the implication behind everything that they were teaching us was
that it was “counter-intuitive”; you could almost take what you would
normally say and do the exact opposite and you would be in the right
ballpark.
As we listened, we all knew that what they were saying made sense, but
could not square it with what we had been taught about social dynamics.
For a 46-year-old guy who had spent a lifetime being a polite
conversationalist (which had worked so well in other areas of life, whether
social life or in business) this was a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn.
A key part of this second “attraction” stage was to get her to “hook.” It
is really important to develop enough self-awareness to be able to identify
this stage in the interaction. Eventually, if she is interested, she will
“invest.” She would give a sign. She might ask you a question. She might
ask where you were from, or what you were doing in town. She might also
give physical signals of interest and investment, such as playing with her
hair or crossing her ankles or legs.
Part and parcel of getting her to hook is being able to be quiet and listen
once you generate a conversation. And this means being prepared to let the
fish go. If she walks off, then fine. Throughout the interaction you should
attempt to cultivate an air of self-amusement about the whole thing. You are
enjoying yourself and could “take it or leave it.” So a key part of this is,
once you had been into the conversation a few minutes, being happy about
pausing and waiting to see whether she fills in the conversation.
Once you generate attraction and she has hooked, the next stage is to
back off and have a normal conversation. You should “dial it down”; now it
was time to be friendly and just chitchat for a couple of minutes. During
this stage it was good to “ground” the conversation and tell her a little bit
about yourself, such as where you are from, what you are doing in town or
what your job or life circumstances are. The point of this is to show
yourself to be a regular guy so that when she goes home later that night
(and talks to her friends about you) she does not categorise you as a street
performer or some talented, crazy guy who went around chatting up girls.
You could, in other words, overdo it, for instance if you were a theatrical
type who liked acting. Telling a flamboyant story about yourself or teasing
her massively and getting her to laugh her head off might make for a great
performance, but unless you had stepped out of your role and engaged in
boring talk about the weather and your job, she might not feel comfortable
later about the idea of meeting up.18
The final stage of the street approach is “the close.” This was pure sales.
You are selling yourself to her, and so you have to accept that you need to
follow through and actually ask for her number and be strong and confident
about it too. This is often the hardest area for guys, we were later told by
Jon Matrix. You need to “pull the trigger” and ask for her number, and not
in a polite, sweet way, but by saying, simply, “Let’s meet up for a drink
some time, what’s your number?” and be getting your phone out as you say
it, assuming she will comply. Confidence is of course an aphrodisiac for
women.
 Much of this was reinforced throughout the day, but the training huddle
covered the key points, and then that was it. It was time to get out there and
start to approach attractive women, hit on them, and get their numbers.

After this initial warm-up and the “back street induction,” we were paired
up, a coach with each pair. A third assistant coach now also appeared. I was
paired up with a young Asian dude, Waqar, who was handsome and well
dressed. Our coach was Tom Torero himself, and the three of us formed a
kind of “street sex-terrorist cell” as we went about the busy streets on a
Saturday afternoon engaged in covert operations against the female
population. We were on the hunt. I was not about to choke, and I was off,
like a rabbit out of the traps, almost as soon as I saw a remotely attractive
bird.
She was tall and gangly and pretty, and I took down the street, wheeled
round, planted myself in front of her, and paid a compliment. I was so full
of nervous energy and enthusiasm that she really had little choice but to
stop.
“What I noticed about you was your long legs and gangly walk,” I said.
“You’re like a flamingo.”
To my amazement, she laughed.
“I like it,” I added.
And now I was into assumption stacking and I ploughed on, not wanting
to lose the momentum.
“I’m guessing you’re from Romania. You have this gypsy look.”
“No!” she protested, “I’m Danish!”
“Really?”
 I switched to suspicion and started to tease her on the topic of Denmark.
“Denmark… all I can think of is Lurpak butter products, Vikings, and that
you won the European Cup once upon a time in the distance past. Or maybe
not. I forget. And I hear the girls get dead bored in winter and go nuts at
night, drinking rather than hibernating, dancing on tables, and breaking
furniture over the guys’ heads. My mother would DEFINITELY have told
me to be careful.”
And then she started to laugh. She defended her country and told me it
was nice and I should visit one day. And suddenly the ice was broken. She
asked me, “So… where are you from? Your accent is very… English?” In
daygame parlance she was “investing”.
I told her a little about myself and then somehow managed to fumble
my way through the close. She gave me her number.
I could not believe it. I went up to Tom and he congratulated me and
threw me a compliment. A part of me felt like a performing seal getting a
fish from the trainer, but another part of me had just got in touch with a
youthful abandon and sense of fun that I had not felt for years.
“That animal stuff actually works.” I said, with disbelief.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Obviously you don’t want to be comparing her
to an elephant or a rhino, but anything cute and unexpected, like a squirrel
or cute bunny rabbit, or giraffe if she is tall, is a good one, but be sure to
smile and tell her, ‘I like it.’”
During that afternoon there were of course plenty of girls who just
ignored me, blanked, or just said “sorry” before I had even opened my
mouth. Oxford Street is a busy street, after all—people are in a hurry a lot
of the time, and there are all sorts of obstacles, like street hawkers,
salesmen, chuggers (which are charity workers that are more synonymous
to a street hustler), as well as a good supply of homeless people and the odd
drunk. People are wary of someone who seems like they want something.
But by far the majority of girls I approached but did not give me their
number actually just seemed delighted to have been paid a compliment.
Many were married or had steady boyfriends, of course.
“Oh thanks, that’s so nice! You’ve made my day!”19 they would say,
laughing.
At times like that, I would wonder, Is this all that weird, after all?
The military “numbers-approach” method was a little weird, to be fair,
but I recalled the expression, “Use a thorn to remove a thorn. When the
thorn has served its purpose, you throw both thorns away.” I wondered
whether or not men had so lost touch with how to be men in this area that
something a little out of the ordinary was needed to jolt them back to reality
and the natural order of things.
It really did seem as if these were skills and techniques that could be
learned and actually worked. Like nearly every other guy there, I had surfed
the net and bought the odd boxed set of dating DVDs from America back in
the day, with all the tricks and pick-up lines. I might have tried one or two
in a half-hearted way and then cynically written it all off and let it sit at the
back of the cupboard, gathering dust. But it was starting to seem to me that
maybe this stuff could actually work if you actually got off your arse and
applied it.
It also started to seem to me as if I had entered another world. It
somehow felt as if I was under the radar, or as if I had put on a pair of 3D
spectacles and was seeing the world in a completely different light. Usually
the very idea of Oxford Street on a Saturday would fill me with the dread
that comes with having to hack through a human jungle, but it was now a
glittering forest of interest and intrigue. And now we stepped into
Selfridges (having tried the famous “Yad Stop” a few times in the street),
and I saw the teeming tide of shoppers in a fresh light. I was now a natural
predator in his habitat. I was top of the food chain. I felt I was now in an
environment with which I was comfortable, but had never really realised
was there. It really was like that film The Matrix, where time stands still
and the hero moves amongst the stationary pedestrians. I was learning how
to read if a girl was likely to be interested, if she glanced at me and gave me
an “indicator of interest,” or if she looked languid and bored. I was almost
able to tell if she was single, just by the way she carried herself, or whether
she looked like a “yes” girl, interested in some adventure. These are all
signals that the experienced street daygamer can read. They laugh at us
“normal” people, crashing about in our socially uncalibrated way.
I now ripped up Selfridges left, right, and centre. I was a cork that had
spent 20 years in a bottle, so what else would you expect? I could not stop!
Tom explained that the technique in a shop was slightly modified in that
you obviously did not do the jogging stop or anything like that, but you
basically respected her space and you would use the line, “Excuse me, can I
interrupt you just for a moment?” She was shopping and so it would be
uncalibrated20 to plunge straight in.
So I made a couple of approaches and experimented. I tried talking to a
shop girl. She was sweet but it went nowhere, and when I went back to
Tom, he said that shop girls were not straightforward—they were working
and were paid to be nice, so the dynamic was weird and it all risked being a
bit obvious and socially clumsy to hit on them. In truth, I was being rather
socially uncalibrated, but he said it was still a great way of just getting into
the zone and practising conversation skills.
 We broke for a coffee in Starbucks on the top floor. While we were
there, I wanted to know how to approach a girl seated at a table. I wanted to
know everything, so hungry was I for knowledge in this mystical area. Was
the technique the same? He explained that it was, but you just needed to
check with her that it was okay to interrupt her for a couple of minutes, and
it was, on balance, better to actually bend down and be super polite at first,
so you were at her eye level, rather than swagger up like some dick.
I had seen a cute girl—a brunette, mid-twenties probably—reading at a
table when we entered, and so I now went over to her. I crouched down.
“Excuse me, do you mind if I interrupt you just for a moment to say
something?”
She put her book down. I could tell she was a student of some
description, with time on her hands and with that relaxed, leisurely air that
students have, open to anything that the world sends them.
“Sure.”
She was evidently a confident student. Her accent however, was
difficult to read.
“I was just over there with my friends grabbing a coffee and I saw you
and just had to come over and say hello. You look really nice.”
“Oh, thanks!” She gave out a little laugh of surprise.
“Yeah, you’ve got a cool shawl—or scarf, or whatever you call these
things… ”
I pointed. And then I remembered Tom’s advice not to talk too much
about what the girl is wearing because then you come across as a fashion
consultant, or a hairdresser or something, which projects the wrong vibe.
Anyway, I had already gotten a handle on where to go with the conversation
and what assumption to make.21 That was easy.
 “I’m guessing you’re a lazy student with a few spare hours to kill,
pretending to study over a double macchiato.”
“Haha. Actually, I’m not even pretending to study. I’m just reading a
book.”
“You’ve got really piercing eyes and an exotic look. I can’t place it.
You’re probably from one of those ‘Stans.’ Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan,
Kazakhstan, et cetera.”
“No, Turkey, in fact.”
“Ah, never been. But everyone says I should go. I did Ancient Greek at
University and that part of the world is actually more full of Greek
monuments, old Asia Minor, than Greece itself, virtually.”22
I didn’t know whether I should (1) start talking about my educational
history or (2) be showing off my knowledge of the Ancient Greek world,
but I was just saying stuff to keep the conversation going. Though now I
wondered whether perhaps I should not have been teasing Turkish girls
instead and saying, “I’ve never been to Istanbul, but I have a friend who
went once and said that all the women are beautiful but go crazy at night
and start dancing on the tables. It’s all that exotic dancing.”
But I felt uncomfortable just following the stock lines, and felt I had to
be original.
“I’m Alex.”
“Afmae.”
We ended up having a really interesting conversation and she gave me
her number, though she never returned my texts. Later I was to come to the
scandalous conclusion that women are just as shallow as men are, and they
are not going to become attracted to you just as the result of a really
interesting conversation. The stock routine would probably have worked
better.
But in the meantime, I went back to Tom and excitedly talked about
how amazing it was to just be able to generate a great conversation with a
girl that you had just met.
Now I was on fire. Even the other students seemed taken aback by my
quick transformation. And now I suddenly noticed that my partner, Waqar,
seemed to have disappeared into the shadows and I had hardly noticed he
was there for the last hour. He did not seem to be making many approaches,
but he seemed a handsome, well-dressed, and confident guy. Perhaps he
was just weirded out by the fact that we were now in a shop and not the
street, where the “spotlight effect” of other people being in close proximity
was stronger.
I now saw a girl on a crowded escalator and run onto the escalator after
her, but then, as I was running up the escalator I saw a more attractive girl
going the other way and changed tack and ran down.
“Hey!” I said.
To my surprise she turned and smiled.
“You look great,” I called. “Really nice.”
She smiled some more.
“How’s the shopping spree going?”
She gave me a coy look, disarmed, and smiled. “Good, thanks.”
The escalator was packed and yet no one seemed interested, but I had
not calibrated it right, as now we stepped off the escalator at the ground
floor and I was behind her and not in front of her as she was walking off.
Nevertheless, I was surprised to see her turn and wait to see what I would
say next.
 “Not spending Daddy’s trust fund all at once, I hope.”
It was not a brilliant line, but then again I was noticing that the words
hardly mattered, if the energy and vibe was there, and whilst she would
certainly have walked away if I had used that line in a bar or nightclub, here
it was different. She was just magnetised by my ballsy approach, I guess.23
She laughed, but then I noticed her glance round and a few yards away
was another girl, who had also stopped and was glaring hard in our
direction. She was a bit plain and had a scowl on her face. The cute girl
shrugged and said, “Thanks,” then moved off to join her friend.
Shit! I did not know what to do. This was not fair. We had something
going, for god’s sake. She was really cute. And now just a look from her
friend and she was leaving. Her friend’s look was one of pure disapproval.
She was the gatekeeper of female sexuality, clearly, as far as this friendship
was concerned, anyway. Whilst her pretty friend had lit up like a Christmas
tree she had scowled like a bulldog with piles. Was this some sort of female
jealously thing? I had heard tales that girls were not all sugar and spice and
all things nice; they were not all like Jenny Woodhouse. This girl was of
course what is endearingly termed a “cock block.”
“Sorry,” the girl I had approached said, shrugging and walking off with
her friend, who continued to glower at me.
It was funny. Society’s chaperone. There she was. Girls were not
allowed to be flirted at. They were not allowed to stand there and have a
randy guy hit on them, basically saying to them, “Do you wanna fuck?”
Especially not on the ground floor of a major department store on a
Saturday afternoon! With crowds of other members of society around them.
Tom later explained that the golden rule in cases like this is that you
engage the friend, win her over or at least include her in the conversation,
before chatting up the pretty one.
Waqar now said he preferred being out on the street, and so we walked
out of Selfridges. Then history repeated itself: the very moment we stepped
out I saw a really beautiful Middle Eastern girl glide by and glance at me.
Tom nudged me into action.
She had given us an “IOI”—an indicator of interest—clear as day. A
tiny moment or glance that previously I would have simply been puzzled by
but now I leapt into action and chased her down the street at full pace.
I was now very much in a zone, and when I did the classic Yad Stop, it
was strong and confident and I was full of enthusiasm and smiles. She was
young, probably not much more than 20, and very demure.
I paid a compliment, which was not hard as she was stunning—and coy,
as it turned out. She instantly “hooked,” it seemed to me, as she smiled and
looked down, and then I started the assumption stacking and said, “I’m
guessing you’re from a Middle Eastern country.”
“Saudi Arabia.”
I was right. It was weird. I continued. “Oh no! Some deadly hot country
with too much sand and crazy politics and girls who are like sexual pressure
cookers ready to blow. Haha.” And to my surprise, she did not react
defensively and nor did she laugh. Instead she agreed and amplified me!24
“Yep. Saudi Arabia. It’s a wasteland. There is nothing there.”
I did not know quite how to respond to this. She really did not like her
country, and my opening remark had made her look glum.
But then she smiled at me again and crossed her ankles.
I cannot recall what I said at that moment but I started blathering
something as I could see I was going to have to do most of the talking. And
then, as I was blathering, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that someone
else was there and had also stopped. I had not noticed her at first. Oxford
Street is crazy busy on a Saturday, and I had been so pumped and focused
on the girl that I had not taken note until now, with this rather unusual
situation I found myself in. It was an older woman and she was all burka-ed
up. She was also wearing a weird and suspicious smile.
The earlier lesson came to my aid. This was a “two-set.” Mother and
daughter, perhaps, but the rule still applied. Hit on the ugly friend… or ugly
mother.
Wow, I thought in passing, is that what she’s going to look like in 20
years…?!
So I opened the mother: “Hey!” I beamed. “You must be enjoying the
sites and sounds of London—holiday or business?”
She hesitated, but the suspicion in her smile faded as I really was so full
of pleasantness.
“Yes,” she said. Then added, “But part business.” Then, “This is our—
my daughter’s first time in London. For break holiday.” She moved in,
protective of her daughter. Only later did I realise what was going on here,
that the idea of a man hitting on a girl in the street in broad daylight was
totally unacceptable in her culture. Somehow I mastered the situation,
quickly seeing the need to pile on the comfort and reassurance and dial it
down, so I played the “English lawyer” card. I waffled on about how I was
in business and even produced a business card and encouraged her to look
me up if her business interests in London needed a lawyer.
Cool, I thought. This stuff is even great for networking.
And then I turned back to the girl and started to escalate. After all, this
was what you did, right? We had already been warned by the dudes not to
turn the conversation into polite chitchat; “Sexual, not Social” was their
mantra. So I took her hand as I introduced myself and we exchanged names
as I stroked her hand.
That was a mistake.
Whooosh! Suddenly this ancient, decrepit mother swept in on me like
Mohammed Ali and grabbed her daughter’s hand away, spun her and
dragged her quickly into the crowds with a horrified scowl, and I was left
disorientated and floundering.
The girl looked really disappointed and cast a look over her shoulder. I
had been her escape plan, evidently.
This was annoying. She was hot and into me and wanted rescuing, like a
princess from a horrible witch-genie. It was Arabian Nights. But I had
barely mastered the skill of paying a compliment, let alone paving the way
for clandestine sex with a hot young girl from a highly paternalistic and
religious society where I would have had my hands cut off if a policeman
had seen me.

That night we went back to the Daygame H.Q.—a flat around the corner
from Marble Arch Tube. We piled into a lift. It was one of those old ones in
a metal cage that we squashed ourselves into. It was half-broken, and we
had to hold the button or else we risked being stranded between floors.
In the flat we gathered in a crowd around an old television and sat on a
dirty old sofa as we watched videos. Of us.
During the day, a kind of covert-cameraman had been filming us. He
was an innocuous, inconspicuous, and rat-like character. He moved about
unnoticed, like many rats in London. He would park his camera quietly on
top of a dustbin or shield it under his jacket by a bus stop as he slunk in
close to film us. No one on Oxford seemed to notice him. It was obvious
that everyone was moving at speed, or even if they were not, they were
preoccupied—people were too tied up in their own internal world to notice
or care what we were doing. These guys moved about the crowds, almost
like I imagined professional pickpockets to do, unseen.25
It was such a strange world. It once more reminded me of putting on a
pair of 3D spectacles and seeing an extra dimension in life. And strange
characters and their henchmen peopled this strange world. They lived there
and were happy there. It was their habitat. Tom Torero himself reminded me
of Banksy street art. He was thin, lithe, with black shabby boots, a cool
leather jacket and t-shirt, and some sort of stud or jewellery or tattoo. And
yet when he talked he had the accent like the head of The Oxford Debating
Society. He moved amongst the crowds with an impish smile, flashing a
sexual smile or look when an attractive girl glided by, to see if she would
“hook” and give him an IOI. And then he was no longer Mr. Nice Guy, but
Mr. Badass.
I started to wonder later whether that Saudi Arabian girl knew about this
hidden world somehow.26 She had flashed us an IOI, after all, subtle and
imperceptible. These guys were operating under the radar, and these
attractive girls knew what was up. They knew the game and were operating
under the radar with them.
But back to the film-rat dude and the Daygame H.Q. He had also been,
at points, shackling us up with radio microphones, and we now watched our
own street approaches on television whilst Jon Matrix took charge and ran
through them, pointing out our strengths and talking through our sticking
points. Almost universally the main problem was simply guys being “too
nice.” We were all trying to please the girls and were being semi-apologetic
about asking for her number, even after we had done all the hard work and
gotten her to invest in us and in the conversation.
For example: “So listen, er… I know this sounds crazy, but I don’t
know… Do you think—what I’m saying is, would you like to meet for a
cup of tea, perhaps, sometime? If you like?”27
The girl might by now have second thoughts, and girls are naturally
wired to resist. She then says, “I don’t know, but thanks, it’s been nice
talking.”
And we would say, “Sure. Cool. Have a great day.” And then wander
off, pleased we had actually made it into a proper conversation.
“No, no, no, no, no…!” Jon Matrix said. He winced as he saw it.
“Just say, ‘Let’s meet for a drink…’”
He waved his mobile. “Take out your phone and ask her, ‘What’s your
number?’ And then stop and wait. Hold your phone out and begin dialing
like it is obvious that she is about to give it to you. Or give her the phone
and she will automatically type in the digits.”
He had an exasperated look, explaining that he had seen so many great
sets that day and so many missed opportunities.
“Close strong. Then walk away.”
We were encouraged to get an early night and not go out and go crazy.
None of us needed persuading; the day had been exhilarating but
exhausting.
I walked back with one of my brothers-in-arms—Waqar, in fact. He was
a bit down. We walked along a back street and he said, “I’m going to get an
early night.”
“Don’t want to join us for a drink?”
 “Nah. I’ve come all the way from Manchester. Think I might just crash
back at my hotel.”
He was good looking, probably the most of all of us, and wore a smart-
casual top and jacket and a cool, Crombie coat, and had his black hair
slicked back. But he was traumatised. I realised that he had found that
afternoon really hard. He said that I had done really well and it was now
obvious he had felt in my shadow the whole day. I told him, “Look, you’re
like—twenty something?”
“Twenty-eight, yeah.”
“I’m a 46-year-old guy who has been on the sidelines his whole life—
I’m hungry! I am not going to be wasting time.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “It’s pretty crazy, though, isn’t it?”
He did not turn up the next morning. We never saw him again.
The platoon was a man down.

Bootcamp – Day Two

The next day it was raining. We all thought that this was a major setback—
and perhaps secretly hoped that we would do no daygame that day. But it
was in fact no problem at all. We just went to Westfield Shopping Centre,
Shepherd’s Bush, a massive shopping complex. London really was
daygame gold for meeting people in the street, and it was no coincidence
that it had taken off in this capital city. The streets were narrow and
higgledy-piggledy, filled with interesting buildings and loads of shops and
malls—literally one hundred different spots you could daygame. There was
Covent Garden, Soho, Stratford Shopping Centre, Selfridges, Harrods,
Knightsbridge, Southbank, Westfield… the list went on and on.
On this day I was with Jon Matrix28 and buddied up with another guy
who shared my name, a Filipino also named Alex. He had done this stuff
before, so he knew some of the lingo and looked cool and relaxed as the
three of us walked around the mall in relative silence. With Tom and the
Asian dude we had been a babble of energy, and conversation went in a
stream, with Tom constantly encouraging us and pushing us into
interactions with girls in the hubbub of Oxford Street on a Saturday
afternoon, but this was different.
We met quite early on Sunday and had coffees together. Tom explained
that Waqar had not turned up—it was nothing to worry about, and it
happened from time to time. After a brief refresher of the method, we
paired up once more and went into Westfield Shopping Centre. The mall
was massive, and although it was busy enough, it was not crammed. It was
like a Western movie as the three of us walked casually around like
gunslingers looking for a fight.
Not a word was spoken. Jon was big on cutting out unnecessary
conversation. A few of the guys had complained that he had been a bit “off”
with them on the Saturday. But it was clear to me he was just trying to get
guys to cut out the chitchat and focus on what they were doing. Being still
and grounded was important to him.
For me this was perfect. Encouraging me to make approaches and
gently pushing me into interactions had been great on Saturday, but today
on Sunday it would have felt like I was being treated as a child. I needed to
be treated like an adult and be left to make my own decisions. Jon would
invite one of us to approach and the other one just watched. He would then
walk around, and there would be no conversation. He would simply wait for
us to find a girl who was attractive to approach.
There was a host of weaselly thoughts that came up, of course—many
potential reasons not to approach. A girl would seem to be in too much of a
hurry. A girl would be wearing a frown. Or she would look too old. Or too
young. Or too angry. Or too plain. Or too attractive. Or I would simply not
be “feeling it.”
The stock response from Jon to any of these weasels was, “If you would
like to have sex with her, you should approach her. End of story.”
I actually got three or four telephone numbers that day. One was a really
gorgeous Brazilian girl, the very last approach I made on the way back to
Marble Arch Tube, in the rain. She had an umbrella up and it did not look
like an auspicious situation, as she was hurrying to the Tube to take cover.
But that was just another weasel telling me, She’s not going to want to stop
in the rain, for god’s sake. Especially as she’s loaded with shopping
hurrying back home. Don’t do it, man.
I did, though, and suddenly it was if there was no rain and no shopping
and the situation was not weird. I paid a simple compliment and then made
an assumption that she was a student.
“Yes. From Brazil. I’m staying with my uncle and aunt and looking for
some work to pay for studies.”
“Cool. And enjoying the beautiful, refreshing UK summer rain. Loaded
up with shopping, too. I hope you’ve been behaving yourself and not
maxing out shopping on your uncle’s credit card.”
She laughed and defended herself, of course. It was interesting to me
that getting original or being creative was not the key here. Once you had a
few basic assumptions up your sleeve, you did not need to perform a whole
pantomime show. I suddenly felt myself a more protective male in that
moment. She crossed her legs and when I flipped out my phone and said,
“Let’s stay in touch and have a glass of wine sometime,” she gave me her
number automatically. Some sort of primal programming or wiring was
operating.
I also had the opposite experience and got chatting with a girl but she
did not stop. I ended up walking with her and trying to keep in step and
keep the conversation going. I could feel Jon watching me from a distance,
saying to himself, Where the fuck is he off to?
I was just walking and walking. She was going quite fast and she was
dragging me along with her like a kite. I was flapping about, and then I
found myself outside a service entrance to the mall and she was opening a
door and now giving me a slightly weird look.
Is he going to follow me through this door now? she must have been
thinking.
I peeled off and returned to Jon, feeling stupid.
“Nah, you don’t want to be following them,” he advised. “It’s too
dangerous, as you end up supplicating them and creating the opposite of
attraction.”
But the most notable interaction of the day was with a white South
African. She was about 30, with a cool hat and a waistcoat. A little quirky,
but also confident, as if she worked in management or something.
I executed a Yad Stop and paid a compliment by telling her she looked
pretty, and I then noticed she was wearing a tie! Very quirky. It was an easy
opening conversation.
“Quirky. I like it. You’re proper well dressed for a Sunday at Westfield.
Obviously a classy girl.”
 Now that I had paid the compliment I needed to tease. “Or perhaps
you’re one of those privately-educated types, a St. Trinian’s girl, whose
daddy owns a ranch or is an oil tycoon and you’ve been petted and
protected and spoilt from an early age.”
She liked it and threw her head back and laughed. She was attractive
and confident, and I noticed how much easier this made the interaction. It
had been a feature throughout the weekend.
It seemed rude, but it had worked, so I went on:
“I’m guessing you went to Roman Catholic boarding school. Or a
convent.”
“Oh my god!” she said, laughing, “I did!”
“You’re a nun?”
“No, private boarding school!”
She now laughed some more. The laughter seemed to be a kind of an
aphrodisiac in the moment, and I noticed myself take a tiny step forward
toward her.29 I did not move. I just stood there. The normal tendency is to
run away from a situation, but now I decided to do the reverse and move
towards her, emboldened by Jon’s encouragement to be more physical and
to stand your ground and stick with it.30
“But my daddy’s not an oil tycoon. I’m a PA in the energy sector. So…”
“Close.”
“I guess.”
“I’m Alex.”
“Helen.”
What was different about Helen was that she was the “right age” for me,
meaning I felt she was long-term girlfriend material. She had a good job
and was confident and could hold a good conversation, unlike some of the
younger girls I had stopped. There was also something else, which was that
we were both products of the private boarding school system. She was
confident, perhaps even a hint of arrogance and cool indifference, which
seemed to be epitomised in her decision to wear a hat and a tie on a Sunday.
Quirky. Self-assured. I have always enjoyed and responded to girls who are
a little more confident about themselves like this, rather than girls who may
be super attractive but are a bit too coy and demure.
We talked for a while, and I remembered to keep my mouth shut for
long periods. Perhaps this was the influence of Jon Matrix, Mister
Monosyllabic himself. Short, to the point, and steady.
At the end of the conversation I produced my phone and had no
problem taking her number.
“Okay, I’ll text you. You better get back to your shopping. But don’t go
too crazy on Daddy’s credit card. Haha.”
Jon congratulated me on how it went and felt sure she would respond to
texting.
I reflected on what had happened and it seemed to me that, after barely
two days, I had met a girl who ticked my boxes, whom I was sexually
attracted to but also found interesting. And I had not met her on an
awkward “blind date” set up by a friend. I had not met her online only to
discover she looked nothing like her photo. It was not a girl I had met in a
club, whilst drunk, whom I may have even snogged, but who in the cold
light of day has second thoughts about the whole thing and never returns
your call. It was certainly not as flaky as Tinder. And nor was it a girl in my
own social circle, where you orbit each endlessly, waiting for the right
moment but constantly under pressure because somehow the stakes seem
that much higher.
 This was incredible stuff.
What an excellent way to meet a potential mate, I thought to myself.

At the end of the weekend we had another debriefing at the Daygame H.Q.
Jon took us through texting, giving us the basics and actually giving us the
wording of the first feeler text:
“Hey crazy St. Trinian’s girl, fun if random to meet you today. Are you
always this friendly to strangers in the street?! Alex”
That was it. He advised us never ask a question, like, “How did your
shopping go? Did you find that dress?” And keep it short. If she replies, she
is interested. Maybe exchange a couple of innocuous, fun comments and
then “roll off.” A day or two later you “ping her” something like this:
“Hey, working on my tan in the park with a great book. Life is good.”
Just something situational. This allows her to respond naturally, not
feeling as if she has to answer a question. When she is texting naturally,
then it is time for the “Date Request.” Make sure to give her a couple of
options, and do not choose a Saturday or a Friday when she is likely to have
made plans with her friends, especially if she is attractive.
That night I met up with Chris. We sat in a bar on Union Street,
downstairs. It was just us and a bar girl at a very quiet cocktail bar. He was
as fascinated as I was, and he was amazed that the thing had worked so well
and I had gotten so many numbers.
I told him about the Brazilian. My feeler text had come back
“undelivered.” Her number had been a Brazilian one as she was only
recently in the UK and not staying long. Chris, the IT geek, went through
all the possible permutations of what could have happened, from incorrect
international dialling codes to various permutations of a crucially misplaced
numeral. As if the fact it was 32 and 23 was the difference between hot,
South American sex with a Rio Carnival Princess and a wank in the
bathroom. She had probably not really cared what number she had given
me. I never got through to her, and if she had received my text, she never
responded. That was the last I heard from her.
Helen, the South African with the tie, was a different story, however.

15 This “kvetch,” as the Germans call it, is a daygamer’s constant companion, I was to later learn.
You spend most of your dating life with this fellow parroting away on your shoulder.
16 Believe it or not, the police have created a bylaw in Nottingham—a policy note of some
description, initiated by the Chief Constable—that they may arrest men approaching women in the
street.
17 And indeed, Andy Yosha had produced a weighty tome on the subject, The Blueprint. It resembles
more a Haynes Car Workshop Manual than it does a book on dating.
18 And on a few occasions later on, girls actually asked me whether they were on “Candid Camera”
and being interviewed for television. I like acting, and whilst this is helpful to a point, you must dial
it down. The Candid Camera interactions never stuck.
19 Actually, during my entire time doing this stuff, when I was being rebuffed, the girls nevertheless
seemed to like the fact I had taken the trouble to pay a compliment. Surprisingly few were angry or
annoyed.
20 Calibration is a popular term in the daygame and seduction lexicon. It means being aware of
where a girl is during the course of a street interaction or on a date and adjusting your behaviour
accordingly. So it might be where you have overdone it in terms of generating attraction (too much
teasing and challenging, for example, or too much physicality) and so should dial it down and
generate more comfort. A girl is going to need to be comfortable with you before she makes out with
you and certainly before she has sex.
21 I was later to learn that really looking to find something unique about the girl that attracts you
specifically to her is a real key to unlocking a conversation. Be observant. You would be amazed at
how often a guess about a girl comes off correctly. After finding the courage to approach and pay a
compliment, the next hard part is moving seamlessly into a conversation. I later learned to use the
expression, “What I noticed about you was—,” and found this was an excellent tool to move through
that tricky hiatus after the initial compliment.
22 Demonstrating that you are knowledgeable and intelligent is good, if used sparingly. I have had
dates with girls who were genuinely turned on by intelligence.
23 But having lines that worked gave me that confidence.
24 Amplification is one of the many tools in the Daygamer’s toolbox, one which you use on a girl
who challenges you. For example, if a girl says, “You’re old,” you respond by amplifying and
keeping it sexualised: “Yes, nearly 87. Thank god for plastic surgery! And it’s been a bad week; the
clinic told me on Monday I only have one sperm left.” And on the subject of being old, some girls do
have strong views on this, but in fact even they can be turned around. Wait for the later chapter,
“Hobbit, Essex Boys & The Text”.
25 Filming in a public place is not illegal, in the UK at least. The test is, “an expectation of privacy.”
26 Daygamers call it “The Secret Society.”
27 Imagine Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and A Funeral. Imagine Hugh Grant in any Richard Curtis
film, in fact. The actor himself obviously got annoyed with this persona as he did a one-hundred-and-
eighty degree turn in, Bridget Jones’s Diary.
28 Incidentally Jon Matrix really wanted to just find a girlfriend - and did after working for a couple
of years with Daygame.com. Last time I met him he was in a very happy long-term relationship. Tom
Torero went in the opposite direction.
29 A technique to be credited to the notorious Nick Krauser, whom you will learn a little about later.
30 It reminded me of skiing, where the natural tendency is to want to sit back on your skis because it
feels safe, when in fact you should try and move forward over the skis, looking down the mountain,
which feels precarious.

OceanofPDF.com
 5

Reality Strikes Back

I had been blasted out of the cannon, and like a cartoon cannonball circus
act I sailed way, way up into the sky and through the clouds. I floated after
that weekend. Floated amongst the clouds - dreamy, wistful and starry-eyed.
I fancied I saw a beautiful angel on a cloud, a South African one in a cute
hat, plucking her harp and sending me salacious, un-angelic glances and
throwing her head back and laughing, her earrings tinkling like bells. I was
in Wonderland. I had broken through! My life as a single, sexless chode
was surely about to end! Moreover, I was now in another world that only I
could see and most of the population were unaware of. Down below they
walked about, busy bees or ants streaming down Oxford Street, funnelling
in and out of department stores and becoming angry, irritable, impatient…
It was indeed another world, and it was a world in which time operated
at a difference pace and there was immense space where there had
previously been claustrophobia. There was such opportunity. I had always
hated shopping in Oxford Street, and travelling back and forth on the
transport system was just as bad. But now this was the highlight of my life!
Being on the Tube, or in a packed bus, jostling up an escalator, swerving
past pedestrians… I now found a simple joy in this environment. It was a
playground. And it cost nothing.
 I was even getting good exercise, by simply walking about. On one
occasion I recorded it on an app and I had walked ten kilometres. I did not
have to pay an entry fee to the salsa club, or membership to the gym, or fees
to a speed-dating event or online dating membership. I just needed a good
pair of shoes! Where else would you go but Oxford Street (or
Knightsbridge, or New Bond Street if you were feeling more upmarket)?
In the two years ahead, whenever I started to doubt my decision to get
into daygame, I reflected on these early days. What was so wrong with
going up to a girl, paying her a compliment, and engaging in a
conversation? What was wrong with it being a flirty conversation? Two
people of the opposite sex naturally warming to each other and getting to
know each other, with no one else on their shoulders to judge or criticise?
And no alcohol involved. No awkward mechanism in the way (dating site,
club activity) to hinder or dilute the interaction.31
It was actually a really efficient way of dating. In a busy area you could
approach ten girls in an hour or two and be sure you were attracted to them
by a short follow-up conversation. You can learn a lot about someone in
even two minutes. And then you reveal yourself to them and both of you
can make a decision about whether you want to go forward. It was a far cry
from the pick-up artistry of California where guys did magic tricks in front
of girls at bars and clubs and seduced them, doing them in toilets or side-
alleys or in the back of the car.
Anyway, I realised that I must get back out into the streets without
delay. Whilst it was a great springboard, I knew that the bootcamp was only
the beginning.
The next time I went out was the very next weekend. I did not want to lose
any momentum. And I had two fabulous interactions…
It was a Saturday morning and I jumped onto the Jubilee Line and went
up to Bond Street on the Tube. I wandered into the shoe section at the back
of Selfridges and was met with the glittering arrays of both shoes and girls.
Fancy actually being at home and enjoying such an environment! I even
became familiar with the décor and the arrangements. There was, for
example, a neat section where they had these old cinema chairs with red
velvet that I used to perch on. I would just soak up the atmosphere for a few
minutes whilst I watched the girls mingle around, checking out shoes like
squirrels checking out spots on the grass where they have hidden their nuts,
or pigeons pecking at the ground. Girl world! Fascinating.
At this point in my development I knew not to hesitate or I was doomed.
That was my mantra. So I approached the first attractive girl I set eyes on,
and she was very attractive indeed. She was a brunette, French, not too
skinny but with nice curves in all the right places. She was smartly dressed
and feminine. She was looking lost, holding a shoe, and casting her eyes
around the shop floor, which at that particular moment was quite empty.
“Hey, sorry,” I said on my approach, “and I know this is a bit crazy, but I
just saw you and I had to come up to you and say hello and that I think you
look really nice.”
She beamed and said, in a French accent, “Thank you. That’s really nice
of you to say so.”
It was clear she was comfortable in her femininity and knew how to
take a compliment.
“Yeah, I noticed you looking a bit lost, too, as if you were like stunned
by one hundred and one fashion decisions hitting you at the same time.
You’re probably buying yet another pair of shoes when you already have
one hundred and fifty pairs in the back of your wardrobe.”
“Haha,” she laughed. “Not that many.”
“But a few, right, like well on the way towards three figures?”
“Maybe.” She laughed a bigger laugh.
“Oh my god, I’ve accidentally started to chat up a crazy Imelda Marcos
clone,” I said.
“Actually, I was just looking for a member of staff,” she replied, still
laughing.
At that precise moment I saw a shop assistant walk past and I waved
them over, “Excuse me, do you mind if we grab you for a moment?”
Suddenly I was “The Boss.” This was awesome. She was in my frame. She
explained to him that she was looking for a certain pair of shoes and had
been everywhere as she had been shopping previously but could not
remember which shop. They did not have the shoes, and I resumed the
conversation. I fancied to myself that waving the shop assistant over had
helped established a male-female frame and now the conversation ran quite
freely.
“I have to be honest,” I said, “I’ve got a thing for French brunettes, ever
since I was basically molested by one as a kid.”
This was daft enough to intrigue her, and was actually kind of true.
“Yeah, I went on camping holiday in Wales and there was this older girl,
probably 15. I was about 13, and we sat on the riverbank and talked in the
dark and it was my first sexual experience, in fact. Without anything
happening though, if you know what I mean. She was an au pair and I’m
sure was eyeing up having her way with me.”32
 She laughed. Now I knew I had her invested and did not need to plough
on, and so dialled it down. Time to be Mr. Boring.
“You live here, I guess. Your English is quite good.”
“Yes, but actually I’ve taken time off and am doing an executive MBA
before I go back to work.”
“Ah, yes!” I said breezily, and was just about to start talking about my
own experience on an executive MBA, but I remembered the advice not to
start talking about yourself when a girl mentions a topic, hijacking it. And
yet the pressure was very strong to mention my ill-fated year at Cranfield
Business School and start riffing on that.
“Which one?” I asked, meaning to compare it with Cranfield and tell
her that Cranfield was one of the best. Conversation was now easy and I
saw the need to hold back and try and not say too much, although I was
desperate to tell her all about my life and how I had done a business MBA
too.
“INSEAD. I’m working for this company who put me through it, but
now that I’ve done it, I’m thinking of leaving the company.”
“Well, that’s good, and once you have finished your earning potential
will be double what it was. I guess actually it’s probably all designed just to
get rich to satisfy your shoe fetish.”
She laughed.
I continued, “But I like it. Shoes I think are really important. People
notice a good pair of shoes.”
“Yes, they do.”
“And you have hundreds to choose from.”
I suddenly remembered to make sure it was clear I was attracted.
“Anyway, listen, I’m attracted to you and would like to see you sometime
for a glass of wine. Let’s exchange numbers.”
“Ah, I’ve got a boyfriend,” she said.
Now, what was I going to do about this? Well, on the bootcamp this had
come up a few times. The view had been that girls will just say this and
may not actually have one, or they will have one but may not be serious. So
we were encouraged to push through this objection by saying something
cheeky.
On this occasion I said, “Ah, I see. Like an accessory boyfriend? Like a
handbag boyfriend? Let’s be honest, girls like to have nice things, handbags
for instance, and why shouldn’t they? Also boyfriends, particularly nice
ones that they can parade around.”
I was not sure where I was going with this, as it was tantamount to
suggesting she was shallow. Fortunately the interaction had gone well and
she laughed, but I still decided to change tack and get serious for a moment.
So I went with a line that I had heard during the bootcamp. “Listen, I’m a
guy and you’re a girl, and I like you and want to stay in touch. Who knows
where life will lead? Let’s stay in touch on Facebook.”
This was something that the guys on the bootcamp also recommended,
as it was a much less aggressive way of closing, and in fact, the truth is,
after all, that attractive girls do go through a lot of boyfriends.
And to my surprise, she agreed. We both got out our phones and hooked
up on Facebook. The important thing was that, whilst it was unlikely to go
anywhere, I had got myself into “the zone”.33

After this interaction I felt really pumped up. I walked down the escalators
and arrived at the bottom floor. I decided I deserved a break and started to
mingle around the coffee machine section. There was a bit of a buzz as they
were doing a demo and inviting people to try out the machines and make
themselves a cup of coffee. And there I saw another cute brunette, again
with nice curves in all the right places. She was younger than the French
girl, mid-twenties I would say. She was obviously with her mother, and the
two of them were buying a coffee machine.
Now, after my experience with the mother-daughter set at the bootcamp,
I felt ready for anything, and anyway, I was on a roll after the French girl. I
think my opener was really cheesy, but I was learning that cheese works.
“Hey, can I just say I think you look really cute? Really nice. Perhaps
you’re just excited at buying a coffee machine. Are you sisters?” I glanced
at the mother.
“Hahaha,” went the girl, “this is my mother.”
“Ah, so you’re coffee nuts, I guess.”
“Yes,” said the mother. “We’re buying a machine for my flat in London.
Just moved here.”
“Well, I guess you’ve come to the right place. Selfridges is a grotto of
delights and just a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon walking around.”
“Yes, exactly! It’s my favourite store of all.” She was agreeing with me.
So far so good.
“So she’s persuaded you to get out your chequebook this weekend, once
again… ” I said, turning to the mother.
“I’m afraid so.” The mother smiled.
“It’s also an expensive store, but—sorry, what’s your name?”
“Jessie Rouget.”
“I guess ‘Jessie’ has expensive tastes. She looks like one of those high-
maintenance girls who likes to have a holiday flat in Monaco,” I said,
continuing to banter with the mother.34
 “Actually, I’m studying to be a lawyer,” interrupted Jessie. She said this
quite seriously, defensively, and I did not realise at the time that I had hit a
nerve. She was going through a phase when she had decided to get serious
with her life. She was a party girl—an intelligent one, but a party girl
nevertheless. She knew exactly how to smile and make a guy feel good and
laugh at his jokes but she could put her foot down too.
“Ah, right. Me too,” I said.
“Really? What do you do?”
“Yeah, I’ve got a firm here in London.”
“You’ve got your own law firm. Cool. You looking for interns?” She
laughed and hit me lightly on the arm. “Just kidding!” Jessie turned out to
have this endearing way of showing her ambitions and desires and then
laughing them off.
Whilst we messed about with the coffee machines, I learned more about
her. She was from Canada, from a city in Saskatchewan, in the North. Her
mother was visiting, and her sister lived in London. She had just started her
legal training, but it seemed it was a bit later than usual and she must have
taken time out because she was in fact in her mid-twenties at that time. We
exchanged numbers and I gave her a business card and told her to get in
touch. I could not get her phone because she had not been long in the UK
and did not have a number, so instead she gave me an email.
Bringing up the law firm seemed innocuous at the time, and it had been
impossible to resist bringing it up. It made me look good. But actually,
looking back, it was a very early sign of how the relationship later became
set. Although I had blithely mentioned it to boost my own status, it was a
mistake. I was exhilarated at the time and already picturing a hot girlfriend
who worked for me and how we would have hot sex. But what view had the
interaction given her of any future relationship? Quite possibly something
rather different from my intentions.35

All in all, the fun continued and I was doing amazingly. Moreover, I was
already in a good place because the text exchanged with Helen, the South
African girl, had been going well. It had been an amazing reply to my
opening text:

ME: Hey there, Public School Truant! Random bumping into you, but cool, at
Westfield. Are you this friendly with everyone you meet? All best Alex

HER: Hi Alex, how lovely to hear from you! To be honest, I am usually very stand
offish and aloof - unless someone admires my tie! Helen

There then followed a long chain of messages as we texted each other back
and forth, and at each turn she would message me more, talking about her
job and her boss (she was a PA) and giving me a lot of information about
herself and her life.
But then, the following week after my glorious Selfridges successes, I
pinged her the date request. It was a bit long and muddled and ran like this:

ME: Hey, you, well once you surface from the audit let's hook up for a drink.
I've got a busy couple of days on a case, but free the following week. Tuesday or
Thursday are good. What suits you best?

It was not a great message and a bit confusing about the precise dates, but
still, the texting had been fizzing and Jon Matrix, had he seen it, would
definitely have said that it was on.
But I heard nothing. Silence. Radio silence for two days. So then I sent
a follow up text:
 ME: What's up?! Have you been kidnapped?!

I got this reply back:

HER: Hi Alex, gosh I am sorry I've taken so long to respond! I won't be able to
meet up with you.

That was it. I pinged her a few days later but she did not reply. I never heard
from her again. I wrote a number of follow-up texts in my confusion. I was
perplexed and could not understand. It was a blow. How could she suddenly
completely vaporise after texting so freely?
I then became a bit desperate and wrote:

ME: Hey, the other guy, right? Haha. No problem. Just let me know. It was still
great meeting you.

This might have been okay, but it was about the fourth in a line of
unanswered texts and there were too many exclamation marks. I could not
help myself. Jon Matrix would never have done this. He would have pulled
up her number in his contacts and pressed “delete.” For sure.
I was puzzled. I had thought I had hit gold and a relationship was just
around the corner and everything was right with the world.
But after all, this was only to be expected and I was not to be daunted. I
had known it would not be easy. We had been told that this would happen
and not to expect anything as it was all quite random. You just had to keep
getting the numbers and create abundance so if one girl disappeared you
had other options. This was the whole philosophy. You were not to get
fixated on one girl and have a mindset of scarcity.
 And of course I now had this new, special skill that would generate me
all the numbers I could want for. And now I went out for a second weekend
on Saturday. Furthermore, I had got two great numbers from two great girls
that weekend in Selfridges, and that was something to be proud of oneself
about no matter the ultimate results.

The next weekend, the second after the Bootcamp, I decided to go to

Knightsbridge for a change. The kvetch was particularly busy, as it often
was when “going into battle,” and I could not stop my thoughts churning
around and around on the Tube, though I was determined not to let these
weasels take control; I knew that once they did I would be paralysed from
approaching anyone. So when I came out of Knightsbridge Tube next to
Harrods, I literally exploded like a bullet from a gun and ran after virtually
the first attractive girl. She was walking quite fast and I followed her
around a corner… and now suddenly I was in a quiet back street, a long
way from The Brompton Road. She turned another corner and now it was
quite a leafy back-street area. I quickened my pace and was now ten yards
or so behind.
Oh my god, I thought to myself. She walks fast.
But I persevered. In reaction to this first doubting weasel, I broke into a
run, wheeled round in front of her and executed, believe it or not, a pretty
perfect Yad Stop. She loved it, explained that she was just hurrying back
from lunch having bought a sandwich and was a beautician at a local
department store, then, regrettably, flashed an engagement ring at me.
Damn.
I walked off. But I was now a bit lost. I went down a street, planning to
pick up the main street eventually. But I then decided that it was actually
quite nice to be in a quiet, quite leafy part of central London. I walked past
a pretty church and said to myself, What a lovely day. I still kept my eyes
open for attractive girls. Perhaps I could explore a bit and try “off-piste,”
away from the crowds. So I started to wander.
I then started to feel a bit odd. I realised that actually I needed to try and
meet some girls. There were one or two around these back-streets, but one
crossed a road and was walking too fast away from me. Then another went
over to a cycle by a bike rack and just as I was about to approach, a guy
turned up. So I walked some more. I now started to feel really odd.
I glanced back at the guy and the girl with the bicycle. She was meeting
her boyfriend and they were clearly both “normal people.” Girlfriend and
boyfriend. The girl who was walking fast had a bus to catch or was late for
a hair appointment, I decided. And then it occurred to me that these people
were engaged in just normal, regular human activity on a Saturday
afternoon.
I saw a well-dressed woman, if slightly too revealing and vampish, turn
a corner and I followed her, crossing the street and avoiding a car to catch
up. But then I slowed. She glanced round. Did she see me? I carried on. But
paranoia once more kicked in, This is stalking, isn’t it?! I tried to imagine
myself as a spy, a daft idea that did not silence the voice. I was not a spy.
She ducked into a shop and I pulled up and hid, loitering by a bus stop and
pretending to look at the timetable. She had seen me, surely, and was taking
cover. I nervously walked up and I peered in through the glass. She glanced
through the glass back! She was standing right there, still in the entrance to
the shop. I wildly imagined to myself that, rather than a idle gaze, her eyes
had glazed over into a look of fear and horror!
 Of course it was just a look that you cast innocuously over at someone
when they put their face up against a window, but my imagination was out
of control.
I decided I was being really sketchy and I just needed to get out of
there.
And as I wandered, trying to find my way out of the cul-de-sac and back
in to the relative safety and comfort of the crowds, my mind went back to
the girl on the bike. And the kvetch started up again.
Here are all these regular, normal people, going about their normal,
everyday lives. A boyfriend meets his girlfriend on a bicycle. They are going
for a nice, relaxed lunch. He will read the paper later in front of a fire. A
girl goes to a hair appointment before a date that night. A guy at work
probably, or in the same social circle, who met over drinks on a Friday
night and he has asked her out.
I decided that I was little more than a sketchy ruffian. Worse, I was a
grown man. A lawyer. A part of the establishment, no less. I had taken the
whole afternoon off just to go into central London and approach innocent
girls who had done nothing wrong and did not deserve to be so rudely
confronted by weirdos without girlfriends. And as I walked people glanced
at me…
Who is that guy? they must have said to themselves. What’s he doing by
that bus stop? And now he’s looking into a window. He’s just loitering.
That’s a bit odd. He looks like a homeless person, looking for a handout,
except he is smartly dressed. OMG. Now he’s running across the street and
grabbing that girl who just came out of that shop…
Eventually I hit the main street again and was greatly relieved. I walked
out into the main flow of pedestrian traffic outside Harrods. I spied a
Starbucks further down across on the other side of the street, and it seemed
like an oasis or safe place where I could collect myself. I made for it. My
mind was full of thoughts such as, Shit. This is weird. Seriously? I’m
walking around on a Saturday afternoon on my own, friendless, and going
up to strangers. Jesus. What the fuck am I doing? Have I lost my mind?
Shouldn’t I be online with Match.com or at a salsa club or out with friends
at a barbecue, meeting people in a normal way? Instead of wandering
around London Streets in endless circles like a highly-strung shark.
As I crossed the street and walked through the cars on a red light, I was
now losing it, spiralling down a hole, into a thicket of thoughts and doubts
from which I struggled to escape—and only became more entangled. Or it
was as if my head was surrounded by a storm of bees, stinging me and
making a cloud of confusion that I could not escape from, however hard I
ran. I now took refuge in a doorway of a shop with an awning to try and
collect my thoughts. There was a homeless person in it and he looked at me
out of his dirty sleeping bag.
“Get your own doorway,” he said, with his eyes.
So I went to the next doorway. And there I stood. Huddled.
And then I saw this guy across the street. He was under the awnings of
Harrods. He had a peaked cap, as if he was from the North of England. He
had a man-bag slung across his shoulder. And then I saw him run across to
a girl and stop her. Right there in the street. And now I saw he was talking
to her. What was he doing? And then she waved him away and he walked
slowly back, to the exact same position he had been in, under the Harrods
awning.
What a loser!
 And then I saw him do it again. I saw him emerge from under his
awning and try and stop a girl with his hand and she brushed by him with a
frown.
I paused, hesitated, and reflected on what I was looking at. “Oh my god!
He’s another daygamer.” I scurried out of my doorway, horrified.
Finally, I arrived at Starbucks and took refuge. I grabbed a coffee and
looked around me. At least now I was doing something normal. Having a
latte in Starbucks and playing with my phone. Eventually I realised I should
look around and see if there were any girls here. There were. And one or
two of them were alone. All I needed to do was go over, crouch down, like
Tom Torero had said, and say, “Excuse me, do you mind if I just say
something very quickly?”
But I could not do it. It was as if my mind had done a one-eighty, and
my feet had been suddenly laid in a concrete block. And anyway, going up
to an attractive girl in a coffee shop who was minding her own business? I
couldn’t shake the thought that it was a gross invasion of privacy. Was I
seriously thinking of going up to them?! No way!36 They were probably
busy, waiting for a friend—boyfriend, probably—and anyway the area was
too small. If I went up to them everyone would hear. They would feel
uncomfortable, trapped. Before I knew it, security would be dragging me
out. Did Starbucks have security? Well, they would probably phone for the
police:
“Police, please… Sorry?… Well, the thing is there’s a sketchy guy in
here… Starbucks, Knightsbridge… who one of my staff actually saw earlier
in another part of Knightsbridge going up to girls in the street and peering
into windows… he’s now just gone up to a customer… I don’t know, he got
really close and started to talk to her. Anyway, the customer clearly did not
like it but was smiling just to be polite… I don’t know, but he probably did
touch her at some point… that’s assault isn’t it? He’s in the toilet now…
yes, that would be great… five minutes, fine. Should we lock the toilet or
something?”

A barrister stands up in wig and gown: “Harassment, Madam. Yes,

section 5 Public Order Act. No real defence, no.”
The prosecuting barrister turns to his papers.
“In interview he said he was just shopping, but then later he
admitted to having approached a girl who was getting married. He
bluffed a bit but we’re pretty sure that he was harassing her. She had
just popped out for a sandwich. We have been unable to track the
girl and take a statement as yet, but it’s clear from the confession,
we would submit. Besides, he then was seen by a local shop owner
outside a hairdressers staring at a girl inside, who looked shocked.
And then of course later, the incident at Starbucks.”
“Mitigation?” says the District Judge.
“None, Madam, to our knowledge.”
“I see. Mr. Forrest? It says here you are a professional—a
lawyer, in fact. What exactly were you doing?”
“I was just out approaching girls, Your Honour.”
“I see. In the street?”
“Yes.”
“Do you do this often? I mean, have you done it before?”
“Once or twice, yes.”
 “How many girls have you actually approached, let’s say… in
the last week?”
“Er - one hundred. Give or take.”
A pause.
“I see. This matter will definitely need to be referred to the
Solicitors Regulation Authority Disciplinary Committee…”

Back in reality, I got up and stood outside Starbucks in the street for some
fresh air. I just stood there, trying to calm down. I was there for at least an
hour. It was no good. My mind would not stop racing and I went home,
more frantic and guilty than ever. I found myself agreeing with the Judge.
Next day I got on the Tube again and went into Bond Street. I got out,
walked out into the street, took a look—and then went back into the Tube
and back home, where I hid all day in front of the television.
The damage had been done. I made myself try again, but I had been
nearly four hours standing around in the streets outside Harrods, without
approaching a single girl, before going home in disgrace again.
What was I thinking?
The next week I sent an email to Jessie, the visiting Canadian law
intern. I used the recommended opener:

ME: Hey you, fun if random meeting you over the coffee machines at Selfridges ;)
Are you usually this friendly to strangers?! Alex

She did not reply. Still, it was an email, I reasoned, so it might take a while.
 I checked my texts daily—still nothing from Helen. Should I send
another text, maybe? Perhaps she had lost her phone?
I did get a nice message from the French Girl, but she was clearly just
being friendly, and it was obvious she was not about to cheat on her
boyfriend.
I heard nothing all week from Jessie. That was odd, as the interaction
seemed so good.

And so it slowly dawned on me…I was just a street monkey. Little else. I
had amused all these girls and given them a break for a few minutes whilst
shopping. Nothing more. This was a far cry from being a ladykiller.
“Ha! How I’ve fooled myself!” I realised. “You though you could turn
yourself into a player overnight?” I was no better than those losers who
take the microphone at Tony Robbins self-development courses, thinking
that a shot in the arm from the man himself will awaken their giant within
and they will walk out of the conference hall and their life will change. All
that had happened was that I had learned a few tricks. The street monkey
had learned a few tricks that enabled him to get a telephone number or two,
but an actual date? Seriously?! The prospect of me actually kissing a girl,
let alone getting her all the way to the bedroom, seemed an extremely
unlikely prospect.
“This is just a total waste of time”, I thought. I had wasted a whole two
weekends, in reality—when I could have been doing something
constructive. I could have been at work, meeting friends, or I could have
learned salsa dancing. That was a better way to get girls, wasn’t it? (Then
again, I remembered, I had already tried salsa dancing. The girls liked to
dance with you but it was the instructors who got the action.)
 Over the next few days, when I walked along a street, I just felt like I
was in a different world, neither in the world of the pedestrians who passed
me by nor in Wonderland any longer. If it had ever even existed in the first
place.
Had it, in fact? It was probably just marketing hype—a bunch of fake
videos on the internet. I had paid £500 for that course. A classic sting. I was
a mug as well as a sketchy ruffian.

I withdrew and started to watch videos online of “anti-pick-up” stuff. Dudes

ranted in YouTube videos against weirdos who went around hitting on girls,
saying it was crass and that these guys were lost souls, and the pick-up
artists who they looked up to, narcissists. And I started to agree with them. I
started to hear stories of guys hitting on literally hundreds of girls at a time
and being blown out again and again, and I heard stories of girls who had
been approached ten times in a week. I retreated to my old, establishment
position. These guys were losers and weirdos. Why could they not just meet
nice girls in their social circle or online and get a regular girlfriend like
normal people?
I listened to a Radio 4 documentary that had been made about
Daygame.com, in which the journalist had gone on a bootcamp. Here was a
respectable radio journalist from the BBC, doing a rigorous documentary.
There were two guys in particular that he followed. One, a Mexican who
was probably about 21, had terrible trouble on the streets and was
constantly interviewed about what he was doing and trying to get out of it.
The other subject was equally hopeless and helpless. The journalist even
interviewed them a couple of weeks after the bootcamp to see how they had
got on. Neither had got on well. The conclusion was that there were some
guys who clearly had mastered a skill that brought them the success—the
pick-up coaches. But all the others, their clients, were never going to be
able to acquire these skills and shouldn’t even bother. They were just
parting with hard-earned money.37
“What have I become…” I mused, grimly.

31 Of course, guys are not used to it. People do not know how to approach strangers, and there is no
doubting that it can be brutal, learning the skills by walking the streets all day. You are in the same
boat as those chuggers (charity workers) and other street hawkers and hustlers and there will be
plenty of blowouts.
32 Hinting at sex by embedding it in a story is a good way of grounding the interaction in the sexual
realm, rather than the social one. Stories are great conversational aids in any event, for keeping a
conversation going and avoiding silences (which should be left for dates, not for the street
interaction). Moreover, Jon Matrix emphasizes how important it is for guys to tell a story about
themselves on the street so that the girl actually learns a little about you and you are not just some
slick, predatory dude.
33 Most attractive girls have a boyfriend of some description floating about in the background, but if
they actually announce the fact during the interaction, it probably means they want to stay with him.
If they don’t, it’s fair game. If they say they are engaged or married, that is a different matter, of
course.
34 A stock line, but quite prescient, as it later turned out.
35 Read on for more about the “Provider versus Lover” theory.
36 I had forgotten all about the survey that said girls would most like to meet their future partner in a
coffee shop.
37 Coincidentally, I actually got to know the Mexican quite well. And astonishingly, after working
very hard at it, he has had real success. I remember him showing me photos and a text exchange at
one of our earlier meetings in which he had met a really cute Hungarian girl with whom he then had a
very nice mini-relationship with. He had picked her up in the street whilst on holiday in Budapest.
I realised that the radio journalist had a mission to deliver a product for a 30-minute slot and have an
angle or conclusion, and it seemed ridiculous to me that he thought a newbie would somehow make
progress in such a short time. It was not such a rigorous documentary, after all. It was a bit of a blow
that the beloved BBC was not infallible, and that even they could be guilty of just filling the airwaves
with ill-informed opinion. It’s just too easy to pillory PUAs. They have become an irresistible target
for journalists everywhere.

OceanofPDF.com
 6

The Wing

I felt myself to be in a twilight world. What had seemed at first a

Wonderland of immense space and where time stood still, a playground in
which I could enjoy myself, now felt like a dangerous prison that would
lead to my ultimate ostracisation from society.
I felt very much on my own. I wandered the streets, lonely and lost…

Still, I had mentally prepared for this slump. I had known that action needed
to be taken and I had already made my decision and knew that the very
definition of action was that a decision once made should be followed
through.
One of the things that I had initially researched about Daygame.com
was whether or not they had some form of follow-up, post bootcamp and
the fact that they had a Facebook group, the DGBCA (Daygame Bootcamp
Alumni) had persuaded me that these guys were the real deal. Unlike all the
other organisations offering dating advice and expensive coaching, the
DGBCA was absolutely free and had not been exploited for financial
gain.38 There were no fees, no subscriptions and any guy who had done a
bootcamp was invited to join this group. This gave the group a strength
unlike many other forums online in that it was populated by guys who
wanted to learn and improve themselves, not a bunch of armchair critics
who just trolled the site or simply engaged in unproductive intellectual
discussion, which if you have been reading you will have learned is a big
bugbear of mine. Talking about a pursuit or skill is anathema to me because
it is a very great weasel, and a clever one, that subtly deludes you into
thinking you are doing something when in fact you are doing precisely
nothing and probably going backwards!
Anyway, the group now came to me in my hour in need. These guys
were not necessarily the trailblazers, but a lot of them had kicked on after
the bootcamp and earned their spurs. So I posted up on the forum.

What does a guy do after the bootcamp when is floundering and

does not know how to take the next step?

The answer came, almost unanimously.

Find a wing.

The hive knowledge of DGBCA also told me that it was going to be tough
but I had to keep going and weather a storm for a while. This was a critical
time for me; about 90% of guys fell away at the stage I was in now. I
realised that the journey had only just begun and it was going to be hard.
Looking to follow through on their advice, I posted a call for wingmen
in my area, and to my relief someone responded. He said that he was a
Londoner and would be happy to hook up with me that weekend. He was a
Muslim, about 35 years old. His name was “Shaheed,” although you never
really knew what guys’ real names were as a number of the more hard core
daygamers seemed to use pseudonyms; in his case, perhaps he was worried
his family might find out what he was up to. I learned that he was under a
great deal of pressure from his social circle to get “hitched,” and he felt
really old in that regard. That made two of us.
I met Shaheed on a Saturday morning at Pret a Manger on Marble Arch.
He had done the bootcamp nearly a year earlier, so was relatively
experienced, but he had lost his existing wingman. Apparently his old wing
was a guy who only wanted to use this stuff to get really hot girls and he
was very selective in who he would approach, which actually meant that he
did not approach anyone. Although they would go out together and “hit the
streets,” they used to spend more time talking about approaching girls than
actually doing it. So whilst I had little real experience, Shaheed was happy
to have found someone bright-eyed and bushy-tailed who was throwing
themselves at this stuff.
He showed me photos of girls he had met on his phone, and one of the
suspicions I had had about Daygame was laid to rest: regular guys could
indeed get numbers and dates with very attractive women. One girl I
remember him showing me was hot. She was a 25-year-old Russian and
looked like a model. At least, she did in her photo. He had met her in the
street, fooled around with her, and now was trying to escalate matters to the
bedroom. I cannot recall whether he eventually did or not during the course
of our time together, but I was impressed. And she was not his only girl.
So this stuff could actually work. I quickly forgot my worries about
street approaching of earlier. The paranoia and horror that I had felt when I
set eyes on that fellow daygamer outside Starbucks, Knightsbridge,
evaporated. Perhaps this was because I was now presented with a picture of
the potential “prize” of a hot girl that diminished the power of that paranoia
and eclipsed it, or perhaps this was the dissolving of social conditioning as I
now joined somebody else in the daygame adventure. Together we were,
perhaps creating our own set of social “do’s and don’ts.” Our own mini-
society.
Another reason myself and Shaheed got on so well was that, like me, he
was in it in order to genuinely master this area of his life. He was not doing
it in order to get laid. Whilst we both wanted sex, it was more as a stepping
stone to “male mastery” than gratification in its own right. Men want to be
men. And women, ironically, want a man who is successful with women
whilst also of course wanting him to remain faithful. Getting into the game
in order to get laid is of course the popular public perception of the PUA
community, but actually, the more I got to know guys involved in this stuff,
the more I learned that they were just trying to find a girlfriend but felt that
they knew very little in a practical sense about women and seduction. So
Shaheed too saw it as a rite of passage.39
Both of us wanted to be married one day, and he had the same ethics as
I did—by which I mean our backgrounds were both quite conservative, and
his obviously quite religious. Whilst he presented well and was always well
dressed, he was not in any way a player and he was not too slick. He was a
guy in a regular job in business development for a big company, and he just
wanted to learn. It matched the profile of most of the guys on the bootcamp
and many, if not most (though by no means all), of the guys I was to
subsequently meet. Most of them were simply dudes who were struggling
with women and relationships. In other words, the majority of men.
Now one of the big messages that daygame taught on this rite of
passage was abundance. You need to get an abundance of girls in your life.
It was a virtuous circle: girls are attracted to men who have other girls
attracted to them too. It also took the pressure of “neediness” away.
Neediness arose out of scarcity and was the daygamer’s constant enemy. It
must be thwarted at all times, and one of the best remedies was abundance.
To that end, daygame was a numbers game. You had to approach a lot of
girls, as only a small percentage would hook up with you.

So it was that Shaheed and myself hit the streets, at least twice a week,
usually on weekends, but we also took time off on an afternoon or early
evening, sometimes meeting on a Thursday after work when many of the
shopping centres (and of course my favourite, Selfridges) were open late.
We were a real team. There was now a positive energy as it was two
men, two bros against the world. We no longer felt like weirdos who stood
at street corners or under lamp-posts waiting for girls to walk by, but we
were brothers-in-arms, battling against a sea of socially-conditioned
humanity who had no real idea about the truth about women and moved
about the streets blissfully ignorant, whilst we hunted like wolves.
In the spirit of fun and adventure, we started to lark about with “two-
sets”. On one occasion, I jumped in front of two girls on Carnaby Street.
One was a French student, Laura, who was cute and fair and blue-eyed,
whereas the other was a crazy Italian girl, really buxom, curvaceous and
funky. I opened them with some stupid comment or compliment and they
stopped and giggled, and then Shaheed, who had been hovering, joined us a
minute or two into the interaction to lend support. He pretended we had
arranged to meet at that spot and apologised for being late. We got both
their numbers. We used this routine often.
We also frequented shopping centres and we tried some shop girl game.
This was not very successful, however, and I should have remembered Tom
Torero’s warning that it is worth warming up with such girls to get your
conversation skills going, but in terms of actually asking them for their
number, it was a bit uncalibrated. Still, I thought I knew better than Tom, so
I tried anyway. I remember ending up in all sorts of stupid contortions with
sales girls who were trying to sell men expensive anti-aging creams in the
streets—such as in New Bond Street, where I met a hot Ukrainian and spent
endless time and energy on her, getting her number in fact, but never getting
her out. And then myself and Shaheed got drawn into a similar shop in
Knightsbridge and ended up being sat down by a couple of hot shop girls
who we thought we were gaming but who were far more experienced
hustlers than us.
Shaheed and I did, however, start to have greater success in getting
numbers and fixing up dates, and then we met another guy called Lars. He
was from Norway, in his forties, and had done a Daygame.com bootcamp
like us and was on the Facebook forum. He had his own business and was
now relatively footloose and fancy-free insofar as his business was largely
running itself, and like other “Digital Nomads” had decided to spend spring
and summer of that year in London to try his hand at meeting girls. He had
been in long-term relationships during his life but had no children and had
not been married. He was a really chill guy. Very personable and had clearly
achieved a level of financial success. But what was interesting about him,
and about a lot of Scandinavians, if I can generalise for a moment, is that
they have slightly lost the frame as the males of the species. Unlike in
Russia (for example), where there is a very real macho image as
exemplified by President Putin’s publicity machine, in Scandinavia the men
were sweethearts and tiptoed around women. I think Lars recognised this
and had woken up and was taking action. It was an early foreshadowing of
some darker truths I was to learn, rather unwillingly, later on in the journey.
I had always been such a nice, friendly guy to girls and I am sure I would
have fit right in in a Scandinavian country… but is that what even
Scandinavian women really want?
As well as my two “Wings” I also met up with a few other guys who
had got into daygame and I learned some unpalatable truths that clashed
with my traditional upbringing and Victorian values. This came about
because I started to organise daygame meet-ups. I had realised that part of
the journey was about giving as well as taking and that I needed to really
commit to this stuff. So I hit upon the idea of quarterly meet-ups of guys
from the DGBCA, usually in London, in order to bring folk of like minds
together. The first of these occurred at The Porterhouse Pub in Covent
Garden. We all met like secret conspirators and shared the stories of our
exploits.
There was one dude, Kevin, who was in his forties and was a shaggy-
red-haired rock musician as well as running his own IT business. I
remember that he told us about this cute Lithuanian that he had met.
“So, this is her.” He showed a photo on his phone.
“Wow,” we all said, some of us also thinking, She’s too young to be
interested in a gnarled, shaggy-haired IT guy. “We met in Brighton. She
was really cute and girl-next-door, but then later…”
“What?”
“She was a maniac. She was the one who wanted to try stuff and she
had a friend and wanted a threesome. And that was just the start of it.”
“Seriously? But she looks so sweet.” We could not reconcile the photo
with the picture he was now drawing in our minds.
“Yeah, well, she has a boyfriend it turned out, and when we’re in bed
afterwards, she’s telling me that he’s sweet but he just doesn’t get it. And
then she’s wanting me to pull her by the hair and shit. I’m like, ‘What?!’”
There was another guy there, a Swede, who chipped in with his story
about a girl who he had met who was also perhaps as young, nineteen as I
recall. He was in his thirties and had been on a date with her, and it had
been a hell of a battle getting her out on the date, texting back and forth,
and then suddenly she shows up.
“She was pretty friendly on the date. It was all looking good and we had
actually kissed, and then she gets up suddenly and says that she has to go
and I walk her back to the Metro. I’m thinking, ‘Oh, well, that’s it. This is
as far as it goes.’ And by the way, she’s this really frail, skinny girl, and
she’s done some modelling or whatever. And then as we are walking, she
takes my hand and drags me down a side-street. We are alone, and it’s a
Sunday and late and no one’s about.”
This Swede was a good-looking guy and it was not a surprise to me that
a girl might find him physically attractive. He also came across as a very
sensitive soul, in spite of his beanie and cool, black leather jacket. It did not
therefore surprise me that she might be hitting on him, rather than the other
way round. But it did not prepare me for what then followed.
“And so she stops when we are a good way down and backs up against
a wall and says, ‘Hit me.’ ‘What?!’ ‘Hit me,’ she says.”
“I’m confused. ‘Like… cocaine, or something?’”
“‘No, you idiot! HIT ME! Fucking hard!’”
“And she’s like—as I say—frail, at best. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘I can’t do
that.’”
“So what happened?” we all ask.
“Nothing. That was the end of it. She went home. I never saw her
again.”
 Whilst there were one or two oddballs at these meetups, guys who had
clearly been swallowed up by the stuff and were obsessed with girls and
pick-up, most were “Regular Joes.” It was difficult for us to reconcile the
conflicting perspectives. The photo we had seen declared to the world that
pretty girls are lovely snowflakes who have stepped out of the pages of an
E. M. Forster novel. The stories grated unpleasantly against our idealised
view of women. This was perhaps because many of us had spent nearly our
entire adult lives pursuing a sexual strategy that involved opening doors for
women, buying them flowers and giving up our seat on the tube. These
stories made us feel foolish because our strategy was based on a pretty poor
grasp of what women find attractive.

Meanwhile, back on the streets with Shaheed, I was starting to make real
progress. I got an “Instant Date.”
I had become slightly jealous of Shaheed at times because, whilst I was
able to get numbers from girls after a short conversation in the street, I
would sometimes watch him at a distance turn and walk off with a girl and
disappear into a coffee shop or bar. He would then reappear an hour later.
(He had taken her into a coffee shop, not a backstreet. He was good, but not
that good.) These were instant dates.
Instant dates were a good way of cementing the street interaction so that
the date was less likely to flake (providing you did not draw it out too
much). Like everything else, it was a skill you needed to learn.40 Once you
were a few minutes into a good interaction you would ask, “Hey, what are
you doing right now? I’ve finished my shopping and I’ve got 30 minutes
spare before I meet my friends. Let’s go for a tea.”
 What then happens is that the girl says, “Er, no, I haven’t really got
time. Thanks.”
And so you just return to the conversation and a few minutes later ask
the same question, “You know what, there’s a cool Starbucks just round the
corner. I’ve only got 15 minutes, but let’s just finish our conversation in the
warmth.”
“Er… okay, yep. Sure,” she’ll say. And then you lead her off.
This is weird, is it not? She just changes her mind? And as often as not,
she will. Of course, it is not weird if you understand what so many logical
men fail to understand, which is that the very things that are pressing her
attraction triggers are qualities like persistence, confidence, and not being
phased. Taking her literally does not press an attraction trigger! Nor do the
colour of your eyes, your well-defined abs showing prominently under your
Michael Kors t-shirt, or your Oakley shades.41
But when she sees that her “no” has not phased you, like water off a
duck’s back, and you are now asking the same question again, and actually
(as far as she can tell) completely assuming she is going to agree… well,
you have just flipped her attraction switch. Imagine it as if you were with an
ugly girl and just making polite conversation and then your Fairy
Godmother waves her wand, sprinkles her with stardust, and “POOOOF!”
She turns into a beauty. You’d feel a big change, right, in your level of
attraction towards her? That is what a girl just felt towards you!
You then just lead her to the nearest coffee shop, talking all the way to
engage her brain and avoid second thoughts. And then you just treat it like a
date, although obviously you might not escalate as much as on a date.
I was, in fact, prepared for the eventuality of an instant date—I had
done some homework. You will recall that the original reason for me
getting into all of this stuff had been Tom Torero’s The Girlfriend Sequence,
an online product in which he talks you through the whole date routine. I
had not yet watched this, but I had seen a free video on the date basics he
had produced. In it he gives some simple tips.42
First, you give the girl a little mission to find a nice seat whilst you
order the drinks. This deals with any awkwardness at the bar as you jostle to
order drinks. Second, when you are both sat down, you have some chitchat,
but you must at least once “spike” the conversation, spicing things up.
Spiking can be verbal, physical or both. (Not drinks, of course!) In the
video with an attractive blonde girl, Tom Torero demonstrates by asking her
to stand up and give him a twirl. This is after she has said that she is a
hairdresser but also does a bit of modelling work and he says, “Don’t you
have to be quite tall for modelling?” She stands up and he says, “Give me a
twirl,” and she does. “Yep, you’re right. You are tall. I’m six feet and you
nearly come up to my eye line.” He then sits down and says, “Nice bum, by
the way. I couldn’t help noticing.” He laughs and then immediately goes
back to ordinary chitchat. If she tuts or blushes at your brazenness, he
explains, you just take it in a lighthearted way and say, “I’m a man. I drink
beer, watch football, and read dirty magazines. And I’m lazy. What can you
do?”43 If you were feeling brave you might also lean over and touch her on
the arm or leg as you said it.
So it was that I found myself in Oxford Street one day near Debenhams
and saw a cute 25-year-old girl.
I approached her in the traditional Yad Stop manner, and she instantly
“hooked.” In spite of her imperfect English—she was evidently from
somewhere in Eastern Europe—she started asking me questions. I asked her
if she wanted to grab a coffee and she said, “No,” and at that point I felt like
giving up and just getting her number, but I could tell that she was not in a
hurry or busy, and somehow I was awake enough to realise that her “No”
was really “Try harder” or perhaps “Not yet.” I made a big effort to just
change the topic, and after a short while, I asked again. This time she said,
“Yes.”
Now, Oxford Street is not exactly short of coffee shops, and yet I could
not find one for the life of me. I walked her across the street and down New
Bond Street and then hung a left, and still I could not see a bloody
Starbucks or Costa Coffee for love nor money. I kept talking, babbling
something inane as we walked, having told her, “I know a coffee shop—this
way.” I was now quite lost and simply holding out that I would stumble into
something shortly. “Hanging a left” had not worked as I had now set up an
expectation of some special, cosy little spot off the main street, and now the
number of shops had thinned down completely.
I had made it halfway down towards Piccadilly and nearly as far east as
Regent Street before finally lucking out. And it was indeed a cosy-looking
spot, but it could have been a trucker’s cafe for all I cared.
There I pushed it by trying some of the escalation tips that Tom Torero
had recommended. It was a bit clumsy, as it was in a busy cafe in the
daytime with other punters at the next table, but I did actually get her to
give me a twirl.44 It was not one from the daygamer’s playbook, but as Jon
Matrix had said, a girl will forgive you for trying and getting it wrong, but
she will simply lose interest altogether if you never try at all. I was also
psychologically prepared for the fact that this stuff was going to take
practice and I would be breaking a lot of eggs in the process.
Oksana was her name, and she was a Latvian hairdresser now working
in South East London, the Dulwich area as I recall. In terms of backgrounds
we had little in common and would never have met socially in terms of our
respective “peer groups,” but that did not seem to matter. Right now, we
were Man and Woman, and class, age, or cultural background seemed to
have little relevance.
At the end of the date, which I made a point of ending early and not
stringing it out, we swapped contact details. This was not easy, as her phone
was broken and she had not been long in the UK, and it was proving
difficult to get a signal in the coffee shop and so Facebook was proving
tricky. For a moment it seemed as if all might be lost! She had no number I
could use; I was not about to give her my number, of course (she would
never have called), and figuring out Facebook—for instance, taking her
name and trying later—seemed precarious. I was starting to realise that
women are a chaotic force of nature and all sorts of errors and obstacles
will get thrown in your path. And perhaps that is just primal wiring to check
out whether or not you are a man. Simply leading the interaction, holding
her hand like a child sometimes, and getting the logistics and practicalities
right is at least half of the skill. Fortunately I was able to find her later on
Facebook and friend request her, but it was a pretty muddled and uncertain
business.
I came away from the date with the exhilarating sensation that “I had
done it!” I had met an attractive girl in the street, a lot younger than me, and
I had led and escalated and generated attraction. This was amazing. I felt
like collapsing over the finishing line, and hurried to catch up with Shaheed
to share my schoolboy delight in my achievement.
I had no idea what I had said to her during the 40 minutes we spent in
the coffee shop together. Whatever it was would, I guess, have been met
with disapproval by feminists. Indeed, it sort of met with disapproval by
me. Some part of me, an old-fashioned Edwardian gentleman, said, “To
treat another human being like a little girl and tease her? How disgraceful!
Chastise her when she misbehaves and reward her like a little dog when she
is good. Get her to do a twirl on cue? That is highly disrespectful to another
human being!” But another part of me felt that it was such great fun and
electric, and I felt sure that she had enjoyed it too. (A PUA I know says that
if this was the only approach you adopted when dating it would work nine
times out of ten. Highly politically-incorrect to say so, but such are the
bizarre contradictions of the dating game. Girls respond favourably to it,
when they are testing men, and I have found it an inconvenient truth.45)
I had already started to wonder about and to question the thoughts, ideas
and attitudes I had in my head. This doubt turned out to be just one of
many.
And yet there was no doubting the efficacy of these skills. What on
earth was all this stuff about “being yourself?” It was now clear that I had to
learn this stuff. It started to occur to me that this new knowledge and these
new skills were like scaffolding around old ideas so that those old ideas
could be removed or replaced with a natural, masculine persona you already
had inside you, but had forgotten or had had family, friends, school, and
society drum out of you. It had started to become clear to me that this stuff
was necessary, for guys like me at least.46

Moreover, after the early disappointment with the South African who had
so mysteriously dropped off the radar, things started to look up with other
leads. I heard from Jessie. She had finally emailed me and I gave her work
as an intern in my office. She did not want a paying position, she just
wanted the experience. This was a very unusual arrangement, as I was the
only person in my law firm at that point and the only other person in the
office was Roman, a Russian travel operator who was renting office space
off me. Still, I decided to make her an intern rather than make a try for her
romantically—give her a job rather than turn her into date material.
Why? When I was so attracted to her physically? When I had not had
sex in years? Here I was, being the consummate professional and treating
her with the highest respect, assuming the role of a sort of noble Knight of
the Round Table. I might almost have called her “My lady” and picked up
her handkerchief when she dropped it. It was perhaps as simple as being
afraid to sexually escalate, that old Bugbear—the fear of rejection. Perhaps
avoiding being vulnerable and opening up to a girl whom I was really
attracted to, by giving her a job and thus creating a role of protector and
mentor. That decision was to be a millstone around my neck because I had
not been honest with myself (or her) about how I felt from the get-go.
Still, I was only gradually thawing from my old self. She had been with
her mother when I approached her, so I could not be overly direct then. The
law subject had come up and I had, perhaps unsurprisingly, defaulted to my
old self. Change was not going to happen overnight. And actually it was
pretty cool that I had met a pretty and vivacious 26-year-old North
American.
Jessie was also nothing if not exuberant. The word was perfect for her.
And it was a happy time for me, having her around the office. She was just
so funny and such fun. She knew she was attractive and was confident in
her femininity. She had probably been a cheerleader in her life at some
point and had been a real party girl,47 but now, well into her twenties, she
had decided she needed to get serious about life.
 She said stuff like, “Urgh. All this sitting on my butt for law exams is
making me fat. I’ll be glad when it’s over so I can hit the gym.”
Once she said to me, very matter-of-fact, “I’m a 7 right now, but I can
get up to 9 if I put my mind to it.” Or the time when she bounced into the
office and delightedly told me, “I’ve had my tattoos removed. I’ve closed
down Facebook. I am done with that. I am now focused on this law thing.”
She would also say great things like, “I just love being around you. You
have taught me so much!”
I really cared for her—and thought she was nuts. She had actually
grown up in a small town in Saskatchewan, some freezing cold backwater
in the north of Canada, but I think her father must have been some oil
magnate or something up there, as she was clearly well off.
I also learned a lot from her about men and women. She used to show
me her phone and all the date messages. Her profile on Tinder was
ridiculous. She looked absolutely stunning. I actually pulled her up on it,
laughing, as we ate lunch at a hippie salad spot, at her request.
“What sort of guys are you hoping to attract?” I asked.
“Do you think it’s too much? Why? I listen to you.”
I finally replied, “Well, at least put up one or two that are more…
normal you, you know?”
She would have guys saying all sorts of stuff by text, Tinder,
WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook, etc., and she would show me and breezily say
things like, “Ugh. What an idiot.” Or, “Mm… I don’t know, he’s a bit of a
jerk, right?” But next week I would hear that this jerk was sleeping with
her.
“How did you meet?” I asked her. “He just came up to me in a
restaurant.” (A natural daygamer.)
 Jessie had an even more glamorous, or rather more salacious, friend
who, strictly in relative terms, made her look like an Amish girl. Jessie had
clearly decided that she was approaching 30 and needed to put her party
years behind her, whilst this friend was barrelling on into some unknown,
cougar-esque danger zone. They obviously both had enough money and
leisure to become washed-up cougars by the time they were 35.
Could Jessie reform and go from party girl to respectable lawyer? I
often wondered this in future months as I heard sporadically about her latest
adventures, which would invariably involve her swinging erratically
between one extreme and the other, between what I guess were the desires
for a “Bad Boy” lover and the need to find a “Provider” (concepts I was to
discover later).
Jessie’s dating escapades aside, I felt pretty cool and relaxed about
where I was. I had a couple buddies and a regular wing who had shown me
that it could work for a Regular Joe. I had had adventures on the street and
at times felt like Superman socially. After all, I had generated attraction
from a cute 25-year-old Latvian within minutes of meeting her.
And really, having Jessie around was a surprising and awesome
development. So what if I was not officially dating her yet? It was simply
amazing to me that I could get her number in the first place, and even more
amazing that she was working for me for free. It was only a matter of time
before it got physical. Yes, I said to myself, This is just a slow-burn. Bide
your time and choose your moment. Then generate massive attraction and
properly hit on her. Perhaps in time a relationship will blossom. We will fall
in love and get married, and she will be the rock I build my law firm on and
she will put all those Bad Boys behind her (and we will have lots of famous
baby lawyers).
 It was a small office and we were often the only two there. And she was
so gushy. Indeed, the predatory animal in me gazed at her as if she was
merely a ripe fruit, hanging low on the tree, flashing her beautiful eyes at
me, shaking her boobs and laughing, “Just kidding! Hahaha!”
Waiting to be picked.
And plucked.
Just a matter of time, I thought to myself, with an evil grin.

38 This is probably why Daygame.com folded. It was not run as a conventional business but on pure
inspiration. It was more like “Fight Club” or “Old School” (to name two films); their motivation was
more evangelical than economic.
39 I do wonder whether or not there exists a sea of guys out there, disenfranchised, often from broken
homes, never having had the rite of passage necessary for a man and now been given dubious role
models in the press and other mass media as well as in music, film and television. The old role
models, as classically depicted in, for example, a John Wayne western, are dead. In such films, you
might see a cowboy throw a woman over his knee and spank her if she’d been mis-behaving. It is
impossible to believe such a scene would ever appear in a movie nowadays, even though it was
tongue-in-cheek. Both myself and Shaheed, whilst we might not be looking to throw any women
over our knees, did feel as if we were having to fight against a politically-correct environment that
was critical of any displays of masculinity.
40 And then abandon when you were more experienced. Remember the principle, “A thorn to
remove a thorn”? You throw the thorn away once it has achieved its purpose (of removing the first
thorn). A lot of these skills or Daygame tools have their time and place—Instant Dates are great for
beginners as they are essential practice of really toughening a guy up and just gaining experience and
exposure.
41 Well, maybe a little. At best these qualities simply open the door. They may, of course, work
better in a nightclub scene, but even here I have met a few guys who were very successful in clubs
but really wanted to learn daygame. They never really approached girls—the girls approached them.
“Good-looking Guy Game,” it is called. They felt they lacked something as they were never the ones
to truly initiate and choose.
42 As I mentioned earlier “The Girlfriend Sequence” (which I still think is very useful) has been
superseded by Street Hustle.
43 We spend so much time these days apologising for being men. Unsurprisingly, this is not
attractive to women!
44 I seem to recall knocking over a chair as I stood up to do it.
45 Much later in my journey I had a date that vividly portrayed how this works in practice, which
you can read about in “52 First Dates”. She was a Russian girl who deliberately set me up whist in a
long queue for a cable car during a romantic away-break in the mountains. It was clearly a frame-test.
46 If your social conscience struggles with the idea of treating a woman on a date like a girl or puppy
dog when she is clearly testing you, think of it as a “thorn to remove a thorn.” Or a necessary part of
the “dating dance” in the early stage of a relationship.
47 In fact, I later came across a newspaper article about one of her first proper boyfriends. He was a
convicted fraudster and classic “Bad Boy” who had flown to Dubai to try to win her back after he
was released from prison and then got arrested for reneging on a hire purchase agreement for a fancy
sports car.

OceanofPDF.com
 7

Dating Oksana

I had by now bought and read Tom Torero’s video series, The Girlfriend
Sequence, and started to watch the first two videos in preparation for the
first date with Oksana. Having gained some mastery on the streets it was
now time to learn about dating. One of the key areas he constantly bashed
guys about was the importance of getting your “logistics” right. What was
this? Well, of course it was unforgivable in his eyes should you have done
all the hard work of generating attraction and then have absolutely no plan
on the date but that you were simply intending to “go with the flow” and
“chill”—see where it went. And other such platitudes.
I used to be properly signed up to such platitudes. I was a lifetime
member of the “Just See What Happens and Be Yourself” Club. As you
could probably guess at this point, I still believed in romance and
serendipity. Which was all very well and good, and felt “real” to my mind,
but the romance was somewhat undercut by the many secret, toxic late
nights of anger or self-hatred at having failed to get a girl.
Getting logistics right was pretty simple, Tom said, but did require
geeky preparation and attention to detail. One should plan the night by
actually scouting for places before the date and finding two things:
 1. A first venue. This should be a bar or maybe a café, and it is not
so important what, because you will not be spending a lot of time
there. You have to learn to lead and change venue, and it is
important not to get stuck at a first venue all night; for a beginner, at
least, this is certainly essential. A drink at the bar on a couple of bar
stools would be good, but it does not matter if you end up across
each other at a table.

2. A second venue. This should not be far from the first venue, and
crucially, it should have areas with sofas or sofa benches and dark
corners and intimate places, and be a bit more like a club. It is
important not to shy away from seedy or salacious-looking joints (a
part of the adventure you will hear about only much later), and in
fact it is important you plough through any anxiety on this front.48
Here it is essential that you are not sat across a table from each
other.

And ideally, although the ideal here might be difficult to achieve, you
should be near your home so you can invite her back. Even though she
might not come back, you should at least try to get her back. This felt like a
little much for me at this stage—bouncing a girl back to my flat for a first
date. It was a bridge too far for me, and I did not plan for this or take this
part of the video sequence seriously.
I chose some locations in Covent Garden, which was and remains a
great date location. The first was a popular bar called The Punch & Judy,
and it has a balcony over onto the main square where you can watch the
street performers. To my relief Oksana only showed up 15 minutes late. It
was not so crazy busy as it often was as I had chosen, sensibly, a Tuesday
for our first date (a Friday or even a Thursday might well have been a
different story, especially if it had been the height of summer). This meant
that, whilst I waited for her at the bar, we could go from there to a table
easily. As is so often the case with girls on dates, she was texting me for
directions and sending the usual notifications of lateness and apologies,
etc.49
One of the things that came back to me from the instant date, as we both
sat drinking our gin and tonics, was this issue that we were from different
backgrounds. Now, previously these prejudices would have sabotaged me
on a date. They would have created a subtle excuse why not to escalate—a
very subtle inner voice I hardly knew was there: She’s not in my class and I
—unfortunately—am not in hers! Sex therefore cannot happen.
But the fact I was now practising dating girls and applying skills meant
that this prejudice was eclipsed.
There was nothing remarkable about the conversation. My main focus
however had been to add a “spike.” That was the one thing I must do, as it
was like a first rung on a ladder; a small, defiant step out of the friend-zone
and into date-zone. This required taking a risk.
I was not brilliantly original, and decided to fall back on the previous
success I’d fallen into: I found a way during the chat to compare her to a
furry animal. I said that she was like a chipmunk, and this worked well
because she did not know what this was and very quickly was Googling
away on her phone. Soon we were exchanging Google images and she was
laughing in mock shock, and I momentarily touched her leg! She then said,
“You say what, that I short?”
 “No, not short,” I said. “Cuddly. Especially in your big coat, which
looks too big for you. I like it.”
And then I finished my gin and tonic and I found myself saying, “Stand
up a moment.”
I took her hand so she knew I meant it. She stood up. There was a
mirror in the bar and I said to her, “See, you’re not actually that short. I’m
quite tall.”
She had turned away from me and as she turned back and sat down I
said, “Nice bum, by the way…”
She screwed up her face in mock horror.
“…for a chipmunk.”
A pause.
“I like it,” I added.
This was all going well. I led her to the second venue, and now the
penny dropped as to why it was important to move location. By the time,
we had arrived at The Clubhouse (Earlham Street) it was as though we
knew each other. Moving location creates a false sense of time in this
regard and creates a comfort that might not have been there previously. The
Clubhouse was a good choice of venue, as it was quite trendy and there
were great little sofa areas, dark and intimate. We both ordered quite exotic-
looking cocktails, but unfortunately she made a beeline for a table with
chairs across from each other. Once there, she sunk back into her sofa-seat
like a limpet and would not come out the whole night. It was a great, moody
corner and the chairs were these fabulous comfy, swivel sofa-lined chairs,
and I think I was also deluded into going with it because they were “so
cool.” Eternal vigilance is the price of the successful seducer! I had ducked
out of leading forcefully and early enough from the bar to one of the many
other, more suitable sofa areas.
Still, it was a good conversation and I managed to steer clear of the
boring topics of job, religion, and politics, and asked her as much about
herself as she asked about me. By the time we had finished our second
cocktail, she was keen to go. She started early in the mornings at the
beautician’s in Dulwich or Forest Hill in South East London, and I think she
actually had the lowest entry-level job, probably, and had to sweep and
clean up first thing. Also, as is often the case with Eastern Europeans, she
was not ready for things to escalate quickly.
So it was that, as we walked back, I tried a couple of clumsy tricks. The
first was teasing her by bumping her into a lamp-post as we walked, trying
to be playful and not too romantic or gooey. And the second was putting her
on her bus at Trafalgar Square and trying to kiss her. Now, I had not known
how to “do the kiss” previously, so I was understandably nervous. What had
Tom Torero’s “The Girlfriend Sequence” said about it? Basically, that the
most important thing was to attempt it. You had to “show your intent” and
pull the trigger—his constant mantra. The woman was constantly steering
you in the direction of the friend zone, and you had to jump out of that zone
and continually be putting yourself in the date zone. The second most
important thing was not to leave it until the end of the date! Try early. So,
once you are reclined together on a sofa you should move in, put a hand on
her leg, round her shoulders, perhaps pull her in. Start playing with her hair
to “test for compliance.” And hold her eyes at times and pause, saying
nothing. If she is allowing these things, then you simply have to pull the
trigger.
 Another tip is to say to a girl, “I’m just going to the toilet. But be
warned. When I come back I may try and kiss you.”
If you are walking between venues you could also say, “See that
lamppost? By the time we reach it, I will kiss you.”
Now, of course, the thing is that I had done none of these things, and I
now bitterly regretted not having chosen a sofa area. So when I went in for
the kiss, she would not let me. That was it. She got on her bus and was
gone.
But at least I had tried, and reassured myself that other than that
misstep, it had actually gone pretty damn well. And, after all, culturally she
would put up more old-fashioned resistance than other girls, so not getting
the kiss was not the end of the world. In fact, I went home very happy with
progress. From where I had been previously (Gotia was my benchmark),
this was about a 500% improvement. I had done the “spikes” during the
night, had led by taking her to more than one venue, and had teased and
also touched her one or two times, playing with her hair and leaving my
hand on her leg at least once.
It was a warm March evening and I walked across the Hungerford
Bridge between Embankment and Waterloo, taking in the beautiful
cityscape both up- and downriver from this amazing spot. I breathed in the
air and congratulated myself, and also breathed a sigh of relief that I had at
least found it within myself to battle against decades of conditioning and
habits.50
I realised that with the help of buddies and the DGBCA, I had been able
to break through the early, dangerous period.
For my second date with Oksana, I decided to go on an “adventure date.” In
his “Girlfriend Sequence,” Tom Torero recommended that it is good to try
something with a girl, perhaps on a Sunday afternoon, that is a little
different from the ordinary. Stuff such as playing air hockey in a dodgy
amusement arcade or hiring a couple of Boris Bicycles and riding round a
park—basically, something that gives opportunities for escalation in a way
that sitting silently in a cinema or sitting across a dinner table from a girl
does not! Whilst travelling together on a bike, for example, you could tease
her about not knowing how to ride a bike, challenge her to a race, or show
your masculine frame in the date by knowing the topography and
geography as well as by leading. Or you could pull down a branch of a tree,
pretend it was mistletoe or something, and kiss her.
In one video, Tom actually showed himself riding around a park in
London with a Slovakian girl, I think, doing these things, and I was in awe.
There was one video of him where he had just bundled the girl in a taxi and
when she asked where they were going he said, “To see Disneyworld and
the dolphins! Get in.” And when in the back he pushed her away and
accused her of sitting too close to him so as to be able to grope him,
reversing the clichéd date roles of men and women. She laughed.
I was not feeling quite that adventurous, but I did arrange to meet
Oksana on the Southbank and walk her along the river to Bankside Pier,
where you can catch the Thames Clipper river taxi and travel down to
Canary Wharf. There was a pub at Tobacco Dock that had a pool table; pool
tables were also on the “recommended” list because once again, you were
likely to be better than her and exert your masculine frame (by showing her
the rules, for example), and it also gave plentiful opportunities for physical
touching—physical escalation rather than just verbal escalation. Just as Tom
Torero had advised, I had been totally anal about all of this, and had
actually spent two hours going down there the day previously to check it all
out and do a dry run! I had decided that I was not going to leave logistics to
chance, and I was not going to be ashamed of preparing for the date with
military precision. I was trying to bury the old romantic who would
previously have just “gone with the flow.”51
Now, I had planned everything out, but my troubles started almost
immediately. Oksana was a force of chaos, like a lot of girls at such times.
And I had also not nailed the logistics.
I chose the Black & Blue restaurant as a meeting point without realising
that there are in fact two of them within 100 yards of each other in the
Waterloo-Southbank area (and there are only about six of this restaurant
chain in the whole of London!). Disaster had already been built into the plan
without my knowing. And it was raining and cold. And even before she
arrived there was trouble, of course, as she was late and not sure what the
best Tube stop was:

HER: Hi. I am not sure I will come. I am on Bakerloo line - I think - but do not
know what stop.

As I stood in the rain outside Black & Blue, I hurriedly Facebooked her as
best I could, cursing the fact she did not have a proper phone and swearing
that I would chose a meeting point indoors next time, at a bar with good
Wi-Fi.

ME: No worries. It's Waterloo. I am here at Black & Blue. Just get off at
Waterloo, okay?
HER: Okay, maybe I will go back home. I -

But I lost the rest of the message presumably because she was in transit. I
quickly typed, but I could not tell in the rain whether it had even been sent
(I am of a generation who did not grow up with the internet and social
media—it was a struggle).
I then did not hear from her for 20 minutes. She was by now half an
hour late. I did not know what had happened and wandered up the walkway
to Waterloo Main Station Entrance, and suddenly I saw one of Black &
Blue’s distinctive cows outside a restaurant.
“OMG!” I said to myself. “There’s another fucking one!” I started to
scurry between the two, casting my eyes around amongst the heavy
pedestrian traffic streaming out of Waterloo Station for signs of the Latvian,
and I started to give up. I was fuming, both angry with myself and
disappointed, when I saw a lonely polka-dotted umbrella not standing near
either of the two Black & Blues, and I made my way over. It was her!
I walked her along the Southbank and was relieved to see the rain clear.
It turned into a reasonably nice evening. I tried teasing her, like I had on the
first date, by playfully pushing her into a post as we walked together, but
now she was irritable and asked, “How long? Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise, you’ll like it. To Disneyworld.”
“I don’t want to walk too far.”
“Just up here…” I said, pointing to Shakespeare’s Globe, which sits
next to the pier.
“What we are doing?” she asked again.
“We’re going on a boat, a Thames Clipper.” I yielded to her question a
second time, feeling as if I was not “holding the frame” very well.
“I don’t like water,” she said.
“Okay,” I said, trying to reason with her. “You don’t have to do it if you
don’t want to.”
“Good.”
 “Look, let’s have a drink at The Globe first, anyway,” I said, struggling
to take the frame back and not to completely capitulate on a key part of the
whole logistics of the “Date Plan.” I could not believe she was putting up
obstacles like this, as if a riverboat was a big deal.
We had a drink at The Globe and I checked the timetable, as we had by
now missed by a long shot my planned time of departure.
“Great,” I said, “there’s one in 20 minutes, just time for a drink.”
She had a glass of wine and that seemed to settle her down—now she
agreed to the Thames Clipper, after all.
Now, here is the funny thing. After having planned the Tobacco Dock
visit and pool at the Pub, I now wavered. Did we have time? It was a good
20-minute walk from the Canary Wharf dock, and it was a midweek date
again—she had an early start at the beautician’s and had a longish Tube ride
home.
Then, as the Thames Clipper pulled into the dock, I noticed a steak
restaurant called Gouchos which was one of a small chain that I knew. I
decided to change tack and just have drinks instead and go there.
Once inside I had the presence of mind not to ask her if she wanted to
have dinner or to allow us to be led into the dining area, but just said, “We
just want a cocktail at the bar.”
So the bar was fine as we were now sat next to each other, side by side,
which made flirting much easier, of course. The conversation flowed
reasonably well and we had cocktails. The barman was very good and he
brought us some small starter plates that we ordered at intervals. But I had
difficulty escalating, and I felt that in a way it was actually a step back. It
was a well-lit location, and in truth, it was no better than the first venue
location on the first date, and certainly not as good as the Clubhouse on
Earlham Street. I could do no more than touch her leg from time to time,
and I made no attempts to touch or play with her hair (and certainly not try
and kiss her) right in front of the eyes of the barman and other staff and
customers mingling around.
Suddenly I started to feel a bit avuncular and old. There was more than
20 years between us, after all. The bill came, and it was nearly three figures
—I paid for it and did not ask her to pay a dime. I felt trapped. I could not
really ask her to pay as I had chosen it and it was expensive. And I felt an
imperceptible shift, as if I was now the provider who was entertaining a
young Latvian relative visiting London for the weekend. She was enjoying
herself, but the sexual tension was not there.
We walked back to the Thames Clipper. It was a beautiful ride as the
approach to Tower Bridge is very pretty at night, with all the lights. We sat
at the front of the boat so we could see it all. But on the inside I was in
contortions. The date was drawing to an end and I had done nothing really
by way of escalation. And somehow the vibe was not there. Still, I had to
do something. I now clumsily just put my hand on her leg (she had a skirt
on so I put my hand on her tights) and left it there, massaging a bit.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “Don’t.”
I took my hand away, devastated. This was horribly like my dates of
old. Okay, I had tried some touching, but it was really uncalibrated. I felt
like some old, sketchy, creepy dude who is overstepping the mark, or like a
puppy dog who does something naughty and his lady owner snaps at him
and he obeys. I might as well have been in her handbag at that point, my
little furry head poking out, panting for some affection.
By the time the boat docked, I had worked myself into a negative lather
about my “failure,” and as we walked up the gangplank and then onto the
grass, I brought the date to a premature end and did not even offer to walk
her back to the station. I was angry with myself and the kvetch was in
control.
“Okay, well, see you around some time.” Sullen and grouchy, I could
not hide my disappointment.
She seemed to pick up on this and it seemed to make her more
delighted. “The boat was great, actually. Thanks!”
“You’re obviously not interested and that’s fine,” I almost said out loud.
In reality, I had already turned away. I waved half-heartedly.
I guess I had failed a basic test. I had reacted to her test of my ability to
hold the frame and remain chill. I was yet to learn the inner balance of
escalating physically, being rejected and just rolling off, then coming back
later.
I now hated myself. I had not even tried to kiss her. This was now the
third date, if you included the instant date.
As I slouched off, kicking the dirt, I countered up the dates, Does an
instant date count? Yes. It’s a third date. No kiss attempt. No kiss. I’m in
reverse. Even for an Eastern European (well, the Baltic is near enough) it’s
a glacial pace.
I suddenly “felt my age,” as they say. What I mean by this is that the
number 47 kept appearing in the back of my brain, like a cinema screen in
reverse. And with it came all these negative associations. They were not
specific; it was just a general vague idea of not being “that guy,” which I
had felt before in life, but now it had an age dimension. Not only was I not
“that guy,” I was some older, creepy guy now.
This is what “Not That Guy” guys became: older, creepy guys. This was
my natural evolution into sexless, lonely old age. Clearly.
 I was too old. A girl in her twenties is not going to be interested in a guy
nearing fifty! I realised. What was I thinking? Get real. It really is rather
too late. You need to go onto Match.com and find a girl your own age…

I dealt with these negative thoughts by bounding back into the daygame,
daytime street adventures with my amigos, Lars and Shaheed. After all,
Lars was not that much younger than me.
It was in Westfield Shopping Centre, that location of my fantastic
second day on the Bootcamp, that I had an experience with a girl whom I
approached in a clothes shop that went quite well. She was in her twenties,
probably the same age as Oksana, and we bantered, but I did not get her
number.
A week or so later I was in Piccadilly and I saw the same girl. I weaved
through the crowds, never losing sight of her. I crossed the streets over into
Monmouth Street at the top of the Square. I walked up Monmouth behind
her. It was a good, clear pedestrian area, and the crowds had thinned out,
and so I decided that she probably was not the same girl, that was just my
mind playing tricks and I decided to simply make an approach. I did the
classic Yad Stop, running ahead of her and wheeling round and putting a
hand up to stop her. But before the compliment had even come out she
yelled, “Oh my god! Urgh! You’re old enough to be my grandfather!”
She hurried on.
I was stunned. It was definitely her. But she did not recognise me as the
same guy. Or perhaps she did and was truly weirded out.
After this incident I struggled to get my mojo back. She was right; I was
old enough to be her grandfather. I started to do the math: Let’s assume I’m
50 and she’s 20 , for the sake of argument… now, if we double her age…
 And what was I doing out on the streets if I was a grandfather? Running
around with these younger dudes? This was weird. And yet, I still went out
with Shaheed and Lars, but now I made no approaches.
“Listen, guys,” I would say, “I’ll come out with you for the company,
but I am definitely not approaching girls.”
They laughed, but also just went with it and accepted that I had hit a
dark place. They understood. They too struggled at times with this stuff,
both being older dudes with careers and conventional lives. I remember
spending a whole two days just walking down the King’s Road with them,
having lunch with them, chatting about it all and not doing a single
approach the whole weekend. I was stung—burned. And burned bad. Man
down!
I started to reflect on it all. It wast just my age. This stuff was
remorseless, going around in circles in the streets of London, hitting on
girls, getting a telephone number or two, then having the number flake, if
she replied at all. And all for what? To get laid? To get a girlfriend? Was
there not an easier way? The repeated rejection was hard to bear.
And what results had I actually achieved? At the end of the day, for all
my success in generating attraction, had I actually had sex with any of these
girls I was approaching? “No. Not even close”, I grimly concluded.
And then my wingmen started to flake on me. The first was Lars. Lars
had some early success on the street, having met a young Portuguese girl,
early twenties, with a daughter. They had started to date and he had started
to prevaricate about coming out to daygame. She would text him, asking
him where he was and what he was doing, and he would not tell her the
truth—hitting on girls in the street! She had a young child and was jealous
and possessive and he was now in two-minds about daygaming so often.
 And Shaheed was not much better. He started to complain about family
pressures. Increasingly the topic of an arranged date would come up. Both
his mother and aunt were on his case and would frequently badger him to
go on dates with respectable Muslim women they had lined up.
He had also been having run-ins with his boss, who sensed a drop in
commitment as Shaheed would skip work some afternoons so he could go
out and daygame. They argued. Shaheed, now that he had this newfound
confidence, would hold his own, and he was probably an even better
salesman now than he had been, but he felt that he was shirking and letting
people down. He started to flake on me, or just turn up extremely late which
was really annoying.
As far as Oksana was concerned I got drawn into long- ending
Facebook exchanges with her but could never get her out on another date.
All that happened is that she played along and engaged in Facebook
exchanges, and I never got her out. I felt more avuncular and less likely to
have sex with a younger girl than ever.
The dynamic had changed. I had lost the attraction I had generated, and
now I was just a Facebook toy, a man-friend to her. The excitement of that
first instant date, when I had got her to do a twirl in the cafe and led like a
man, was now a distant speck in my rear-view mirror.
Inevitably I got drawn back online during my spare evenings and now
stumbled on things like the Julien Blanc controversy. He was a minor
celebrity in the PUA world and worked for the biggest PUA company in the
world, Real Social Dynamics (RSD). Allegedly he had actually grabbed a
girl by the throat whilst hitting on her. There was even a photo.52 He was
pilloried on US television. I was appalled. And I was associated with this
stuff! I had watched a lot of the videos on RSD and in particular one with
their founder, Tyler Durden, who had been a minor character in Neill
Strauss’s book, “The Game”. In this video they talked about how dudes got
more attractive to younger women as they aged, not less.

I know doubted all the knowledge I had acquired. It was just online click-
bait to drive up his subscriptions and draw yet more impressionable men
into this world, before parting them with their money on insanely expensive
bootcamps and coaching sessions. I rationalised that the only success with
younger women we were likely to have was the success that Lars was
having: a stifling relationship with a crazy Portuguese girl who needed a
father for her daughter and was determined to get his balls into a jar and up
onto that top shelf.
Once again this did not feel like real inner change and it seemed that the
BBC 4 radio documentary surely must be right. At best the girls we
approached just played along because it was fun for them. The attention
was great. And we were harmless monkeys, not sexual prospects. The anti-
pick-up lobby were right too. There was no inner work, no inner “game”
development happening.
And actually having sex with a girl seemed more of a distant prospect
than ever.

48 Over a year later I would take a girl into a subterranean bar in Middle Europe down a horribly
dark and dirty stone staircase where it was so dark you could barely see anyone else and the walls
were covered with bohemian sexual totems and the wall-paper itself was patterned vaginas. (It’s
name was, translated, “Slap a girl’s arse.” I took two dates there. One girl I made out with. One girl
ejected after about 30 minutes. (But I still saw her again for another date.)
49 There is a chaotic force within a woman who is in a date situation. I dare say the evolutionary
biologist would say this all important for separating the wheat from the chaff, to see whether a man
will remain calm when faced with such chaos. I mean, if he can’t deal with a bit of girl chaos, how
would Palaeolithic Man have dealt with a sabre-toothed tiger jumping out from behind a tree at him?
50 A lot of guys give up with this stuff during this vulnerable period because their ego cannot take it.
It feels as if they are being dismantled and asked to practice things that are alien to them because they
go against the grain of old habits. Worse, they start confiding their adventures to the wrong friends
for reassurance, friends who almost certainly are thinking, “I don’t need it, but he obviously has
problems in this area and does”. They fail to see that simply making the effort to try something new
is very great progress indeed and a step in the right direction.
51 Girls are totally illogical about this if you talk to them. If you told them that you spent 2 hours
preparing for a date by running a military-grade training afternoon before you met them for the date
they would roll their eyes and think you were a super nerd. This is not what the romantic lead in a
movie does. You would not script this, unless it were in a Hollywood comedy and the character was a
total nerd. And yet, if you asked the girl how much preparation she had done for a date, at the
hairdressers, at the beautician, at the manicurist, the pedicurist, the tanning-centre - with her nose in a
magazine for hours on the bus or metro, let alone the time spent getting her clothes ready…she would
think you were a nerd.
So what is the social conditioning that hits against the logic here? It is socially acceptable for girls to
go to great lengths to make themselves attractive to men, around which a huge industry flourishes,
and yet it is not socially acceptable for a man to learn skills on how to hit on women. Can you
imagine there being a class in it at a high school?! It would be closed down immediately by the
School Board. There is a good Ealing Comedy of the fifties worth watching on this topic, “School
For Scoundrels”.
52 It turned out to be a photo of his girlfriend and she was a more than willing participant in the play-
acting. Later the media outlet responsible for misleading its public published a retraction, I
understand, but of course by then no-one cared. Poor old Julien Le Blanc tried to make a television
apology and was massacred. The media were far more vicious than he had even been with any girl!
He was just a foolish boy who had not kept it in bedroom and perhaps was drawn to the limelight.
The whole episode made me realise how naive we are about the media, expecting a balanced, truthful
story on issues, when they are often, of course, simply a soap box to indulge the whims, prejudices
and inflate the sense of self-righteous anger of their viewers. Why the press (and society) love to
pillory seducers and pick-up artists is a whole book in itself.

OceanofPDF.com
 8

Roberta

If you go onto YouTube and search Tom Torero’s videos, you will come
across one that uses a clock face in order to plot the dating sequence. It is a
23-minute video entitled, “What to do on a date.” It was appalling to me
that such a fine thing as a romantic relationship could be boiled down, like
some sort of soup stock, to a basic A-Z - and that if you hit these marks you
could accurately predict success with a woman on the date and vastly
improve your chances.
In my current frame of mind this seemed like a disgrace! Women were
tender, gentle human beings, and it was surely wrong to inflict such a
mechanical process on the lovely creatures. Should we not “get to know
each other” first? Should I not “be myself” and cover a range of topics and
be spontaneous and natural? Love was a fluid, fantastical thing that could
not be pinned down or bottled into a formula. A man should wait for
“chemistry” or “the moment.” Surely? The idea that it could all be run as a
routine, and as a repeat routine, again and again—this was heresy. It was
heretical to my belief in the purity of true love and true friendship. It was
hardly romantic. It pulled the rug from under most of the important
literature of the modern age and all the Hollywood love stories or romantic
comedies that had ever been made.
 And yet I was to learn that it was extremely effective and I threw myself
into it. I had thrown my old ideas to the four winds. I was now desperate
and determined to continue on the course I had set.53

Torero’s Date Clock

The way Tom Torero had laid it out was that there were certain key hour
marks on the dial in which you had to “pull the trigger.” The kiss—or the
attempt at a kiss, more accurately—was obviously one. A kiss needed to be
attempted and for this you might try the “hair test,” the “floppy test,” or just
staring into her eyes and holding her gaze. The point was not whether she
lets you kiss her, but that you roll off and chill out if she does not. And try
again later. As I had discovered with Oksana, logistics made the whole
thing much easier, so for example you get yourself next to her on a sofa, or
on bar stools, or stood next to her physically.
But a more important trigger moment was asking her back to your
place. A big problem here is where guys had far too much fun on the date
and felt that they should quit whilst they were ahead. Or perhaps had an
inner objection to it, such as their upbringing, or religious views. Or they
think that they want to get a girlfriend, not a fuck buddy, and they are yet to
realise that the best chance to get her to be their girlfriend is to man up at
this point and ask her home. The attempt is the important thing as this
demonstrates that you are interested in her sexually.
The mechanics around pulling the trigger to get her home were to give a
girl some “plausible deniability.” This means that you need to accept and
acknowledge that she would not just come back to your place if you asked
her. Society had conditioned her not to be a slut, and so if it was going to
happen it needed to be completely unexpected and random, with her having
had absolutely no overt part in the decision process, even though she wants
it to happen. How else was she to avoid the disapproval of her friends
around the water cooler at work the next day?54 There were a number of
different ways of generating plausible deniability. The key was to “seed”
the bounce-back early on in the date. This might be by referring to some
reason that you should move the date to your place. For instance, by
referring to a YouTube video on a topic that you were talking about that you
wanted to show her. Or telling her that you had a half bottle of wine back at
your flat that needed polishing off. Or you ask her whether or not she has
ever tried 100% pure chocolate and tell her you have some back at your flat.
Once again, logistics are key insofar as you should have planned the second
date venue close by so you could virtually lead her to the door. Or you
could even be witty and amusing by saying, “I have this great view of the
mountains from my flat,” when you lived in the middle of the city.
The third key trigger point was sex, of course. Once you have her in
your flat you make yourself at home, kick back and let her wander around,
preferably asking her to take her shoes off at the door to make her feel more
comfortable with the idea of getting cosy. You leave her alone whilst you go
into the kitchen, dropping in the occasional comment whilst she
acclimatises. In terms of actual physical escalation, hopefully you have
kissed by this point. You then get her on your bed with the laptop and get
her to show you where she lives, and a laptop can be perfect for this.
Alternatively, you can watch YouTube videos. With one girl much later on
in my journey, for example, she mentioned she liked a particular British
sitcom called “Coupling” and we went back to my place afterwards to
watch an episode. When you start fondling her or taking clothes off, if she
resists you, simply pull away, and then a few minutes later go back to what
you were doing. You will be surprised at how she may now be willing.
And then, of course, if it comes to the point where sex looks likely she
is probably going to say, “No, it’s too fast. I’m not ready.” Once again you
pull away and use the immortal line, “I completely understand.” That is,
you use “push” rather than “pull.” You might even get up and go and do
something completely different, such as go and make a phone call or tidy
the kitchen.
And then, if all else fails and it does not look as if she is going to go for
it, you can use a final killer trick which is simply to take her hand and put it
on your “crown jewels.” This is a way of overcoming her reluctance or
shyness about sex.55 According to Torero, this can have a remarkable effect.

It was now summer and I found myself letting a room at my Southwark flat.
One of the tenants who came round was an attractive 30-year-old Italian girl
called Roberta who was moving to London. She had now made the UK her
home and had worked full-time here for many years. She had major
prevarications about the room and ended up not taking it, which is
irrelevant to the story. What is relevant is that we had exchanged phone
numbers by that point and the relationship went in a different direction: she
accepted an invitation from me to grab a drink.
I had by now learned from my mistakes with Oksana and the date went
well. I ran the same basic routine with the two locations I had used before.
First The Punch & Judy and then The Clubhouse on Earlham Street in
Covent Garden. We drank cocktails at the second venue whilst at the bar
and shared a pizza, and then I led her over to a comfortable sofa.
 We were very close together in a quiet corner, and we now took selfies
in the dark. I stroked her hair, caressed her leg and so on56—but did not kiss
her. I walked her back to a hotel where she was staying and we kissed en
route, but it was very fleeting and she would not go further.
But somehow I badgered her to come in for a cup of tea and found
myself on her bed in the hotel. It was then that she gave me a speech.
“Listen,” she said, “nothing is going to happen.”
I ignored her and touched her on the leg as we sat on the bed. This set
her off:
“Okay, look. You know how you have friends, okay? Normal friends?”
I nodded.
“Okay, so you know how you just have a drink and a nice chat or they
lend you things and you go on trips together or meet on birthdays and
parties?” I said nothing. She continued, “Well, that is what we are. That is
all we are, alright? Do you understand?”
Now, these words had actually stung. I had heard them in the past and I
still thought that the girl might actually mean, in a literal sense, what she is
saying. I had always assumed that if a girl told you such things that they
were factual, to be taken at face value and that it was official—she had no
attraction towards you whatsoever.
I had now learned to qualify such remarks and that in all likelihood a
girl was deploying them to avoid being thought of as a slut and so simply
not wanting it to happen too quickly. (The fact that she had let me into her
hotel room and we were on the bed together spoke louder than any words.)
But still, she was pretty blunt about it, and as I said, the words did sting as
they rekindled the unhappy failures of the past.
 I knew intellectually not to take it personally and to laugh and shrug it
off, but I was yet to have enough positive reference experiences to really
believe it.
She insisted that I go. She was, after all, a 30-year-old woman who was
also looking for a long-term relationship and she did not want it to go too
far. She dug her heels in and I had no choice but to leave.
“Sure,” I said, “I better go.”

For the second date, I planned everything meticulously. The “just friends”
speech did not seem to have been all that sincerely meant, as she turned up
looking gorgeous. I decided to meet her at a pub on my street corner, The
Ring, and to have one quick drink there before leading her on a mini-
adventure date on the Thames Clipper and to the pub on Tobacco Dock at
Canary Wharf, the one that I had tried and failed to take Oksana to. This
was the pub with the pool table which gave such good opportunities for
intimacy.
This time I was determined NOT to leave the kiss attempt until the end
of the date. I put a half-bottle of wine in the fridge, tidied my room and left
for the pub on the corner. I bought some condoms. This time I prepared for
success, not for “luck” or “serendipity,” something I had never done before.
At the pub she was dolled up and looked nice. After one short drink, I
said, “Let’s go!” and walked her the ten-minute walk to Bankside Pier next
to The Globe theatre.
It all went well, with the numerous changes of location adding to a
sense of having known each other a good deal longer than we had. The trip
down was magic, and at the pub at Tobacco Dock I knew I had to start to
spike as early as possible and to escalate and try and kiss her. I was
determined for it not to drift into dangerous Friend Zone territory and to
drift off like it had with Oksana. If I did not man up she would be telling her
friends over the water cooler the next day, “Aw, he was really nice. We got
on really well… ”
“But?”
“But… I dunno. He just didn’t do it for me. The chemistry wasn’t
there.”
I was now learning that this magical chemistry is not something that
explodes out of the combustible compatibility of your personalities, as
much as she would like to pretend that it is, but something that is generated
when a man escalates and takes control. She has no idea of course that you
are working damn hard, that your little duck’s legs are pedalling away
underneath the water at a furious rate. You have to maintain the fiction it is
all effortless and natural.57
Whilst seduction is an art and not a science, it is a craft too, and there
are methods and principles and when you are learning you need to have
some simple methods and routines up your sleeve. This is what creates your
amazing “chemistry!”
So we played pool and voila! She did not know the rules. I became the
teacher and somehow played a really good game of pool, whilst she was
utterly hopeless and played up to her girly role magnificently. I did lots of
cheesy stuff, such as coming up behind her and touching her as I showed
her how to hold the cue, just as I had been taught in the Girlfriend
Sequence, and the date plan worked excellently.
And yet it was not easy. For me the furious paddling was trying to stay
on plan and follow the date sequence, working my way round the hours of
the clock whilst simultaneously ignoring the romantic in me who cried out,
No, this is too tacky. Like some trucker date. I can’t go through with it. If it
is going to happen at all it needs to happen like a scene out of Casablanca.
But then suddenly, after a particularly poor shot by her that she laughed
about, she turned and came back to me at the high-side table where I was
perched with my pool cue. I rolled my eyes at her and put my hands around
her waist and pulled her in and said, “This is even worse than I feared… but
I’m taking it personally. My teaching skills are clearly pretty rusty.”
And suddenly I found myself kissing her, and she was kissing back.
Now it was a full, long and lingering kiss, rather than the fleeting peck that
I had experienced on the first date. The poolroom was pretty empty by now
and it was just the two of us.
I felt incredibly relieved and would have happily called it quits at the
kiss. But we still had a goodly part of the date left, and I was determined to
work myself round all of the hours on that Torero clock.
We took the Thames Clipper back and arrived at Bankside Pier once
more. There we walked along the riverbank and held hands and then sat
down on a bench. It was a beautiful summer evening. She sat in my lap and
we made out some more and it was all pretty heavenly.
And now I was faced with the second trigger point: I had to ask her
home. “Shall we grab one more drink before calling it a night?” I asked.
I then announced that I had a half a bottle of Rioja back at the flat that
needed polishing off. I had not seeded the bounce-back earlier, and it was a
pretty ordinary attempt at giving her the “plausible deniability” that I had
been told was necessary, but it worked and she simply said, “Sure.”
At the flat I got her to take her shoes off, and then showed her into my
bedroom. I got out my laptop and she got onto the bed. We showed each
other photos of where we lived using Google Earth and Google Images, and
we chatted for a bit, polished off the wine and then started making out on
the bed. It was then that she broke off and said, “Just to let you know,
nothing is going to happen, okay?”
“Sure, I completely understand”, I grinned.
It was a line straight out of the Seducer’s Dating Playbook, of course.
And it was “a line” that I had been taught. Well, more of an approach,
really. But it worked. All those online gurus who advertised their services
by saying, “I don’t teach pick-up lines, I teach you the key principles that
will make you irresistible to women,” were clearly nonsense. Lines worked.
I meant what I said in so far as if she had rolled over and gone to sleep it
would have ended there. (Indeed, this did happen on another occasion with
another girl I will come onto in a later chapter.) The point is that time and
time again in the past I had simply assumed that a girl was not interested in
me at all, romantically, if she playfully pushed me away. As I have been at
pains to explain in my story, I was using these lines as a “thorn to remove a
thorn”, to get over the wrong-thinking that a girl was not interested and
rejecting me.58
She smiled coyly, as if to say, “You’re impossible,” After a pause we
went back to making out and clothes came off.
“No, really,” she said, breaking off again, although clearly in two minds,
since she was aroused.
“No, absolutely. I’m not going to do anything that you’re not happy
with”, I smiled, equally playfully. “Let’s just lie here and chat.” I rolled off
her and we chatted.
But not for so long… I then remembered the twelve o’clock position on
the Date Clock: I took her hand and put it on my Crown Jewels. I had my
jeans on, but I just held her hand there. Then I unzipped and guided her
hand underneath my jeans.
“Have you got any condoms?” she suddenly asked.
And that was it. We made love, sweet love.

The next morning I awoke and I felt like that silly character in a movie
scene as the camera looks down at him from the sky and he has his hands
behind his head, staring upwards and wearing a stupid smile. The moment
seemed like it would last forever. If it had even happened, which I still
could not quite believe.
I was back in the fluffy clouds, floating dizzily amongst angels again,
plucking harps and wafting me salacious glances, but these were now
Italian angels out of Botticelli paintings and not the South African ones
post-bootcamp. All the pain of the past—all the old rusted rubbish in that
Scrapyard of Regrets—seemed to dissolve and evaporate. It was almost an
out-of-body experience or the experience I imagined that astronauts have,
except rather than the earth it was my past life that I was seeing at a great
distance. It seemed so inconsequential.
It had all been so deeply rewarding, enjoyable—and the nourishment I
so desperately needed. Part of it was having to do with the sex but a lot of it
was to do with the whole process, which had been such great fun and such
an amazing learning experience. It really did feel like I had stumbled on a
secret knowledge and it had now been made real. The promise of those
crazy days on the bootcamp, when the impossible had suddenly become
possible, had happened again. It felt as if once more the door had opened to
a secret world, a wonderland.
 And I just could not believe that it had all worked so smoothly. It had all
ticked over like the hands of a clock, just as Torero had said, and there had
been loads of lines and routines that I had incorporated into the process.
Elsewhere in this book I mention the film Hitch in which the loser finally
gets the girl only once he has stopped using pick-up lines and started “being
himself.” So what the hell was going on?! Was that movie a lie? Had
Hollywood been lying to me? And had society been lying too? As much as
I was in Cloud Nine after the sweetest sex of my life (up until that point) I
was also astonished at the ease with which the A-Z of seduction had
worked.
If this was a whole different world, a Secret Society, then I wanted
lifetime membership.
Roberta had shown me that this stuff really was a skill that, if executed
correctly, could massively help your dating life. Or at least get you sex so
even if you did not end up dating, you did not have a pair of blue balls… or
purple in my case (it had been over 15 years). I could not quite believe that
it had happened or that it had seemed so effortless and so unlike my dates of
old. I still could not square the fact that it had been a routine and not some
romantic, deeper inner connection.
After sex, Roberta showed an interest in taking it further forward. But I
now felt I was just at the beginning of a rite of passage and I did not
reciprocate. We fooled about once more, but I could see that she was
looking for a long-term partner and she clearly wanted to get married and
have kids, whereas I felt on the threshold of a big new adventure. Whilst I
had got into this stuff to find a partner, I had also felt that I needed to really
acquire the skills first so that I would never have trouble in this area of my
life in the future.
 I now wanted to go further and deeper. Much deeper. I wanted to
become “rock solid” in this area of my life.

53 Men take things so personally. We have an idea that if we get the text saying, “I really like you but
I see you more as a friend,” that this means that we are a failure, as far as women are concerned
(perhaps as far as his life is concerned!) and that it is personal and something is intrinsically lacking
in him. But the reason you have got yourself into the Friend Zone is because you did not do the right
thing. The right actions. You did not escalate correctly. Plain and simple. It’s nothing to do with your
looks or your personality. It’s behaviour. Thank god that behaviours can be learned and changed!
54 This is called a girl’s “anti-slut defence” (ASD) in pick-up circles.
55 This is termed “Last-Minute Resistance.” It is an unfortunate expression, as it gets the PUA
community into all sorts of trouble and is cannon fodder for the media. It suggests that rather than
escalating in a sexual way and seducing a girl, in which she willingly allows it to happen, the
encounter is equivalent to rape. The truth is that women want men to overcome their token
resistance, and this is all part of the dating and mating game. It is the litmus test for them of whether
you are a man or a mouse. The word “rape” has become a great soundbite word. It can be used in an
irrational way by society as a label to humiliate the unwary—irrational though it’s application may
be.
56 In pick-up circles, they call this “kino,” which means physical touching.
57 Of course, there are “naturals” at game. But I am not sure if the word is quite correct. Were they
really born with a talent, or did they just figure it out at an earlier age than most of us? Even if the
former, there are surely examples of guys who, because they never had to learn it systematically, lose
their touch, get married and find themselves in “Beta Male” territory. In any event, don’t use it as an
excuse not to learn this stuff yourself!
58 At the risk of stating the obvious, one obviously has to distinguish between playfully pushing a
guy away and actually pushing him away! There is a world of difference, and hopefully I do not
insult your intelligence by pointing this out. In fact, it is almost very nature of the mating game is a
girl flirtatiously pushing a guy away.

OceanofPDF.com
 9

Bansko, Bulgarian Spies, & The Secret Video

You will recall that I had taken the initiative in setting up meet-ups with
other members of the daygame community on the DGBCA. I now floated
on the secret forum the silly idea of “Snow Game.” In other words, I said
that getting out into the mountains and skiing or snowboarding would be an
excellent thing to do, and could actually all be part of building character
and becoming men. I had had a number of positive responses to the idea
and a number of locations were considered, and so I put some dates on the
diary. But then, barely a week or two before the proposed trip, which would
now be a late spring long-weekend break in Bansko, Bulgaria, guys
universally flaked on the idea.
It looked as if I was going to go alone.
And then, at the last minute, I got a message from none other than Tom
Torero himself. He had just returned from a tour of the US with
Daygame.com, doing bootcamps over there in all the major cities, and was
a keen skier. He and another coach from Daygame.com, a dude called Dave
Diggler, had gotten wind through the DGBCA that I was organising a trip,
and they were up for it. It impressed me that these guys were “yes” men,
who simply made a decision and then followed through rather than pissing
around with a “maybe” that ultimately flaked.
 And so it was just the three of us who went on the ski trip.
I suddenly felt a new lease on life, from the moment I met them at
Gatwick Airport. The airport was one of their playgrounds. They joked and
jibed and teased each other and hit on girls right there in front of me and
flirted with the air stewardesses, but most of all, Torero in particular was
very socially calibrated with people around him. He was polite, organised,
and on top of the travel arrangements and itinerary, and had a smile and
positive boyish energy for anybody around him.
And as I sat with them on the flight over and they continued to banter, I
broke off from my book and looked out of the window and reflected on how
lucky I was. The company of two experts in the field for a five-day trip.
Wow. This was a heaven-sent opportunity. I would now be rubbing
shoulders with them, and really learning about this daygame stuff. This was
just what I had lacked. I had been flirting with this stuff, having fun—too
much fun, perhaps—but not going real deep. I was now about to go deep.
(Although what “deep” might actually look like I had not really given any
thought to.)
These guys, however, were not quite what I expected. Whilst I had of
course hung out with Tom Torero at the bootcamp, I now got to know him a
lot better. I noticed his Banksy-esque quality a lot more on this ski trip. This
was not the guy in the very first videos I had seen, in which he looked like
the lovechild of David Cameron and Michael Schumacher, in his pullover
and open-neck shirt, as though he were still part of the Oxford Debating
Society. This dude had evolved and was in long, thick black trousers, a tatty
leather jacket and worn boots with the laces frayed that look a little like
Italian ex-military, as though picked up from a charity shop. He had a tiny
bit of jewellery and a tattoo on his wrist: some initials. Doubtless that was
good fuel for fun and enquiry on a date.
His hair was black, not fair as I had remembered it (he liked to use hair
dye from time to time). He travelled extremely light, almost as if it were a
challenge to see how little he could carry, and in addition to a bag he could
throw over his shoulder and put in an overhead compartment on a plane, he
carried his Macbook Air in its leather case under his spare arm.
But most of all he was personable, cheery, always had a good vibe, and
was “up.”
Dave Diggler was also personable, but more along the lines of a lively,
lovable maniac. He had a strong Welsh accent (Tom was also Welsh, but
you would not have guessed it). He was bald, with a lot more jewellery and
far more tattoos, and he had a good build, not slim and tall like Tom. He
looked like a proper tough nut, but was actually quite a creative who could
design fantastic websites and had done so for Daygame.com.
Diggler proved to be quite crazy. Brave beyond belief on the slopes. He
literally learned snowboarding from scratch in barely four days. I have
never known anyone to learn so fast. He took out the lights of a snow cat
whilst doing so because he did not seem to see the need to put on any brake
as he came hurtling towards a chair lift with the snow cat parked outside.
He just smashed into it.
He was a crazy man. This was the guy who, during Daygame.com’s US
tour that previous summer, had jumped into an alligator pit for laughs. He
had filmed it on his GoPro but it turned out there was a problem and it had
not recorded, which amused the rest of the team who had told him he was
an absolute idiot to do it.
 But apart from his eccentricities, he was not some sort of emotional
train wreck, or a narcissist with personality disorders, or anything else like
that. Tom and Dave were simply good company.
This was not the way PUAs had been presented in The Game, and I
began to wonder just how many liberties Neil Strauss had taken in his book
to make for a better story. Were PUAs really such self-obsessed villains?
Tom was completely accommodating toward other people. He was not
obsequious, but he had manners. What was interesting was that neither of
them had any major hangups, as far as I can tell, more than the rest of us.
They were not grumpy or angry about flight delays, did not skimp when it
came to buying a round of drinks, were not possessive about what room
they wanted in the hotel, or anxious if there was a danger of missing the
shuttle bus or desperate to get on the slopes. They were not rude to waiters.
They socialised and chatted and were cool with staff. They seemed to “live
in the moment.” Neither were “assholes”—I had always assumed that you
needed to be a bit of an asshole to have success with women.
In terms of their financial circumstances, it was clear that Diggler in
particular was not at all “flush”! He spent a lot of the trip quizzing me about
the law on credit cards and whether or not he could prosper from legal
loopholes that allowed people to write off their debt under legislation
designed to protect consumers (I had been suing banks as part of my legal
work at that time). But Tom Torero seemed to be living within his means,
neither rich nor in debt, and was a good example of this. He enjoyed staying
in a nice hotel on this trip, but would have been just as happy in a hostel, or
at least would not complain.
So were they successful with women? Diggler was going through a
difficult period and had not had any success in the US with his own
daygame—it appears that he was going through a bad patch. (It was also
interesting that they had not found it as easy as they expected in the States.
It had turned out that there really are very big cultural differences between
the US and Europe in this area, particularly where sense of humour is
concerned when teasing.) But I met Diggler a year later when he was
setting up a business with Jon Matrix, and they came to one of our meet-
ups. By then I knew a few more people in the community, and it was clear
that Diggler had got out of his slump and was enjoying extremely good
results with girls.
As for Tom, guys on the DGBCA said that he had slept with over three
hundred women and he was still in his thirties. It was clear to me that this
was not exaggeration.59 He never bragged about it in person, but he had
written books on his stories, and having met him, there was no doubt in my
mind that these stories were true. He was not perfect, however, and had got
himself into trouble with the community by paying an actress to kiss him in
the street for a video, an ill-judged marketing stunt to try and get a “Street
Kiss Close” in the bag. A lot of PUAs had got videos of this online on their
sites and Tom Torero had felt the lack.
These were a couple of cheerful misfits, or carpetbaggers, who were
totally happy at travel. Tom was not all “cheeky chappy.” He was tall and
he had his threatening side which he would turn on with girls, and he had
this ability to put on a powerful gaze and suddenly become very serious,
which was clearly a skill he had mastered as a seducer. They were like
characters at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, these two. This was a part of
Wonderland I had not seen as of yet: an ever-so-slightly sinister part of
Wonderland. A Mad Hatter and a March Hare. Or a Honey Badger.60 The
sinister side was magnified by an apparent amoral attitude around the topics
of marriage and fidelity in relationships. And this jarred with me. Tom was
such good company with good values and conduct in a lot of ways, but I
could not accept his attitude towards women in relationships and married
women. His view seemed to be that married women and women in
relationships were fair game. I had got into this stuff for a GF or wife and
saw it as a rite of passage. But for Tom it was a way of life and the idea of
girlfriends or wives was anathema. His view was that our biological make-
up mitigated massively against it.

Before I get on to this and the story of the trip, bear with me as I have to
first tell you a little about a particular book I had brought with me as
reading material.
As was common with a lot of guys, I had started to read round the
literature in this area. On the purely practical level, I had been dipping into
an ebook that had been recommended by Daygame.com at the end of the
bootcamp, one that they had actually supplied on a memory stick for each
of us, along with the videos of our approaches. It was called Sixty Years of
Challenge and was a mysterious and incredibly succinct book written by an
American who was not at all known, it appeared, and not actively out there
online, but had these nuggets about how a guy generates sexual attraction. It
was mostly directed at meeting girls at night, it should be said, but what
was fascinating to all of us was the way in which he described this “other
world” in which guys who knew this stuff operated. It really was like
another astral plane of existence, superimposed on our own normal world,
where a guy has an open channel to girls and vice versa. They are both in
on the secret, whilst the milling crowds around them of the Average Joes on
a night out are not.
 But the book I had brought with me was more academic and essentially
a study into the “ugly truths” that no man must mention in respectable
society, including the realm of academia, where the author, Rollo Tomassi,
lived and worked. Apparently, he saw no way of getting his work in the
area of men and women and dating published in academic circles because it
would be too inflammatory and toxic. So he was forced into an
underground world of “male-orientated” study and commentary, mostly
online, of course, where for the first time ever perhaps men were able to
easily connect with each other and bridge gaps that were previously
impossible to cross.
The book was called The Rationale Male and the various key tenets of it
that stuck out in my mind were pretty shocking and struck right at the root
of my thinking of the past 20 years. I felt under attack by these ideas. Or
was I being decontaminated of wrong ideas I had accumulated over the
decades?
I would encourage you to dip into the book yourself, of course, and to
extract “the poison”. I call it poison because the antidote for snakebites is a
little of the poison of the same snake. It will help wash away the wrong-
thinking, but do not drink too much of it afterwards, as it will otherwise
work in an opposite, negative direction! Here are those aspects that struck
me so powerfully and shockingly (and a lot of this is echoed in other books
in the area on the evolutionary biology that underpins it all):61

Hypergamy: Women’s tendency to want to “trade up” to a better male and

not necessarily be faithful to her partner if he is of inferior calibre. Evolved
from the need for a woman to seek the highest level of protection and
security she can from the highest status males in the tribe.
The Myth of Purity: Men idolise women and want to believe that they are
pure, perfect creatures (Jenny Woodhouse and those haircuts…). Women, of
course, are under pressure to live up to this idealised image. Men are the
hopeless romantics, not women, who are far more pragmatic about their
sexual strategies.

Dual Mating Strategy: One of the key and most striking theories of
Tomassi’s (underpinned by the science of biology if you believe those
evolutionary biologists mentioned elsewhere in this book) is the idea that
women actually are torn between the needs of a Provider and the desire for
a Lover in their lives. That is, on the one hand the need to ensure that they
and their children are looked after, and on the other the powerful urge to
mate with rogue males with higher-grade DNA, the “Lovers,” or “Alpha
Bad Boys.” Indeed, if at all possible women will maximise the chances of
evolutionary survival of their progeny by having a cuckoo in the nest that
their husband will never know about.62 The qualities of the Alpha are
highly sought-after by the pick-up artist, and he looks down his nose at all
the little Average Joe beta males, often shackled by the ball and chain of a
marriage.

Monogamy: The myth that men will be sad, lonely old bachelors unless
they marry is an important social tool that prevents a guy from doing what
is “natural” and having many sexual partners—“One Life, One Woman”
(like swans). Rollo Tomassi would argue that men are not biologically
designed for monogamy, but it is foisted upon us by a feminised society (in
other words we are more like dolphins, which mate with several sexual
partners over a lifetime, although at the same time have the ability to form
strong, lasting relationships).

Plate Theory: In order to be cured of the sexual prison of the “AFC”

(Average Frustrated Chump), a man must have a number of women on the
go at any one time so that he brings abundance into his life and avoids the
unhappy fate of scarcity. He must keep “spinning plates.” And women will
actually find him more attractive if he does, because they are more attracted
to men who have women on the go than those who do not (in contrast with
men, who are attracted to the Purity Fantasy—see above—and women who
do not have a lot of men in their lives).

Sexual Market Value: Society likes to camouflage the truth here, which is
that men have a far longer sexual market value, one that often increases
with age, whereas women are like matches that burn brightly but not for
very long. Age does not matter nearly as much to women, whereas for men,
the younger and prettier the better. To the point of indecency, as far as
society is concerned. This explains why most “feminised” men, in Western
societies at least, labour under the imperative that they must form a
partnership of someone their own age. Society requires a short age-gap, at
best, whereas biology does not. (Read on for my own direct experience.)

Oneitis: A big one, this. Oneitis is the promulgation of the soul mate myth
that somewhere out there is the right person for us. “The one”. A fairy story
promulgated by Hollywood, amongst others.
Red Pill: Guys in the pick-up community like to compare themselves to The
Matrix because of the idea of this secret world that men who are not in the
know never see. The main character is given the option of a red pill and a
blue pill. The blue pill will send him back to his old, comfortable state of
ignorance, whereas the red pill is a dangerous step to a knowledge of how
things truly are, from which there is no going back. It is important to
swallow the pill and not to cough it back up! Unplugging from the Matrix is
a dirty and lengthy business, and many guys revert or regress along the
road.63

JBY: Tomassi’s identification of the “Just Be Yourself” idea prevalent in

society. Acting out certain behaviours in order to have greater success with
women is frowned on. People buying into the JBY concept would view this
as acting falsely and pretending to be something that you are not. It’s a very
strongly subtle idea that operates quietly in the background and allows men
who do not want to make efforts to change to criticise those that do. An
analogy is “crabs in a barrel”—if one crab tries to climb out, the other crabs
drag it back down. JBY keeps men down, where women want them
(women in feminised parts of the world, presumably).

Alphas and Betas: The idea here is that there are guys who are anti-society
types who do crazy things and who do not obey the rules of society, and
they are extremely attractive to girls (“alphas”). Women gravitate to them.
And then there are Average Joes who do the right thing and get married to
pretty much the first girl who comes along because they do not think they
can do better (“betas”).
Tom Torero noticed me reading The Rationale Male on the flight. He was
somewhat dismissive of it as it was a bit “academic” in his view, and both
Diggler and Tom said as much to me on the plane whilst I was reading in
the window seat and they were flirting with trolley dollies on their aisle
seats: “Ah. Very good. But be careful of the ‘Manosphere.’”64 There’s a lot
of hate, anger, and bitterness amongst dudes who spend their time going
online and reading endlessly about the whole subject, licking their
emotional wounds, ruefully complaining about the injuries received over
the years at the hands of women—right back to their mothers!”
“But you see,” added Diggler, in his thick Welsh accent, “I think every
man has to go through that stage of reading shit. It’s part of their
development.”
“Yeah, Dave’s right, actually,” Tom said.
“I’ve read it. But it was in small print. That’s the problem,” said Dave.
“Why couldn’t he get it properly published?”
“It probably wouldn’t be a Penguin favourite, Dave,” Tom laughed.
“But if he is a respected academic and wants to take himself seriously,
surely, he would put it into LARGE print. Goes without saying, doesn’t it?”
Diggler changed the subject. “Do you think you could actually step out
onto the wing of a plane in mid-flight?”
Tom would roll his eyes and laugh.
“What would be your chances of survival in a plane crash? I mean,
obviously not on the tarmac, but say in the sea.”
“Depends which sea, Dave,” says Tom.
“Yeah. Suppose. I think it could be quite long, though, with a life
jacket.”
 I gently brought the subject politely back round to Tomassi, and Tom
said seriously and attentively, “Yeah, it’s obligatory reading as guys need to
get their heads re-wired. It’s all accurate. But be careful not to become
angry towards women.”
“Do you think I could outrun a shark?” added Dave.

We landed in Sofia in beautiful sunny, late-spring weather. We doubted

whether there would be any snow at all, but of course once we had driven
up to the mountains there was plenty. The taxi driver was an amusing
character who was quite happy to talk about his life and marriage.
“Yes. I am now father and work, work, work.”
“Your wife stays at home?”
“Yes. To look after our daughter.”
“Perhaps you should send her out to work, hahaha.”
He did not say anything because, presumably, that was not so normal or
acceptable in Bulgarian society.
At the ski resort we walked around and bartered with hotels before we
found one—a really good one, in fact, right next to the main Bansko cable
car. The place still had a slight air of a hangover from Communism, in spite
of the fact it was a newish and glossy ski resort. Capitalism hitting post-
communist society, I guessed. Bulgaria had not yet totally embraced the
capitalist concept, and everywhere shop staff as well as hotel staff would
happily remind you in monosyllables or a shrug of the shoulders and silence
that you should be grateful for the service they were providing, not the
other way round.
On the one hand it was silver service at the hotel, on the other, if you
wanted something and politely asked in your polite-ish English, “Excuse
me, do you have any butter?” a waiter would simply answer, “Noh.”
“Excuse me, I don’t seem to have a hand towel in my room?” Pause.
“Do you have any?”
“Noh.”
It was amusing. As Western tourists we expect that the service industry
will provide for all our needs, and so are astonished when staff do not run
around after us.
“Could I borrow a pen?” I once asked reception. “Noh.”
“Do you have a pen? Something to write with?” (This was the main
hotel reception of a 4-star hotel.)
“Noh.”
The Bulgarians’ attitude to capitalism and the service industry seemed
to reflect an ambivalence of my own. I had not owned or embraced the way
of life of a PUA as it jarred with too many of my values. I was wearing that
ambivalence on the outside, as I had been during that spring spent with
Shaheed and Lars, where we had enjoyed the fun of it without having to go
deep into the sexual, seemingly amoral side.
Tom Torero was amused rather than irritated by the Bulgarians’ attitude
to the service industry, and I could tell he was a globe-trotter who had seen
everything and was very much outside society in the lifestyle he chose and
flexible in terms of having to deal with different cultures and nationalities.
One of the things that interested me was that it became clear that language
was no barrier to success with girls.
On the first day, when we were getting our ski gear organised, he
chatted up the waitress at breakfast, teasing her about being a little squirrel
and doing an impression, because obviously her English was not perfect. I
do not know whether it was the look that he gave or the smile, but she was
very responsive. He was not about to act on it, though. It would not have
been easy, of course, as she was a waitress at the hotel and he would often
say to me, “It’s not the Olympics, Alex,” which was a light tease on my
habit of wanting to chat up every girl in every situation conceivable. At the
time, I had the idea that unless you could chat up any girl, anytime,
anywhere, you were not really trying hard enough and being committed.
These interactions were more about keeping the social wheels
lubricated, I think, and keeping the seducer vibe “up” where at all possible.
He charmed the middle-aged lady behind the glass at the hut that sold the
ski passes and bantered with an attractive promo girl who was in the street
trying to sell tickets to a club that night. Bansko was quite commercialised
and there were plenty of clubs and strip clubs. In fact, there was a “strip,”
though it was all a bit tatty. Bansko had had an influx of investment and
building works pre-2008 but now there were a number of uncompleted
projects because the money had left after the 2008 recession.
I noticed he really did go on the offensive with her. He teased her, and
more than that he challenged her by calling out what she was doing—trying
to sell to us—and in doing so neutralise her “frame,” replacing it with his
own.
If I had not known what was going on and I had been a bystander, I
would have thought to myself, What’s that guy doing? That is just rude.
Poor girl is just trying to do her job. I might even have become a witless, or
unwitting, “White Knight”65 and interrupted him.
“Excuse me, my friend. Don’t talk to a lady like that. Get some basic
good manners. Are you alright, miss?”
“Thank you, yes,” she might have said, probably glancing with flashing,
eager eyes at Tom.
 Tom would have said, “No worries, mate. Just bantering. Just arrived
off the plane from Sofia, actually. Bit disorientated. Ha ha. All right, lovely,
keep out of mischief. Catch you later,” and sauntered off.
I would have stood there, feeling like one of society’s policeman,
having dealt with the dastardly ruffian and preserved this lady’s honour. She
would have smiled pleasantly at me as if to say, “Thanks,” but glanced over
her shoulder at the lanky ruffian, her appetite whetted.
I followed Tom and Diggler around, asking questions and trying to
figure this stuff out. I was like a schoolboy with a notebook. “What
happened there with that promo girl?” I asked.
“She’s a club girl. She’s got better game than most pick-up artists and
she’s barely out of her teens. It’s a battle of the frames and you’re rarely
going to close her. You’re both hustling. But she wants to sell you
something you don’t want.”
Before January 2014 I would simply have been unaware that he was
generating attraction, rather than insulting her. One of the things I was to
learn—one of the many, many things—was that we often tend to project our
own point of view onto women, and assume that they would be feeling at
that moment what we would be feeling, or would imagine what they would
be feeling.

***

Now, we were not there for long and it was end-of-season and rather quiet,
but there were nevertheless a couple of opportunities that came my way. I
felt a little of the reflected daygame glory of being around these guys, I
guess, and was emboldened enough to make approaches.
The first was my decision to approach a group at a café table at the
mountain top after we had just finished lunch, mid-ski. God knows what I
was thinking. I opened three girls and teased one about being a Russian
who had skipped across the border and told her she was clearly from Russia
as her furry white mink hat was a dead giveaway. In fact, they were from
Sheffield, which was hilarious. It went well, but then some guys turned up.
Tom Torero looked on as I bailed out of the set and joined him and Diggler
by the ski rack. “Bold move. But it’s not the Olympics, Mr. Forrest!” he
smiled.
He explained that with a group like that, I was going to find it hard
work to isolate a girl, especially with the guys around, probably boyfriends.
He was right, of course, but as is sometimes the case with enthusiastic
beginners, fearless, innocent enthusiasm can take you through.
I proved him wrong the next day as I bumped into the girl with the furry
hat by random chance at another ski bar on the slopes. And this time she
was alone at a table outside, basking in the sun. I could not believe my luck.
I opened her and Diggler winged me by taking photos of us both before
peeling off to the bar for a drink in order to leave us alone. I grabbed and
hugged her during that photo-shoot moment, and after teased her silly hat.
She was a pretty, cute, yummy girl. But was she sweet and loyal? Well, it
went so well that we exchanged Facebook names and talked about what we
were doing that night, and she told me what club they would probably be at.
But when I asked her what she was doing alone she waved and said,
“Waiting for my…” she hesitated, “boyfriend,” she said eventually.
“He’s up there,” she waved, dismissively.
 She said this whilst I had her in bear hug and was comparing our hats—
mine a furry Russian hat and hers a cute little panda hat. The sexuality in
the interaction was clearly there. I had, without realising, generated quite a
lot of attraction simply by going up to her, grabbing her playfully and
pulling her into me for the photos and teasing her. It was one of a number of
“accidental alpha” moments.
Later that day I saw her for a third time, walking back to her chalet. I
watched, thinking that I could run up and approach her. But something held
me back. Was it nerves? Or was it the fact that she had a boyfriend and he
was there on the strip?
I hesitated and she disappeared round the corner. I never did see her
again, and I could not find her on Facebook. We had not been able to get a
connection up on the mountain when we exchanged Facebook names, and it
was actually pretty useless trying to follow up. We did not go to the club we
mentioned, although I did think twice about searching for her later, trawling
the bars and clubs in an attempt to “accidentally” bump into her! (As you
will have noticed I lapsed back into “Chode Mode” at times and became
“Mr Nice”, something that Rollo Tomassi would explain as not having
swallowed the red pill properly.)
But what was going on here, I wondered? Was it really possible that she
was exhibiting signs of hypergamy and a dual mating strategy? Had my two
bold approaches pressed buttons in her, buttons that said I was a higher-
status male because of my seeming confidence in social situations with
strangers? Or was this just fanciful thinking on my part?
And yet, there was no mistaking that she had reciprocated and was
enjoying my company. She had given me her Facebook and told me which
club she would be at. Or perhaps it was not that she saw me as an
opportunity to trade up, just as a guy takes in his old Ford and exchanges it
for a new Mercedes, but maybe she saw it as an opportunity to have sex
with a rogue alpha male and I had accidentally pressed these buttons.
According to the evolutionary biologists, if we had sex she would then have
had the benefit of sperm from two competing males.
It was difficult to apply the laws of evolutionary biology to what
seemed to be an innocent, if flirtatious and friendly, meeting. But I dare say
if her boyfriend had been there to see, it would have aroused very
possessive, jealous, and animalistic emotions in him.
I remember sitting with Tom at a bar at the bottom of the slops after a
day’s skiing and mooting the whole topic with him, feeling that I was in a
state of shock by the implications of the new viewpoint I was acquiring as
the result of reading Tomassi and meeting the girl. He was matter-of-fact
about it.
“That’s just the way it is,” he said. “There’s no point in getting fed up or
angry about it. Women,” he said. “Bless them. What would we do without
them?”
“So this Tomassi, you agree with him?”
“Agree with what?” he said. “That marriage is redundant, or pointless? I
mean, that it is really just a vain attempt to contain what is otherwise
completely natural? That the idea of one life one partner, like a couple of
swans mating for life, is redundant as far as humans are concerned?”
“Or dolphins…” I mused.
“Dolphins don’t mate for life. In fact, they often have many sexual
partners. But anyway, the idea of ‘the one’—yeah, that is redundant. He is
right. Remember that example he gives of a teacher asking a classroom of
students whether they think that there is someone out there for them and
nearly all of them say, ‘Yes’?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s the false idea that we have in society. That we get hitched for
life. No, we don’t. Males want to mate with everything, and even women
want to mate with more than one male if they can get away with it.”
“So you would happily have a number of marriages in one lifetime?”
“I wouldn’t get married at all. Once you’re in it, the codes of society
and social conditioning mean that you’ve pretty much got your balls cut off.
But that’s my take.”
“So in theory you could still be married and be an alpha?” Whatever
that meant. I was a little confused on the subject.
“Yeah.”
“But don’t be surprised if you’re the woman and your man plays
away?”
“Exactly. It’s evolutionary biology. He has powerful drives inside him
pushing him to do exactly that.”
“And he shouldn’t be surprised if she plays away?”
“He shouldn’t be surprised if he ends up with a cuckoo in the nest, no,
and ends up providing for some other guy’s child.”
“Bit of a dangerous strategy on her part, though…”
“Yup. She’s not going to make a habit of it. But just one would greatly
increase her prospects of producing good stock that would survive down the
generations.”
And then I wanted to quiz him about hypergamy, because presumably
she would also want to trade up. But Tom sipped his beer and said,
“Beautiful,” taking in the view of the mountains.
 It was difficult to draw him out further on this topic as he seemed
disinterested in prolonged debate.

It was on this trip that I learned that a little bit more about Tom and the
details of his early life and short marriage.
He had been a proper nerd at Oxford University and hid himself in his
books. It was difficult to believe, but he often spoke about it in his books
and podcasts. He was fond of telling the story of the guy in the bedsit next
to him who had immediately started socialising the minute he arrived for
Fresher’s Week at University. He had asked Tom to join him for some
drinks in his room with a couple of girls he had found, but Tom had wanted
to finish his pre-course reading before classes started the next day. Later
that night Tom was distracted from his books by the sound of this guy
having sex. This bedsit neighbour became “that guy” at University, and all
the girls knew it and it only made them more interested in him, in spite of
the fact that in public they would denounce him. It was more evidence of
the sad reality of Tomassi’s philosophy, that the more of a bounder and cad
you were, the more girls became attracted to you. Pre-Selection, they call it.
They fact that other girls were interested in you meant that a new girl on the
scene would immediately classify you as alpha material and want to sleep
with you, even if society’s code would mean that she would say otherwise
—to herself as well as to others. It is a sad but very observable truth that a
woman becomes more attracted to you when she sees another woman on
your arm. This probably explains why women fall for married men.
In fact, Tom found no solace in his pre-course reading anyway. It was
largely his tutor, Richard Dawkins’ material and reading list. He was left
traumatised by reading about the subject of human evolutionary biology; it
now destroyed his belief in traditional religious values of family and
marriage.
Tom’s marriage occurred at University. He really had no idea, and it was
amazing that somehow he had fallen into a relationship. He then went to a
Greek monastery for a few months to sort his head out. He really valued
this time—there were no women and no distractions—and came out with a
clarity about things. It is a bit of a cold brutal world, and women are driven
by biological forces over which they have little control. He decided that it
was better to play the game than hang on to an outdated and questionable
set of ideas and values that were very likely to lead to anger,
disillusionment, and bitterness. He was a pragmatist on the stage of life.
And he became a hustler, little interested in rights and wrongs or chasing
after truths and certainties; more interested in “grabbing life by the horns,”
which was the motto on his website and explained his pseudonym of
course, “Torero.”
So he did not hold Tomassi in great esteem because he saw that to
jettison one set of beliefs merely in order to pick up the baggage of another
set of ideas, equally dangerous, was foolish. He travelled light, and his
external life was a mirror of his internal one. He was without the baggage of
any ideas or affiliation to any specific belief system. Belief systems just led
to endless argument, debate, and becoming stubborn and opinionated—
which took you in the opposite direction and, most importantly, was a big
turn-off for girls. Girls liked the hustler, the carpetbagger, the Byronic punk
and rogue who knew how to negotiate his way through the social maze of
life.
I nevertheless stubbornly tried to draw him on the topic of hypergamy
once more, over a beer after another day up the mountain. I was a lawyer,
after all, with a very honourable father who had strong beliefs, and I
believed in rights and wrongs and truth and justice. I had studied the
classics at University, and Plato was my reference point, not Dawkins.
“So this hypergamy, or however you say it, it also means that the
marriage is doomed because she will want to trade up?” I asked. “So as
soon as she has had a couple of kids and they have reached a certain age, if
a richer, higher-status male comes along, she will switch allegiance?”
“She is being driven by that driver, yes, and it is pretty strong. The point
is that, as a man, marriage is not some great final solution to the problem.
You are still going to have to work hard to hold the frame, and of course
that is not going to be all that easy because it is going to be harder to see
other women and generate that jealousy plotline that created that attraction
towards you in the first place.”
“It’s such a grim worldview.”
“As Alfie says in the film, ‘They’ve got you either way,’” he laughed.
“But take that girl up the mountain, for example. Let’s say we get on, hit
it off…”
“Yes… and she leaves her beta boyfriend…” he ran with the idea.
“And we really like each other and promise to be together. Always…”
“Yesss…” He couldn’t help smiling.
“And we get into a relationship and get married and she tells me at the
altar that it is for life.”
“The myth of purity.”
I was irritated by the way he belittled such fine concepts and aspirations
by sticking a Tomassi label on it, like a store assistant sticking price labels
on products in the shelves.
 “So what are you saying? She’s going to want to find some alpha genes
along the way, or trade up if a better, higher-status male comes along?” I
retorted.
“No, Mr. Forrest, she’ll always be faithful, I’m sure.” But he could see
that I was miffed and added, in all seriousness, “Listen, don’t hate them for
it. And don’t hate the way the world works and the way biology works. It’s
just the rules of the game. Play along, but don’t get false expectations about
some beautiful existence with a girl who’s purer than the Virgin Mary.
Don’t put them on a pedestal. They don’t want to be there anyway.”
Diggler appeared, having finished what had clearly been an exhilarating
run down the mountain. He had been hours up there. In his element,
communing with nature. He held his snowboard up like a trophy at the
Olympics and declared, “Epic, man. Absolutely fucking epic, I am telling
you!”
This was all a great deal to take in. Perhaps the hardest part was to
accept that I had been labouring under totally mistaken ideas for most of my
life. Another area it struck a hammer-blow at was the idea I had acquired at
University that men and women could be friends. Indeed, that that was how
true love worked—you were looking for your best friend. According to
both Tomassi and Tom this “friends” idea was really the myth of purity and
the idea of “the one.”
I was now struggling to piece together and arrive at any conclusions
about the many fresh concepts I was having to digest, whilst simultaneously
having to force myself, painfully, to dredge up those old, embedded, and
habitual ideas from my subconscious and shine a light on them.
Encouraged by my success with fuzzy hat girl, I tried some more daygame.
This time on the hotel receptionist, who was a real sultry beauty with raven-
black hair and azure eyes. Slightly bored at end of season, but too
professional to show it. I asked Tom about the wisdom of flirting with staff
at a hotel.
“Be careful. It can go all a bit sour and create problems and
embarrassment. But—yeah. If you like her a lot. The thing to do is just pick
your moment and put your cards on the table. Don’t muck about. She’ll at
least respect you for it. Keep it clean.”
So I simply said to her one day after skiing as I walked in and saw her
smiling at me at reception, “Hey, I find you attractive and fun and I would
like to take you out for a drink. When you’re free, of course…”
“Sure.”
“Cool.”
I was too excited to pin it down to a specific time or anything after that!
I said something like, “Cool, great. We’ll… get together. I’ll check what
day is best. Get back to you.” How I wished that I had just put a date in the
diary at that moment. Escalated the interaction harder.66 There is a window
with women, somehow, and you need to strike. The Universe trips you up,
otherwise.
She left shift early on Saturday and she ended up being off-duty on
Sunday as well, and we left on Monday. So I never saw her again to pin
down the date and take her number. I did manage to get her Facebook from
another member of staff who checked with her that it was alright. She and I
had some conversations after that when I had returned to the UK. And she
even sent me photos of herself. They were idyllic Bulgarian gypsy-like
photos of her by a river with her head cocked to one side looking at me like
a Pre-Raphaelite painting. I became romantic about her and drifted off into
dreams of perhaps flying out to Sonny Beach on the Black Sea, a popular
resort for Bulgarians, where she had told me she worked after the ski season
was over. My old “romantic” self would have got on a plane in the summer
and gone and visited her.
The painful truth was that I had this romantic ideal about love and was
idealistic about it all, wanting to save her from her Bulgarian poverty and
whisk her away. It would be a beautiful moment, and she would be eternally
grateful and melt in my arms. And we would be happily married forever
after.
But the ugly truth was that I should have escalated hard and fast and
tried to fuck her there and then, in the hotel lift if necessary, and not
mooned around, wistful about the whole thing. That was the Torero
philosophy. Because until you do you are just a lovelorn victim. A weak
man. George Clooney would not have written love poems and sent sweet
messages over Facebook. He would have escalated and had sex with her
within days or hours of meeting her. I had not swallowed the red pill, in
spite of the fact that I was reading the book.
This in fact was the part I found hard to swallow. Sex. To me it was
sacrosanct. You did not just go around doing it to girls. I started to realise
that my image of girls really was based on Jenny Woodhouse, the girl who
gave us haircuts at Haileybury College when I was 13.67 They were pure,
and the experience in my father’s Eastern philosophy school had reinforced
that big time. One of the stories I had come across through my association
with this school was the famous Indian epic, The Ramayana. In the story
Sita is this pure, magical, and perfect princess. Rama is her Lord and
Master who rescues her from demons, and she breathes strength into him
with her femininity. In the artwork of this famous Indian epic, she is shown
as this warm glow as she sits inside Rama, at his heart, hands in the lotus
position, imbuing him with strength. And she was pure and chaste, of
course.
Unfortunately, events were about to deliver another blow to my
romantic ideals. On the penultimate day Tom asked me whether I would be
prepared to come out and do some filming.
“What sort of filming?”
“A date.”
“You want me to film you on a date?”
“Yeah, for my YouTube channel. It’s easy. I’ll show you how. And
obviously we need to mic it up, but it’s all easy.” He wanted me to become
a secret cameraman and record the whole thing on radio mics as well.

The Secret Video

So the night previously we had all been out into the local town and got
away from the touristy ski resort. In spite of the fact that Torero and Diggler
both wanted to use the holiday to recuperate from their US daygaming tour
and had not planned to do any pick-up, we had decided one night to venture
out into the town. We found ourselves walking down a long hill, past “the
strip” with its touristy clubs and promo girls and into what, to our surprise,
was quite a pretty old town. There were some really quaint spots. The town
on the whole was very quiet, even for a Saturday night.
We tried a couple of bars and kept moving about, and then eventually
we found a bar and a couple of girls, one of them attractive, at a table. Tom
started to hit on the attractive one, whilst I simply hovered and watched. I
felt very much a spectator and did not have the confidence to get involved,
for fear I would put a foot wrong. The conversation seemed to go well and
the girls were obviously up for a bit of banter, although one kept looking at
her mobile phone. At one point, I thought it was going well and decided to
sit down. I was just about to when I saw Tom mouthing at me, gesticulating,
“No,” and I immediately got back up again. After a few moments I
wandered off and joined Diggler, who was at the bar, and I saw Tom taking
her number.
As we walked on to a second venue he explained that they were
celebrating the friend’s new job and whilst it was okay to chitchat, sitting
down and joining them was too much. I felt a chump.68 He had read the
situation perfectly, realising there was just enough rope to close contact
details, having shown off a bit of brash, Brit-adventurer, but little more. In
truth, most guys would either have avoided them, or sat down and put their
foot in it, and eventually the conversation would have died or stalled.
He said he had taken the girl’s contact details in a very neutral way—
Facebook. Not a number. It was clear that the other girl who had started
playing on her phone was just waiting for the conversation to be over so she
could get back to their drinks and chat. She was not interested, and for the
attractive girl who did appear interested to have given her phone number
would have been dangerous. She would probably have flaked because her
friend might have teased her for giving her number out to a random English
tourist. She would then have gone away, thought twice about it, and flaked.
And as you will learn, there was another reason for her being extremely
discreet.
 So when Tom asked me to help video a date, I was surprised that he had
managed to escalate so quickly. In fact, this had not been fast at all, I was to
discover at a later time. It was the penultimate day of the trip and he had not
had much time, but he had been chatting with her on Facebook and she had
agreed to meet. She had chosen the location and the time, and apparently,
she had wanted to pick him up at our hotel in her car. She had been
carefully engineering it all for a reason, one that we only learned on the
date. And the town was not that big. In short, she was setting up a liaison
with as much privacy as she could muster.
Tom wanted me to video the whole date, and I felt he was cajoling me
into doing something unethical and improper. (However, as I noted earlier,
it is not illegal to film in a public place, certainly in the UK and very
probably in Bulgaria.) I was a British lawyer, for god’s sake, whose
grandfather was a vicar, whose uncle was a vicar, and whose father was a
highly respected member of an Eastern philosophy school and pillar of the
community. But I think that the theatre of it, the covert operation, appealed
to the boy adventurer in me and I agreed. It was too much like crazy fun.
And he reassured me that the girl’s face would be fuzzed out—it was a
learning tool for his many fans and subscribers. It was, of course, the way
he made his living. He had by then produced a couple of books, and you
would be surprised at how the proceeds from this, off the back of a good
website with regular videos, produced a half-decent passive income from
the many thousands of guys out there in the world who are really into this
stuff. So, we prepared for the date.
Now, the problem was that she had met me at the bar on the Saturday
night and so there was the very real danger that she would recognise me
from the previous night. So I put on my big, puffy ski jacket, a pair of very
dark glasses and arrived at the cafe location dead early. I procured a
Bulgarian newspaper and I set my secret bird-watching “hide” up at the
stools and bar that ran alongside the main window and looked out onto the
street. From there I concealed the camera and radio microphone under the
folds of the paper, the lens just poking out (there was no reason that a girl
would think it was recording—I just had to make sure the flashing “record”
light was covered). I had an earpiece in, which in this day and age is merely
evidence that someone is zoned-out with an iPod, not a giveaway clue that
they work for the Bulgarian secret service.
So I read my paper, imagining myself to be a Bulgarian to add colour to
my new role. The waitress was a bright, busy girl. She came over and said
something briefly in Bulgarian and gave me a menu card. From where I was
sat, I could actually see a reflection in the window of the appointed seat that
Tom had chosen for him and the girl to sit in. It was a sofa, of course, so he
could escalate easily.
I waited. Ordered a coffee. Turned the pages of my paper.
Tom came in. Nodded covertly at me. Then the girl appeared outside in
front of me—right in front of me. She looked at me through the glass
window. She was in dark glasses. I froze. But she simply walked in and
Tom greeted her.
They ordered coffees and sat down. He seemed relaxed and at ease, and
then the waitress came over to me and put the coffee down. She hesitated,
and in my imagination I guessed that she had figured out what I was doing
and the game was up:

“What’s this?” she says, whipping the paper away and exposing my
flashing camera.
 “Er—,” I sat.
“You’re with him, aren’t you?” and she turns to point at Tom. “I
saw you secretly talking earlier.”
“No, no, no… I’m just a local Bulgarian guy…” I stammer.
“I’m calling the police.”
“What’s going on?” the girl on the sofa with Tom asks.
“They’re secretly filming you for a YouTube channel for
basically porn. They’re pick-up artists.”
The girl leaps up: “My boyfriend’s a policeman,” she blurts out,
angrily, “And works out.”
I am now in a Bulgarian court. The Judge is talking in
Bulgarian. I do not understand a word of it. I am dragged away to
suffer some grim European punishment. I plead with my lawyer,
“What are they saying? Where are they taking me?! Can’t you say
something?!”
“Noh,” he says, bluntly.
The Bulgarian Police are probably far worse and more brutish
than the British. This was the Balkans, virtually. It would be some
traditional beating in the streets with pine tree branches, or tied to
the axles of a log wagon.

But of course, the waitress simply put the coffee down and asked me
something in Bulgarian.
I grunted, “Noh.”
And she went away.
I was absolutely fascinated as I listened to their entire conversation through
the radio mics. He ran the Girlfriend Sequence there before my very eyes. It
was not overt or flashy, just very subdued and cool. He teased her, he
challenged her, and when she said things like, “You’re just another British
male tourist looking to… you know - with a Bulgarian Girl,” he replied,
“Yeah. A trophy. I’m going to put you on the wall with my other moose
heads.”
He then moved a little closer, put a hand on her leg and changed topic.
“So, what is it you like about me?”
Of course, this was pretty clever. He had “agreed and amplified” and
had dealt with her frame test. He had then simply changed topic.
There was some more conversation and it was a shame that I could not
turn and look at them, because there was definitely a period when it went
quiet and he was obviously escalating physically.
In fact, he was actually kissing her. And they had only been talking for
about 20 minutes. And then there was some more conversation and he
pulled away—what they call “push pull.” He quizzed her, suspiciously,
“Why are you single?”
She took a moment and explained that she had a boyfriend, a long-term
relationship. It turned out he was a cage fighter, of all things, and went on
tours around Europe. They lived together and she worked at a restaurant in
a neighbouring town. She had small-town claustrophobia, though, it turned
out and it suddenly made sense that she had these big dreams and this brash
confident British traveller had showed up and hit on her. I guess it played
into her dreams.
I turned a page of my newspaper. Bulgarian traffic problems, Bulgarian
politics, Bulgarian global warming…
 I really struggled with this revelation. The setup now made sense. It was
she who had chosen this coffee bar. It was a very quiet, discreet one, and
probably the best place to meet him to avoid exposure in a small village.
Did the friend with the phone know? I wondered. Possibly not. It would
only increase the danger of getting back to her boyfriend, apparently of
seven years.
And then, to my great surprise, they were kissing some more and then
she was encouraging him to leave. She had her car round the corner. She
dragged him off.
I leapt from my seat as soon as they had walked out and stuffed some
Bulgarian notes under my empty coffee cup. Lord knows how much it was,
but I put down a lot to be sure. Then I ran out of the shop.
They were walking down the street and I followed at a distance, all the
time listening into the conversation.
He was “away,” she said. “Long trip.”
“Cage fighter? Oh. But I can run fast,” he joked. “I’m a lover, not a
fighter,” he added. And then they turned a corner and I lost them. They
were too far for the mic to pick them up.
As I stood there for a few minutes, a car came round the corner and
drove up the hill past me quite fast, and I saw her behind the wheel, staring
forward with her sunglasses now on. I stood openly holding a camera, but
she did not notice and evidently could not have been less interested. Her
thoughts were elsewhere.
It transpired that they went and found a quiet spot and made out, but
Tom said he could not escalate to sex; she did not want to go to the hotel, as
she knew some of the staff there. Plus, she had to go into town to work at
the restaurant early evening and we were flying back the next morning.
 So that was that. She drove him to the hotel and dropped him off after a
heavy session in the car.

I mulled over these events all the way back to Sofia Airport the next
morning. On the radio a pop song was playing, Jason Mraz, “Be Honest
With Me”:
“We are what love wants us to be…I don’t ask for much. Just be honest
with me!”
“Make no mistake. I don’t ask for much. Just be honest with meeee!”
“I don’t ask for much! Just be honest with meee!”
A guitar lightly strums the final few bars.
“Here we are where love is the most it can be… Yes, we are…”
I had heard it many times before, of course, and enjoyed the music, but
now the singer sounded so pained and such a pathetic romantic that to my
mind he was clearly in the Tomassi class of “Beta Male”, slave to the Myth
of Purity.
And how honest had she been? I wondered about her cunning
subterfuge. Although I had thought that what we were doing was
clandestine and entirely inappropriate, I could not help but think that she
had been even more duplicitous. After, all, Tom had had no idea that she
had a long-term partner before she told him at the café. Although he had
initiated and appeared to lead, she had played at least as big a part in
coordinating the liaison.
I wondered about the boyfriend. For all his muscular Bulgarian
manhood, logging on weekdays and cage fighting at nights in foreign
towns, he was probably a tender little dove inside, who played lovey-dovey
pop songs in his car as he drove from one cage fight to the next, songs like
the one on the mini-bus radio I was listening to. Blissfully oblivious to the
double-life his long-term girlfriend was living.
And was she looking for a chance to “trade up”? Or was she just trying
to get some Alpha Bad Boy genes inside her? In Robin Baker’s Sperm
Wars, he says that sperm of different males actually compete inside a
woman for the privilege to get to the egg first, and sperm from different
males fight and kill each other for that privilege.69 Was what I had watched
simply raw biology at work, rampant and amoral?
But most of all, I really did feel as if something was dying inside, and
yet also struggling to hang on, stubbornly resistant to change. Why did I
feel the world crashing around me? It was like a certainty was being pulled
like a rug from right underneath my feet. My idealised view of women,
magnified by my spiritual background and influence of my father’s eastern
school of philosophy. I had had an idea, just like the singer did on the radio,
that it was all about being honest and straight, and women were to be
respected and honoured, and it was absolutely disgraceful that they might
not keep their word. Surely it was men who ran around and fucked
anything? And women were all princesses who were exploited, used and
abused by men.
Perhaps, though, in spite of the Myth of Purity, in spite of Hypergamy
and Dual Mating Strategy, the real problem was that I was beginning to
have to accept that, unfortunately, nice guys do not get the girl. Playing the
long game, being a nice man who was kind and respectful to women was
not going to work. The idea that there were “nice girls” out there who were
somehow different, with Victorian manners like me, girls who had stepped
out of the pages of a Jane Austen novel—this was wrong. How many
romantic comedies had I watched, the Hugh Grant ones, or the Colin Firth
period costume ones? And they all promised the same thing—that the good
guy who is respectful and honourable to women and does not make
inappropriate sexual advances on them will eventually get the girl.
But, my god, was fact different from fiction?? Shit!
Just imagine. You are told from an early age what to do and what rules
to follow, and that if you do then you will get the girl. You are told this by
all the mentors you have ever had, your friends, your family.
“Don’t worry. You’re special. It’s just a case of waiting for the right
one.”
And then there was Tom Torero, who could probably have fucked that
girl in about sixty minutes flat had the logistics been better. Whereas here
was I, having waited nearly 20 years for a fuck that I did not have to pay
for. It was so difficult to swallow because I had spent so long travelling in
the wrong direction, and like a mountaineer who discovers he had reached a
total dead end after months of climbing, I was faced with the prospect of
having to go all the way back down again and start from scratch.
Do I even have the time? Or the energy?
“Too late, mate… ” The words echoed in the back of my mind.
I did not realise it, but I think I was angry. Really angry.
There was no beautiful Jane Austen heroine waiting for me at the end of
the road, after I had manfully and honourably resisted all the other
disreputable girls. There was no Jenny Woodhouse.

As the plane took off and climbed through fluffy white clouds, I wondered
whether this was Wonderland I was in, or if I had entered a more sinister
world? In my wild imagination I now saw the Mad Hatter across the aisle,
smiling and tapping away on his Macbook Air, editing his dodgy secret
video together for upload to some sinister website.
Then, suddenly, the March Hare in the next seat woke up:
“Do you think, right, like—how long do you think you could survive in
sub-zero temperatures?” Dave broke me out of my reverie.
“What, do you mean—up here?”
“Yeah. Like you were a Super Bird, or something.”
“You’d die from lack of oxygen in about two minutes, Dave.”
“No, but not if you were a bird?”
Tom shook his head.

At Gatwick Airport, I said goodbye to the two Wonderland misfits.

“Alright, mate. Great. Stay in touch,” said Tom.
“Really cool, man. Great stuff,” said Diggler.
And they were gone. I got back onto the train back to London Bridge. I
stared out of the windows at the grey landscape.
Back to the real world.

59 Over a year later, he stayed with me in my flat in Warsaw where at times it was a revolving door
of girls.
60 I later developed a friendship with Tom Torero. But at this point in time, he was just a puzzle and
a mystery.
61 The Evolution of Desire by David Buss and Sperm Wars by Robin Baker being two notable ones. I
read these but found this stuff pretty hard work and not exactly inspiring. It might all be true, but it
makes for grim reading. I hope we all can find greater inspiration and finer literature in our lives than
the evolutionary biologist’s world of rats, monkeys, birds, etc., and their parallels with humans. We
are not rats, monkeys, or birds, and not victims of our biology in the way that animals are. We can
choose.
62 According to some evolutionary biologists, as many as 15% of children have different paternity
than their actual father. I would say that man’s struggle with nature and need to master it, can be seen
not just in the external world, but in his internal world too—his own nature. My definition of a
successful, mature man is one who has at least some control and mastery over his nature.
63 Does swallowing the red pill mean that you will never get married? Interesting question, but the
answer surely must be “no.” It’s an inner knowledge. How you choose to arrange your affairs after
you have acquired this knowledge is a personal matter for you. The objective of taking that pill is to
make sure that that marriage will never be a prison.
64 The collective term, it appears, used to describe this world. Apparently, Tomassi was not the only
one out there.
65 More on “White Knights” later.
66 You better get used to dealing with regret if you are going to be a daygamer.
67 Interestingly, there was another girl at Haileybury whom I was also greatly attracted to, Sarah W.
In my young mind, she was the flip side of the Jenny coin—she was more of a tramp and had plenty
of boyfriends. She was hot, but always in trouble, and I never held her in high esteem. I actually
never remember Jenny even having a boyfriend. She was too pure even for that!
68 This is why the dropout rate after bootcamps or coaching is so high. It is a big ask to expect guys
to acknowledge the painful truth about their lack of dating skills and how socially uncalibrated they
are. Most prefer to ignore this painful truth and return to what the PUA community styles their
“chodey” ways.
69 In fact, there are even certain types of sperm that are not there to fertilise an egg at all, but are
there purely to kill sperm from other males.

OceanofPDF.com
 10

Brave New World

It was as the result of this trip that I felt I had been given a fresh pair of
spectacles and I now started to see the world in a completely different way.
This first showed itself during a party to a friend who was emigrating to
the US with his wife. It took place at a beautiful house on the banks of the
River Thames at Twickenham. I got chatting to a friend of a friend called
“Carolina.” She was French but lived and worked in London as a nanny and
a teacher. I was straightaway challenging with her, insofar as I took any
opportunity I could to lightly tease her. But this was just introductions and
in the company of others, and so I walked away after a while and did not
linger.
Later we met at the food trolley—there was a sumptuous buffet of
deserts—and I suggested we both go down to the river and enjoy the sunset.
And so we did and I was pretty bold and told her, after a little conversation,
“You know, you’re quirky and strangely attractive. You also remind me of
my childhood crush when I was 13. She was a French brunette. She used
and abused me on a Welsh campsite.”
She laughed.
“It’s true! She was a lot older than me. Fifteen, at least.”
 I did not continue but pulled up and paused. I had noticed the tendency
in me to talk too much and fill the silence. I had learned by reading Sixty
Years of Challenge that you need to learn to “shut the fuck up.” So I just
looked into her eyes and took a step closer to her, a trick I had learned or
heard performed by another one of the pick-up community called Nick
Krauser, a Geordie and a legendary pick-up artist and a scurrilous and
controversial character.
“Wow. Look at the duck,” she said, changing the conversation and
breaking the silence. “He’s getting attacked by the other ducks.”
The riverside reverie had been broken by the less-than-chocolate-box
sight of some male ducks attacking a weaker male in the reeds right by the
riverbank. At the same time, I saw a guy called Brian walk down the lawn
towards us, a lanky character whom I knew had recently split up with his
wife and was on the hunt. I needed to move fast.
“Listen, let’s meet up for a drink sometime. What’s your number?”
I took out my phone before waiting for her reply and she gave me her
number.
And then Brian appeared, “Hey, what’s up?” he asked.
He will have told himself he was just dropping in to say hi, but by now I
had a whole different view of what appeared as otherwise innocuous social
events. And indeed I am afraid that I now believe that this is the ugly truth
of what so often happens. He was a male looking to crash in on our intimate
moment and sabotage it, and he had almost certainly seen Carolina earlier
on in the afternoon. (She was one of the few attractive single girls at the
party who were not in the same social circle as myself and Brian. I knew
Brian from years back because our families used to hang out together.) He
now saw that I had isolated her. In spite of the fact that we were “friends,”
this was primal, biological war! In my opinion he should have known not to
crash in. I mean, it was totally obvious that I was with her, trying my game
on her, at the bottom of the garden isolated from the rest of the party, and at
sunset too! But there you go, as Tomassi or those evolutionary biologists
would have said, he was attempting to get his sperm inside her just as I was.
Biology trumps a casual friendship (or perhaps we were acquaintances at
best).70 But I was not worried that his killer sperm would kill off my sperm,
for the obvious reason that he had no idea what he was doing. “Hey,” I
replied at last.
“What’s up?”
“We were just watching the ducks. Look at the stronger male ducks
attacking and killing the weaker runt duck. Freaky, isn’t it?” This seemed to
silence him.
Later that night Carolina gave me and another girl a lift back into
central London in her car and Brian crashed the party and joined us too. I
said little and sat in the back whilst he did his best in the front seat. When
we arrived at Clapham Junction he said to her, “Hey, let’s stay in touch.”
“Sure,” she said.
He hesitated, not knowing what to do, at the open door, the engine
running.
“Okay, great, well look… here’s my number.” He produced a business
card and gave it to her.
This was hopeless, of course. Not only had he not generated any
attraction, and not only had he failed to escalate at the party and taken her
aside, he was now holding out on the vain hope that she would actually call
him. You have to take the girl’s number, obviously.
 I felt annoyed at him for his blundering attempt to derail our
conversation on the riverbank, but I also felt a sympathy for his condition,
as he simply was unaware of what he was doing wrong and I wanted to help
him, as we did go a long way back.

The next incident transformed my ideas around older men and younger
women, which had been a real bugbear for me, as you will recall. In respect
of age, as I explained earlier, Tomassi’s view is that society says that men
should not hit on younger women and that there is a “female imperative”
that says that it is wrong and a man should find someone his own age. He
puts this down in part to the idea that older women are afraid that they have
lost their sexual market value as younger girls are constantly appearing in
their rear view mirror, and so a social imperative that a man should not mate
with a younger girl helps them to find mates later in life and avoid ending
up on the shelf.
His view is that in fact, biologically, it is perfectly natural for a younger
woman to want an older man. She offers him fertility and youth and he
offers her protection and security. He has survived so far, and assuming he
has established himself, he is smarter about the ways of the world and
simply more likely to make a better match for her and her future children.
So men are shamed for dating younger girls “beneath their age.” And
actually, this had been the feeling I had had with the girl who declared in
the street, “Oh my God! You’re old enough to be my grandfather!” In order
to get rid of me at that moment, she had shamed me by referring to age, and
my sullen withdrawal that had followed for weeks was because I felt I was
a seedy old sod, preying on young innocent girls. So I clearly had caught
the virus of the “feminine imperative” as Tomassi calls it. I had not
“unplugged.”
Well, one Tuesday evening I found myself walking home after work. It
was early summer and a beautiful evening, and I was contemplating going
back home, getting a curry and watching TV with a bottle of Jack Daniels
for company. But instead something inside me said I should just go for a
walk on the Southbank on the river and see who was out and about. Even if
I did not see any girls or did not have the courage to approach anyone, I
would at least have a good walk. In fact, I had started to build daygame into
my weekly routine.
As I reached the Hungerford Bridge just near the Royal Festival Hall, I
saw a girl leaning on the railings, a camera slung over her shoulder. I
approached her and told her that she looked beautiful, framed against the
Houses of Parliament. She liked it and thanked me.
I continued, “You’re one of these girls who wherever they are or
whatever they do are posing for the camera, striking poses. I bet you’re an
actress or something.”
She was not, of course; she was a Russian tourist. She had beautiful
long chestnut hair and she was here just for a week to see the sites and visit
a friend. She was very young (for me), probably barely 19. Her behaviour
was like a student’s, relaxed and with that sense of being permanently on
holiday. We chatted, and as we did I noticed myself getting into social
comfort quicksand, which I mean is where you are just talking but not
generating any sexual attraction. I decided to “lead,” in spite of the fact that
right then the idea of leading her to an instant date seemed like having to
walk in lead boots. I forced myself to say, “Listen. Let’s take a walk over
the Hungerford Bridge. But just by way of warning, I can’t have you taking
hundreds and hundreds of photos of everything. I’m a Londoner and I have
my reputation to think of. I can’t be seen with a happy-snappy tourist.”
She laughed and I lead her onto the bridge. We lingered there for a few
minutes taking in the view before I said, “Look, there’s a cool wine bar
called Gordon’s just at the head of the bridge. Let’s grab a drink.”
She followed. Twice now I had used the expression, “Let’s.” And it
really is a powerful word. People rubbish pick- up artists for teaching guys
“trick” phrases or pick-up lines; indeed, even pick-up artists rubbish it. You
go onto a PUA’s website or read his book and it will say, “I don’t teach
pick-up lines or any of that rubbish. I teach you the real inner game, the
principles underpinning seduction and how to create attraction at a deep
level.” Blah blah blah. But actually, it is so crucial that guys start to mend
their outer habits, such as conversational bad habits they have got into. This
gives them confidence and so naturally fixes their “inner game” issues.
Just a simple phrase like “Let’s” can be a great help. Instead of saying,
“Would you like to go for coffee?” you say, “Let’s go for coffee. I’ve got a
spare ten minutes.” It then gets you in the right mindset. You then act and
lead. You are a man and you are meant to lead. A woman follows. And a
woman is attracted to you not because of the way that you look (or even
“who you are”) but the way you behave. Correct use of language is part of
this.
I did not also realise it at the time but I was doing “mini-bounces,” as
they call it. This is where, for example, you take a girl by the arm and move
her out of the way of pedestrians to the side of the pavement after you have
been talking for a few minutes. Each time you do it you solidify or
strengthen your frame. I had done it by suggesting the walk, then stopping
to enjoy the view and now suggesting the instant date.
 Gordons is a great spot because it is a cellar bar and very low-lit, with
candles on the table, and so very discreet indeed. I took her to the back of
the bar and sat her down and then went and got the drinks. And then the
first challenge—it seemed to take forever to get the drinks. I was filled with
this terrible, irrational feeling that she might go suddenly and that I would
lose her because it was taking an age to get served. I tried to ignore this
impulse and just, at least on the outside, chill out. I was starting to realise
that a lot of this stuff seemed to be about just not reacting. You feel these
incredibly powerful emotions inside you and you just have to go with it and
not react to them.
I sat down with the drinks and she had not left, of course. I then began
thinking that I had to capitalise on the environment and escalate somehow. I
had chosen a table where we were across from each other, so I tried the
cheapest trick in the book, which is to read her palm.
“Mmm…that’s quite a strong line there, running all the way up your
hand, which means you’re certainly going to have a long life.”
“Really?”
“Yup.” But then I pondered, “Still, this is a horizontal line across it,
quite faint, and suggests to me some obstacle in your life, although you will
overcome it, eventually.”
“Ooh!” she said, mesmerised. Whether by drink, candlelight or my
absurd reading I could not say.
And then afterwards I admitted, “Actually, that was just a cheap trick to
hold your hand.” I grinned.
Perhaps she blushed, but I could not tell in the dark. Then she laughed.
What followed was then a very interesting conversation. She told me
her story. She had a boyfriend who was in the military and a father who was
also a solider, or had been. She then told me her age, which was 18 and I
told her mine, which was 47. She talked about her hopes and dreams and
that she was interested in coming and living in London one day and I told
her about myself. I moved round to her side of the table for a moment,
somehow managing to manoeuvre myself into a position where I could put
my hand on her leg, which I did, gently and for a moment, and then I told
her I liked her chestnut hair.
I dared to touch and play with it for a moment. The conversation lapsed.
She did not move. I could not believe it. I had been with her barely 60
minutes and she was letting me get physical with her. And she was
ridiculously young. Surely she would have been weirded out? I was just
trying desperately hard to remember the stuff we had been taught and what
I had gleaned from “The Girlfriend Sequence” and watching Torero in
Bulgaria. I focused on this problem intently so my mind did not have time
to think about the huge age gap, which would otherwise have freaked me
out and sent me running for the hills.
Then I walked her up to Charing Cross Tube, arm in arm. I had no idea
that I could have taken it any further and continued to escalate, or even that
perhaps she wanted me to or even perhaps expected and hoped I would. But
the age gap thing was still there for me. My intellectual brain had kicked in.
I held her around the waist as we said goodbye. I felt like a gambler on a
winning streak, who, instead of pushing on and earning a fortune, quits
whilst he is ahead.
For me, though, this was also a massive insight. Ultimately in that
moment I decided she was simply too young and so, feeling like the “the
game” was over, I decided to ask her a direct question:
 “If I had kissed you earlier, would you have responded and would we
have taken it further?”
She paused. Although I had taken her number, we both knew it was
unlikely to go further, somehow. She was a tourist, she was not here for
long, and really it had all been about the moment. We both knew the score.
She hesitated and said, “Yes.”
But then she changed her mind and said, “Actually—no. Because you
told me your age. You are older than my father and that would probably
have got in the way.”
I was fascinated by this reply. It resonated with Tomassi’s words, that
age is largely irrelevant with a lot of girls. I mean, the fact that she even
hesitated was crazy. Looking back on it, I realised that if I had the
experience to have escalated smoothly it could have gone anywhere, even
back to my flat. Providing I had not triggered her socially-conditioned
forebrain by actually stating my age. As hard as it was to believe -
considering my age gap and her long-term boyfriend and the fact we were
total strangers.
This incident began a slow process of dissolving ideas that I had around
age and laid to rest the Westfield Shopping Centre incident with Sheffield
Girl. It also made me realise what a double life girls lead, insofar as what
they are often saying is one thing (the socially acceptable thing), and yet
what they want is the opposite. Indeed, they actually deploy social ideas to
play the game and test a guy’s courage and commitment. Sheffield Girl has
said, “You’re old enough to be my grandfather!” as a rejection. But
oftentimes a girl brings up the age objection to test your mettle and see
whether you will crumble and buy into the idea. If you shrug it off with a
smile or make a joke out of it, she may be more attracted rather than less.
 I wandered off, having had a fabulous night, wondering after all
whether it would have been wrong to take it further. It wasn’t illegal, after
all. But really, for me, it had all been about the epiphany that the age-gap
issue is just a social conceit, not necessarily grounded in any reality. It is
just the current, fashionable convention in the western world, nothing more.

Meanwhile, I went on a date with Carolina and it seemed extraordinary to

me how she was happy to let me escalate and kiss her. I had done the same
itinerary I had done with Oksana, which was the Punch & Judy in Covent
Garden and then the Clubhouse on Earlham Street. In the Clubhouse, I now
made sure I found a sofa area and not the seats across the table I had
inadvertently ended up with Oksana. I was sitting right next to her, and it
had become quite intimate. I had turned the conversation quite sexual and
she was not pulling away, although she was laughing and playfully resisting
a little. It was a good night and she texted well after the date, but there was
clearly something up as I got a very long text message from her apologising
profusely but saying that she could not see me again.71 I had experience of
girls rejecting me over text in as nice a way as possible before, and so could
tell that this was quite different and that there genuinely was some external
complication in her life.

I then had a moment’s success in a completely different area, with those

elusive shop girls. It was quite unexpected. I had, of course, considered that
it was a bit of a waste of time hitting on shop girls. You had a fun and even
flirtatious conversation, but then they would never give you their number as
they were working.
 But I found myself walking through the Beauty section of Debenhams
on Oxford Street, and I stared straight into the eyes of a girl selling
perfumes. I opened her spontaneously, “That smells nice, but obviously I
want to be smelling it rather than wearing it.”
“Buy it for your girlfriend.”
“Not sure, I’m a bit mean and stingy. I don’t even buy my mother
presents on her birthday. In fact, I don’t know when her birthday is, I’m
such a disorganised son. But I just have to say you have a great smile and
the only reason I hesitated was because I’d like to take your number and
take you out for a drink.”
She laughed.
“You have a quirky, artistic look,” I continued. “You’re a bit of an artist
in your spare time, I bet. Or a photographer.”
She was, and she was hooked.
I was blasé for some reason, and was in a fun-loving mood. She must
have picked up on it, because she held my gaze and smiled.
“So, when do you have a break? Let’s grab a tea.”
And to my amazement she said, “Ha ha. Well, it’s my break in ten
minutes.”
“Cool,” I said, “Where do you want to meet?”
“I just need to go to the staff room and then I’ll meet you by that
entrance,” she said, pointing and then breezing off.
We went for lunch but she did a lot of talking and seemed quite
obsessed with astrology so that by the end of the date my interest had
waned and I did not follow things up. But the incident had made me realise
that if your “vibe is up,” you can do anything.72
 The experience left with me with a sense that it was always worth trying
it on with a shop girl if you really liked her. The rules that I had been
initially taught by Tom and others on the bootcamp were shifting. This
realisation had important consequences, as you will learn later.

This period after the ski trip was as surreal as the ski trip in its own way. I
felt that I was operating in another world. Everywhere I looked there were
girls, giving me IOIs (Indicators of Interest). I was able to read their
reactions. I was aware of this new world. I had gone for a visit down the
rabbit hole and was experiencing a slice of Wonderland. Occasionally I
tried to talk about it to my regular friends, but they were, in the main,
disinterested or felt threatened by it and I learned that it was usually best
not to talk about it.

70 This was another area I struggled with. Whilst I generally disapproved of pick-up artists, at the
time, I could not help admire the way they tended to have a “bro code” when it came to girls. You did
not crash in on another guy who was clearly trying with a girl. It was not cool. You at least waited to
see if it went anywhere. This was an iron code with my wings and others in the community. And yet,
in normal life it was war. Guys are battling other guys, and often in sly and surreptitious ways, just as
had happened with Svetlana and was now happening here.
71 This is an occupational danger with daytime approach. On the odd occasion a girl is “wowed” if
you really get it right, but may well have some sort of boyfriend or other complication in the
background. Your approach has been a powerful attraction trigger and awakened primal forces,
which then creates a dilemma in her life. The external factors, such as a boyfriend, you may know
nothing about.
72 Something the famous “Yad”of Daygame.com had said.

OceanofPDF.com
 11

Going Solo

I continued to hang out with Lars and Shaheed during the summer of that year, but it
seemed to me that they were increasingly holding me back. Shaheed was beginning to
flake on daygame outings with me and Lars was now very much paired off with his
young Portuguese girl. Lars was especially worried about losing his girl and felt the
pressure of being an older guy who might not get many more chances in life.
Conversations went like this:
“She’s got no fixed place to stay and does not want to go back to Portugal and she
wants to stay in my flat.”
“What? Your flat in Clapham?”
“Yep. Like, move in. Which might even be okay, but she does not have a job at the
moment, she got fired.”
“And she’s looking for a dad, bro!” Shaheed said. We all laughed.
“But do you like her?” I asked.
“Yeah. But it’s a bit of a drain. I’m out and about in the streets, and she has started to
suspect and she’s been looking at my phone.”
“Just tell her that you’re at a stage of your life where you just want to date and have
fun.”
“Yeah, be honest,” added Shaheed.
And then it would come out, eventually, that he felt that he was in his forties now
and he may have difficulty finding someone else, that she was a good thing and he did
not want to risk losing her. Depending on your point of view you might see he had either
fallen at the first hurdle or succeeded at the first hurdle. Whatever your point of view
Lars himself seemed dissatisfied with his predicament but not able to take action to fix
it. He was a victim of his own success. The more he became involved in the relationship
the more stuck he became about the issue.
We were still all sold on the idea that it was all about male mastery, creating choice
and options in this area of our lives so that we did not feel pressured to “settle” with the
first girl that came along, but Lars was clearly feeling that there was some invisible
finishing line based on age.73
And then Shaheed started to withdraw from daygame completely. The influence of
his family and community was increasingly applying pressure and he would now
grumble about how hard daygame was. (It was!) He was not short on balls, but this
religious and family imperative was too strong for him to ignore. He started to actively
go on second and third date with girls introduced to him through his family circle or
through Muslim singles events. It was simply his default position.
This stuff raised conflict within him, after all as a religious background is a powerful
brake on any concept of adventure sex. (Muslims do of course have a reputation for
going on a crazy rite of passage, but usually it is a trip to a foreign country at some
distance from their families and community so that they can get away with it, out of
sight. But Shaheed was with his family on a daily basis.74) He also felt pressure because
he felt he was now getting too old, in spite of the fact he was only in his mid-thirties!
But most of all, in fact, I think a lot of subtle pressure came from the fact that all his
friends—as well as his brother—were now hitched.
It was not for me to judge. His decision made more sense to me than Lars’. If he felt
he had done enough daygame and had enjoyed his rite of passage and it was time to get
married then that made absolute sense to me.
But for me things were different. There had been a sea-change. I realised I did not
just want a girlfriend for the sake of being able to say to people, “I have got a
girlfriend”, but I wanted to finish what I had started and exorcise, once and for all, Mr.
Nice, who had dogged my steps all my life and hamstrung me in my efforts to properly
engage romantically with the opposite sex. Mr. Nice was a shadowy, unseen force
within me. He was this happy, cheerful, and friendly character who is nice to everyone,
but is not sexually exciting to girls and turns them into friends, mistakenly believing that
this will lead to relationship. Poor chap.75
 Moreover, what good was being in a relationship if I carried into it ideas in which I
always put attractive girls on a pedestal? It would be doomed. I would have given her
the frame completely. I decided I had to fully address the wrong-thinking that perhaps
echoed back across the years to Haileybury and the way I had put Jenny Wodehouse on
a pedestal, subconsciously labelling her “out of my league”.
I saw, of course, that the ideas of a lifetime would need more than one or two flings
to mend. This was a journey of self-discovery in which I felt I needed to use this new
knowledge as a “thorn to remove a thorn.” Once the old ideas were dissolved and no
longer had power over me, then I could throw away the thorn. I intuitively knew that
Tomassi was not the final word on it all, but that it was nevertheless medicine that I
needed to drink at this point in time. The Bansko trip had opened my eyes to it all. I
needed to go deeper and erase Mr. Nice forever. I needed to bury him—put him in his
coffin and drop him about 20 metres underground!
So I struck out on my own path. It was time to “go solo.” I would become a lone
wolf, just like the sinister reprobate Nick Krauser, the notorious daygamer with
unsavoury views, a man universally disliked, but at the same time admired and
respected by all.76

***

I now started to wonder how to go after much hotter girls.

My radar had been constantly on the go to check myself in terms of whether or not I
was “weaseling out” from approaching girls on the street and I had noticed there was
indeed a tendency to avoid approaching the super-hot girls, preferring to play it safe and
rather focus on just the friendly-looking ones. I was starting to develop some self-
awareness and wanted to meet head-on these subtle inner doubts or rationalisations.77
And after all the mantra of the pick-up artist was to get success with younger and
hotter girls—at least two points higher than yourself on that rather arbitrary, “Hotness
Scale” that men use. It seemed to me I should be looking for the “eights” and “nines”.
(There are no tens, they are like unicorns.78)
 There was in fact already one Hot Girl in my life: Jessie. But she was my intern, and
I had not felt it right to make a move on her as she was staff. (Although secretly I felt
like Jekyll & Hyde, with Mr Hyde just waiting for the right opportunity!)
But unfortunately Jessie had now disappeared. It happened whilst I was away on
holiday and she had to help prepare documents in an important legal case. It was pretty
arduous work and required me giving her a lot of detailed instructions over the phone. I
could tell that the whole experience had left her a little piqued. She was a princess and
was being told to do rather arduous legal work and take orders from me, in which I went
through the technicalities of civil litigation with her in painstaking detail. It made her
miss Facebook and she probably now regretted removing the tattoos.
So when I got back, I found a note from her saying how much she had enjoyed
working for me and how grateful she was for the opportunity, but she was now in Dubai.
She did not explain why she had had this change of heart, and she did not say whether
she was coming back, but the implication was clearly that she was not. I had not been
paying her, except occasional expenses. She was rich and clearly was prepared, like a lot
of youngsters, to work for free in order to get a foothold on the legal ladder. So I could
not be angry. I was just sad of course to see her go. Her behaviour in fact was classic
“Hot Girl Crazy Behaviour.” She was a princess. And she had vanished just as suddenly
as she had appeared.
But I was shortly to meet another girl, a lot hotter than Jessie and perhaps far more
dangerous to my emotional wellbeing.
But first let me explain how I started to try and open the door to Hot Girl Heaven…

My first experience with Hot Girls occurred one afternoon after myself and Shaheed had
been out daygaming in the Knightsbridge area. He went home early and I decided to
carry on “solo” which I wanted to do because, at the end of the day, now that I had got
over my approach anxiety, I felt it was not economical to be walking about with a wing.
Just as he disappeared into the Tube, I saw a tall, dark-haired girl who was on the
phone (Hot Girls are always on the phone) in tight shorts and a revealing t-shirt top
strutting along the street like a model on a catwalk, owning the pavement, swanning into
a women’s clothes shop, Zara. I followed her in, nodding at the security guard by the
door for some inexplicable reason.
Now, my yardstick for a “Hot Girl” is simple: they are always on their mobile
phones, texting or calling. If you had no other intel on them but their mobile phone
package and data usage, you could still tell a Hot Girl from the rest. She was classic,
standout good-looking, with long brown hair and fashionable shoes, and something
about the way she carried herself—with confidence, breezy confidence. I think they
must live in some sort of rarefied world, and I do not envy them. Like a walking
honeypot, surrounded by men’s glances like bees buzzing around them, being subjected
to repeated attacks. No wonder so many of them are neurotic and crazy.
She had great tits, I have to point out, as it is relevant to the story later on.
On reflection, it was quite interesting how it was just as Shaheed was going that this
beauty hove into view. It is a strange fact that it is often right at the end of the day, when
your ego has been battered and bruised by repeated rejections, that you resolve to go on
yet further into battle, like a madman, risking further, potentially fatal wounds! But
something in me was determined to keep going and to laugh at all of it. And of course
she was also probably the hottest girl I had ever approached, and I had probably
approached nearly 500 girls by that stage. I wanted to approach a real hottie, someone
who really intimidated me with her looks.
So there I was in Zara, which is quite a large store at that location, and I wandered
about, trying to see where she had gone. But she had moved quickly and I had lost her.
Damn it! I said to myself. I chilled for a moment and assessed my situation, like I
was in a military operation.
Now, I’m pretty sure that, if I cannot see her here on the ground floor at first glance,
she must have gone up the escalators. Or has she gone downstairs? I reflected.
I glanced round at the security guard once more, smiling. Had he heard me
muttering to myself? I was not sure. I immediately hopped on to the escalator.79 Upstairs
was more likely, as there were about four floors.
I came out into the lingerie section and there I saw her, right at the back. I felt like a
jungle cat, sizing up its prey at a distance, peeking above the tall savanna grass as the
gazelle frolics and grazes. This gazelle was grazing at some blouses on a rack next to the
lingerie section.
I moved forward to get a closer look and noted that she was still as hot as when I had
first seen her.
And then another girl glanced at me.
Shit! My god! Perhaps she has worked me out and is about to blow my cover and
report me to security, I thought. I mean, how weird was it, me lingering in the girl’s
lingerie section? A mad paranoid voice was chattering at me, but I wanted to challenge
the voice and the social convention that made you feel “wrong” for doing something
unorthodox. I wanted to learn more about how powerful social conventions operate on
us and not be an unconscious victim of them.80 I now saw this second girl walk off.
Perhaps she would quietly walk over to a security guard and report me:

“There’s a guy over there—see him? Yeah, yeah, there he is, just gone past the
knickers… Look! There he is!”
“Ah yes. I got him. In the black jacket?”
“Yeah. Look, he’s staring at women in the lingerie section. Or at the lingerie.
I don’t know which is worse.”
The security guard, a big buff guy who bench-presses mini-buses for laughs,
radios it in and then goes over.
“It’s weird,” the girl says, “I saw him running up the escalators, backwards
and forwards.”

But so what? Was I doing anything wrong, or downright illegal? No. And whilst I was
on my reverie I lost Hot Girl again.
I paused and chilled once more. She had to come out through the narrow corridor of
the lingerie section to get back on the escalators and go down. She would have had to
come past me. So therefore, she had to be still inside. I decided to go in—deeper into
Hot Girl Heaven.
And now I saw that there was a raised area with sofa seats in a big circle and a
bunch of changing rooms with red velvet curtains around the sides of this circle. And I
saw a man on the sofa, looking bored.
 Now I relaxed. I could pretend to be like him, a boyfriend or husband, and just sit
down and wait. I now felt sure she must have grabbed a blouse and gone into a changing
room.
So I sat in there and waited, bold as brass, now testing social convention to the limit.
I had decided that I was not going to flake on this one. I was going to wait as long as it
took to make sure that she was definitely not in the changing rooms. I was content. I had
made my decision and gambled on the changing room option. Now it was just a waiting
game. I was like the jungle cat in the documentaries that allows itself a moment’s
relaxation and sitting in the long grass, its tail swinging, knowing that its prey is
trapped.
And then she appeared!
She walked quickly over to a rack and put back an item, then picked up another—a
blouse. I could see that her existing blouse was ripped. That was why she was in the
shop, and why she had hurried in on her phone in such peremptory fashion!
And now I was about to pounce!
Or was I? She was now off her phone. The mobile was no longer crunched into her
ear.
The situation was precarious. I had spent a long time wrapped up in my thoughts,
wondering what I was going to say—always a fatal thing for a guy who is hesitating
about approaching a woman.
I decided that I could wait no longer for the “right moment,” whatever that was, and
needed to just go in and risk rejection.
“Er, hey. I just wanted to say that you look nice, but very determined and focused.”
She immediately smiled and shot me a look. She was completely comfortable with
being opened and seemed to just find it amusing.
“Yeah, I ripped my blouse.”
“Ah!” I said.
I paused. I did not know what else to say or how to follow up. Meanwhile she found
another one, a different size. And she smiled at me again before gliding off into the
changing area once more.
 “I’ll give you an opinion,” I called after her and stayed by the rack, like a sentry,
guarding it for her.
I waited. And I waited. And nothing. She did not come out.
I felt a right muppet and glanced round at the other girls milling about, but they
seemed strangely disinterested.
This was ridiculous. What was she doing in there? She was just trying on a blouse,
for god’s sake. I became uneasy, standing there, wondering what people might be
thinking. I had just opened a complete stranger and I was now waiting for her to come
out of the changing room. And then it occurred to me, Perhaps she’s avoiding me;
hiding in there hoping that I will go away.
I looked over—was she peeking through the curtains waiting for me to leave? I now
became worried that security might really get involved.
I decided to act casual and wandered away a bit from the rack I had been guarding. I
went back to the lingerie area that formed a corridor out towards the escalators and
through which she would have to pass. I was still determined and ignored the paranoid
voices, but the kvetch was working over time and not for the first time crazy thoughts
were buzzing around in my mind like a swarm of bees!
I had no idea why she was taking so long. It could be for a variety of reasons. Or it
could be completely my own imagination and it had only been 30 seconds. In spite of
the oddness I felt, stood next to racks full of ladies’ knickers, I felt that this was a better
position than drifting back down to the changing room area. The cash registers were
there and I would get drawn into a weird conversation with her as she queued and
bought her blouse. No, this was better.
I looked around for security guards. I imagined the guy who bench-presses mini-
buses steaming over with a store detective or policeman and arresting me on the spot. I
would be back in front of the magistrate:

“Mr. Forrest.”
“Your Honour.”
“This is your second charge of harassment and you have only just been out of
prison for two weeks. What’s the charge?”
 The prosecution barrister turns his pages and reveals, “He was arrested, Your
Honour, in the ladies’ section of Zara. The lingerie section, in fact.”
“What do you have to say, Mr. Forrest?”
“There’s no record, Your Honour, he exercised his right of silence.”
“No, no, no Mr. Wignall,” the judge says, interrupting the prosecution
barrister. “I want the defendant to tell me.”
He stares. “Well?”
“I’m exercising my right to silence, Your Honour.”
Another pause. The judge gives me a withering look and I fold.
“I was—in Zara, Your Honour. Shopping.”
“For what?”
“What?” I echo.
“What were you shopping for?”
The bloody prosecution barrister butts in again. “We have a witness
statement from the girl in question, who was just trying on a new blouse when
Mr. Forrest accosted her. We have a second witness, the girl who first reported
the incident to security, who says that she actually saw him following women
into the changing rooms.”
“Have you been approaching girls again, Mr. Forrest? And now in shops?”
“Er…”
“How many are you up to now?”
“Shops?”
“No, not shops! Women in the street—since you were last before this
court!?”
“Er—about five hundred.”

The steel doors of Wandsworth clang behind me as I am handed a small bundle

of prison overalls, with a towel, toothpaste, and hairbrush.

It really did take a long time for Hot Girl to reappear. But eventually she appeared. She
had to; there was only one way out. She bought the blouse and then walked towards me
on the way to the escalators. I jumped onto the escalator beside her and we travelled
down together. It was a good distance, three sets of escalators. And here is the thing. I
have absolutely no recollection of what I said. All I knew was that I needed to keep
talking. So I just kept babbling. Kept going. Talking. Babbling. Talking…
Amazingly, she did not tell me to bugger off. She just smiled and put up with it and I
kept with her. Crazy. She was clearly amused, and she was a Hot Girl. And then at the
bottom, she walked quite fast towards the doors and out into the street, and I had no idea
what to say. I needed to close her and try and take her number. She had put up with me
but hardly said anything.81
I walked out into Knightsbridge, still following her, and then I ran round in front of
her, thinking that I needed some way to close her and try and get her number. This all
felt hopeless. I was following her and so giving her the frame it seemed.
This was exactly what I had been taught not to do, on the second day of the
bootcamp, when Jon Matrix had told me off for virtually following a girl all the way to
the back door of the shop where she was working, walking alongside her like a puppy
dog.
She stopped and stared at me with a straight face.
“Hey, you know, perhaps… we can… I dunno… go out?” I floundered. “Shopping?
Sometime. Perhaps we could go and do some shopping together. What do you think?”
It was the worst close of all time. I had just invited a girl shopping, like a gay best
friend. And it had been a question, as if I was asking her for permission. It was really
weak, but I could not think of anything else. I was sure that I had just burned the set.
Ruined. If Jon Matrix had been there he would have been boiling over, whistling like a
kettle in a bonfire, utterly exasperated.
But then she said to me, “Listen, do you want to grab something to eat?”
“Sorry?”
I was stunned. Hang on, had she just invited me out to an instant date? I did not
know what to say. The world stood still for a moment.
She continued, matter-of-fact, “There’s a place, a nice spot next to South Kensington
Tube, for cakes and tea and sandwiches and stuff.”
I could not believe it. She was asking me out on an instant date.
 I collected myself and snapped into action once more, and looked around for the
orange light of a taxi. Fortunately, there was one right in front of us. Thank god for
London taxis. I hailed it, opened the door and she got in.
This was crazy, way off the scale from anything I had done before. I mean, she was
model-hot. I blabbered on inside the taxi. Again, I have no idea what I said. Just talk.
Like having the radio on in the background, I thought I was best to keep going, to keep
her settled.
We got to this cake shop right near South Kensington Tube entrance. She had a late
lunch and I had some tea and cake, and we actually had quite an open and direct
conversation. Whilst I tried to hit on her and flirt with her, it was a very great challenge
as I had a mindset that I was “out of her league.” But I battled on, manfully.
My reference point with Hot Girls was still Jenny Woodhouse at Haileybury. The
girl who gave haircuts that I had put on a pedestal, in a school of 600 boys and 50 girls,
if you recall. I guess in adulthood I was now unhappy at this idea that I had that I was
out of Jenny’s league, and, looking back, one of my main reasons for approaching Hot
Girls was because I simply felt that this was just one of those ideas that I really wanted
to challenge. Why did we, as men, put them up on a pedestal? But this habit of thinking
was a tough one to break!
After some chitchat we had both warmed up and the ice was broken. She said, “By
the way, that was one of the worst lines I have ever heard, ‘Do you want to go
shopping?’!” She laughed.
She was chowing into a burger and fries, quite the unhealthiest thing she could have
on the menu, as I sipped my tea.
“Well, you were hot and I couldn’t think of anything to say. What do you do, by the
way?”
“I’m with a company round here. A medical practice.”
“Oh, right.”
“Like, you know, cosmetic.”
“Oh, right!’
“Yeah, I went in and…” she gestured, “had these done, and they thought it was such
a good job, they offered me the job of receptionist there.”
 And now I did stare at her tits, and she was completely okay with it.
“They’re great,” I congratulated her. “They are truly excellent.”
“Thanks,” she said, munching down a handful of fries.
And now it felt as if this was a heaven-sent opportunity to get some inside
knowledge. She was from a completely different background to me, and it felt like a
case of “honesty between strangers”. I just cut to the chase.
“How many guys do you have on the go at the moment?”
She went on to tell me about these three guys who were in different pole positions,
and she talked very openly and matter-of-fact about them. It was very interesting: I saw
how a Hot Girl just has options coming out of her ears at all times. One sounded like an
established, respectable guy, and I imagined him in a polo shirt and jacket, taking her to
high-society events at the weekends. Another was in Manchester; she was from there
originally. He sounded like more of a flame that she would go back to from time to time,
but was a dangerous bad boy with no prospects. And then the third one had only
recently been added to replace another guy who had fallen away, and she did not have
much to say about him. He sounded like a classic, “orbiter”, whom girls like to keep
around for comfort.
At the end of the lunch I got the waitress to take photos of us together. I think I
probably wanted to record the event for posterity. Me having lunch with a complete
stranger that I had pulled off the street, and she was proper Hot and had great fake
boobs. She laughed and played along, but tried to shield her face.
Now, my game was not exactly impressive and I had not exactly led her to the
bedroom, and to top it all I ended up picking up the entire bill, but the point was I had
made massive progress. She was a nine with model-hot looks. And I could get better at
this and do it again and again.
Later I texted her and really did not think she would reply. But she did:82

HER: Hey honny. So nice of you buying me food, it was so random. I thought you were a creepy
pervert at 1st but you're really nice and would like to meet u again. I'm changing my number
and giving this to my little brother so text me on my other 1. Xx

She gave me her other number in the next message.

 Unfortunately, my “text game” let me down on this occasion. Fuck! I replied in my
excitement with a text that began:

ME: Hey, creepy guy here!

It was a joke, of course, but you really have to be careful with texting, as humour does
not travel easily. (You will learn how powerful texting can actually be in a later chapter,
“Hobbit, Essex Boys & ‘The Text’”.)
She never replied.
And then I sent another.
And then another a few days later.
And then I phoned and her brother, about seventeen, answered in a thick Mancunian
accent, wondering who the hell I was.
And then, a week later, I phoned again and she answered on the other number.
“Oh, can I call you back? I’m just in the middle of something.”
“Sure. No problem!” I said, fully expecting that she would. That was that. She never
did, and the penny dropped at last. It had been a moment’s fun for her, but she had
evidently already erased my number. It made me angry, Why has she suddenly lost
interest? I don’t understand. It’s not fair. Life’s not fair!
A Hot Girl had momentarily fluttered gloriously into my life, like a butterfly in
through the window and just as haphazardly and randomly, she had fluttered out again.
Would there be another? I worried.83

73 He had an eighteen month relationship with this girl, and she even came to live with him in Norway, but eventually
the relationship ended and he got back and touch and started to daygame with me again. At time of writing he is in a
relationship with another girl, around 15 years his junior and without the complications that he had with Portuguese
girl. She is an intelligent, attractive girl. This all gives the lie to his fears of being too old and having to settle down.
74 As of writing he has got married, in fact, to a Muslim girl he met at a Muslim singles function or on a Muslim
online dating site.
75 There is a fact a book called No More Mr. Nice Guy by Robert A. Glover that goes into this subject of what is
really going on with guys who try and befriend girls in order to get sex.
76 Nick Krauser is credited with a lot of the development of the London Daygame Model and was good friends, or at
least comrade-in-arms, with Tom Torero for a while. His works, such as “Daygame Mastery” are like science books
on the subject of daytime pick-up and he comes across as an aggressive racist, a lone wolf and competitive daygamer
who loses friends easily. But I have never met him, so I have no idea of the man behind the image. His tweets are
pretty unpleasant, but perhaps he just aims to shock and demonstrate that he does not care what society thinks and has
no intention of ever going back to the “normal world” that he turned his back on a number of years previously. (He
worked in the city.) When I first listened to him on Daygame.com podcasts, where he would be a guest interviewee, I
was repulsed by the way he classified and objectified girls and treated them as targets. It certainly did not appeal to
the romantic in me! I nevertheless have his book Daygame Mastery on my shelf and I have learned a lot from it. I also
admired his integrity in terms of of his scientific, sometimes ruthless honesty about women and dating. Yet another
example of the paradoxes that scrambled my traditional thinking.
77 Why is it that we decide some girls are “out of our league”? I simply do not have a satisfactory answer to that
question. It does not seem reasonable (or natural) and I wonder whether it comes about merely because of the casual
accidents of childhood experiences.
78 Search YouTube for a video called “The Hot-Crazy Matrix.” It’s a hilarious and irreverent take on Hot Girls.
79 The “spotlight effect” is something that daygamers often refer to, by which they mean the feeling you get when
you feel that the whole world’s gaze is on you. It’s a funny phenomenon, as of course everyone (including the security
guards) is far too wrapped up in their own worlds to care, or even notice. Apparently, it’s even a medical term.
80 I really did feel at times that a large part of what I was doing was about running a social experiment.
81 What you learn actually is that Hot Girls know the game and are happy to have some fun and play along, and are
not generally unnerved by guys’ approaches. After all, they have had to learn to deal with them from age thirteen.
82 As is the case with a number of the quotations in this book, this is an exact copy.
83 This idea is often what holds the Mr Nice men back, perhaps massively so. Once they have found one they latch on
and do not want to let go. They do not think they will ever find another like her. But of course there are plenty of very
attractive girls in the world and no better way than daytime approach to meet them.

OceanofPDF.com
 12

The Ring

You will recall that I had been told not to try and approach shop girls, or at
least that it was pretty hard to pull off unless you were experienced. But
after my success in Debenhams with the girl at the beauty counter, I felt
suddenly more confident and I was now, in my own mind, Mr. Shop Girl.
Of course, whilst I bantered with them and even on the odd occasion got a
Facebook, or even a number once, I never got any of them out on a proper
evening date.
And then one day, once more back in Selfridges, I had some unexpected
success. I had been looking for a t-shirt.84 On this occasion I had spent a
good two hours or so in the store but had failed to recreate the successes of
the past. I decided to throw in the towel and go to a bar on a mezzanine
floor where they had this nice Czech beer, good ambience, and cool seating.
It was called Hix.
I sat down on a stool and started to banter with the barman. It was easy
and natural to strike up a conversation, and I wondered at the ease with
which the conversation flowed, as it often did after you had got completely
out of your head and into a social mode as the result of daygaming. Even if
you did not get any numbers or generate any attraction whilst out
daygaming, if you stuck at it, it invariably massively oiled the wheels and
left you very highly “socially calibrated.”
And then I noticed a really nice, tall, blonde-haired girl at the very end
of the bar. She was in fact the sub-manager of the bar and her name was
Monika. She was Polish and she had been watching the two of us bantering
together.
She wafted past me on the way to a table and I found myself stopping
her, “Hey, listen, I just have to say one thing: I think you look really
attractive.”
She paused and smiled.
“And this is a bit direct, but look, I’ve been shopping all day for a t-shirt
and got nowhere. How about we have a drink and you help me shopping
sometime?”
“I’ve got a boyfriend,” she said, bluntly. “In fact, he’s the barman next
door.” (Hix had two bars.) “I’m not sure he’d be into it.”
“Ah! Okay, sure.”
In spite of the rejection, I was feeling buoyant and carefree and I
continued, “Well, okay, maybe leave out the drink and just help me buy a t-
shirt then,” I shrugged.
There was a moment of silence and then she said, decisively, “When?”
“Er—tomorrow?” I blurted out, surprised. “How about mid-day? In the
store.”
“Yes, but not here.”
“No, sure. There’s a coffee place on the ground floor.”
“Yeah, okay, I know it. I’ll see you there at twelve.” And she was gone,
wafting off to a customer’s table.
 The next day there I stood, at this coffee bar. I did not have her number.
I did not even know her name at that point. Would she come?
I decided to deploy a trick Jon Matrix had taught me, which is to
pretend to be on your phone so you look busy. And then I saw her, walking
confidently and at quite a pace over towards me. She actually looked a step
up from how I remembered her the day before. And she had this same
childlike, casual indifference of Hot Girls, which reminded me of the Zara
girl. There was no real apprehension in her like there often is with girls,
even attractive ones. Men and dating were things she was very used to. Like
a fish in water. She must have been stared at by men about ten thousand
times in her life and hit on thousands of times.
She waited for me to come off the phone.
“Hey,” she said, blunt like the last time.
“Hi.”
“I’m sorry, I’ve got a stock-take and I can’t do today. I’ve got to get
right back. I’m right in the middle of it.”
“Oh,” I said, crestfallen.
“Can we do another time? Let’s exchange numbers,” she said.
And we did. And then she walked off.
It was a while before I got her out, and it was for lunch and shopping.
Now, this was not a great play and looking back on it I would have been
better off just changing the shopping plan altogether and getting her out on
a date at night. Asking a girl to come out and help you buy clothes is a bit
gay, to be fair. But I am a logical guy and was inexperienced, and thought
that now that I had mentioned shopping it had to be shopping. After all, that
was how the date had been set up, and weren’t women logical creatures,
just like me?85
 One day afterwards when I was out daygaming, I found a decent
restaurant called Aubain just off Oxford Street, and there we met for lunch,
with the plan being for her to help me buy some t-shirts afterwards.
She had arrived on time and was in a chair playing with her phone.86
We had lunch together and she pretty much cut to the chase, as is often the
case with strong Polish girls, and said, “Just to be clear, I’m only here
because my boyfriend is starting to piss me off, drinking vodka and tonics
all the time and getting drunk.”
She told me she was from Bialystok in Poland, where she had half-
completed a mechanical engineering degree.
“So you’re living with your boyfriend?” I asked.
“Yeah. Actually, he even knows I’m out with you!” she laughed. “I left
him on the sofa. He couldn’t care less.”
This was an interesting start to the date. She spoke a lot, and this was
actually not a sign of nervousness—she just liked to talk. She was pretty
blunt and she laughed a lot. She waited next to me at the end when I went
up to the cash register to pay for the meal, because the waiter was taking
ages to come to our table. She fully expected me to pay, but I decided this
was because she was helping me shopping rather than because she was a
gold digger.
And then we went out onto Regent Street for an hour or so and went
shopping. And she was super-efficient and just took me, almost by the
hand, from shop to shop. I did not completely lose the frame, as they say, it
was not quite like that, but I realised that shopping is pretty hard because
you are pretty much giving the girl the frame and inviting her to lead. This
is the opposite of what you should do to generate attraction. Now, a very
experienced seducer would have no problem with it as rules are there to be
broken (once you have mastered them), but for a guy learning this stuff it is
not the best approach.
She was pretty blunt with shop staff and picked out things for me, one
after the other, as if she knew exactly what she was doing. Which she did.
She sat playing with her phone whilst I tried t-shirts on in the changing
rooms and then I would come out and she would say, “No,” or sometimes
not even that. Sometimes she just gave me a look and shrugged with a
frown. She glided around the racks and picked out six t-shirts at a time.
As we left one of the last shops I said, “Perhaps you would like
something?”
It really was a bit Old Mr. Chode, Mr. Nice. My father had always been
rich and also magnanimous. I often felt the same way, trying to fake the
idea of a wealthy man of status who liberally bought things for people. But
I doubt I would have been that way with my sister if she had come shopping
with me! The truth is I was trying to curry favour with her by using my
wallet.
“No, no, no,” she said, batting aside the suggestion in very peremptory
fashion.
In the streets she said, “Urgh. All these people. I hate crowds.”
The shopping expedition was a great success. Her eye was really
excellent. She did not ask for my input much. She knew what worked and
what did not, and she was a Hot Girl—if she liked it then that was all that
mattered (some of the clothes I still have today and she raised my
awareness of fashion).
I should just repeat myself: Monika was simply Hot. She had a beautiful
face and great, tall body. She had a powerful, bewitching stare. She
reminded me of the White Witch from The Lion, The Witch & The
Wardrobe and I felt like Edmund, who gets drawn into her spell. And I was
spellbound. But still, at the end of the trip, which only lasted an hour, I did
what I had promised myself I would do and cut it short the moment it was
over. I resisted the temptation to suggest we go for a tea or a coffee.
Business was done. So once I had an ample collection of t-shirts and one or
two jackets, I said goodbye. It was somewhat awkward but I felt a little bit
as though I was breaking in a wild horse and needed to at least exert a bit of
control. She seemed slightly surprised, as if perhaps she was used to guys
wanting to monopolise her time.
I came out of the date feeling that I had at least survived, and if the
whole thing had been a bit unorthodox in terms of a date, at least I had
closed strong.
It was a while before I got another chance to see Monika. She was busy
or she was visiting family in Poland, and it seemed as if there might not be
that many windows with this girl. Her text messaging was as blunt and
direct as her conversation.
I sent a few texts, though, and she actually reciprocated, usually
immediately. Just as with the Zara girl, there was a certain guileless quality
about her. She had no “game” in this respect; Hot Girls have never had to
learn such skills. They do not really have to learn skills and play game, they
don’t have to bother. Men come to them and they just manage them. Much
like the air traffic controllers, they are likely just incredibly busy trying to
manage the various guys coming across their radar.
As dudes we think we are lucky if we have one or two girls in our
rotation and on our screens, little thinking that some girls have literally
double-digit numbers of guys they are trying their best to manage. I had had
a glimpse of this of course from Jessie’s phone, and saw for myself how
men somewhat demean themselves in their messages, chasing and chasing,
sending text after text after text - of an increasingly soppy tone.
There were hardly ever any emoticons in Monika’s texts. This was a
typical one, an instant reply after I had asked her out for a second date:

HER: HI. Im good. Cant - in Poland this wkend.

That was as elegant and elaborate as she got. Her spelling was atrocious. I
tried a cheeky ping in response to this to show my lack of disappointment
and to see what sort of reply I would be honoured with. It went thus:

ME: Okay, lets hook up when you're back. Don't eat too many dumplings ;)

She immediately replied:

HER: haha

Eventually she agreed to a date, and this time it was a proper date in the
evening. I now thought carefully about logistics.
I had at that time been talking to guys at the DGBCA at our meet-ups,
and Dave Diggler came along to one. Apparently his dating routine had
simplified enormously. He had got out of the rut he had been in during the
Daygame.com trip to the US and now he was having some phenomenal
success simply escalating very hard and fast. He would invite girls to a
local, grotty pub around the corner from his flat and would bounce them
straight back after only a drink or two. No mucking about.
“Come on. Let’s go,” he would say after a drink.
“Where?!”
 “To Sea World, to see the dolphins. Grab your bag,” he would say,
getting up.
“Okay!”
He would then walk her to his front door and take her straight up, before
she really knew what was going on. He had done this to quite a few girls he
had met in the street, and his apartment was in the centre of town so it was
easy. Dave Diggler was rough, messy, and masculine.
Now, I had had enough of my habitual dating arrangements of nearly a
quarter of a century that often left a dent in my wallet and projected a very
strong “Provider/Let-Him-Wait” vibe, and I was determined not to make the
same mistake with Monika. I reminded myself that I was on a journey, a rite
of passage to get in touch with a part of me that was deeply buried, and the
goal was to get proper sexual, escalate hard, and take risks.
Believe it or not, it felt incredibly difficult to go against the grain, but I
did nevertheless. I did not bother to figure out some fancy plan but invited
her to the local pub on the corner of my street, The Ring. My flat was about
a one-minute walk away.
She complied and I took my time getting ready, and even left it so I was
a little late. I just waited until she texted me that she had arrived:

HER: im here. Where r u? Going to gt a drink.

I hesitated in front of the mirror. I suddenly had concerns about the shirt I
was wearing. Was it too tight? It had blue stripes and was a bit old. I had
decided not to wear any of the stuff that she had bought me as it would
come across as trying too hard, so I had this old shirt on.
 Fuck it, I said to myself. I decided to run with it. I was here to take
risks, and my pectorals were reasonably well defined at this point in time,
even if my belly was too.
I cast my eye around the flat. It was empty. Russell, my flatmate, was
out, so I could bounce back easily. I stood at the door and told myself this
was going to be different this time: I was going to bounce her straight back
to the flat. I stopped at the door and said to myself, Whatever else happens
tonight, I am going to take risks and if necessary push it too far so it breaks
and I burn the whole thing, rather than pussy out and spend a whole night
smiling, talking too much about myself and being friendly.
I walked down the stairs.
It was late summer and nice and warm—a beautiful evening, in fact. I
walked breezily down towards the pub. And walked in…
And there I saw her.
She was at the bar and it was as though the rest of humanity in that
place had stood back, like from a bright light, and was not daring to trespass
into her space. She was stunning. I mean, it was ridiculous, quite frankly. I
do not know how to begin to describe it, other than it was slightly odd to
me. I say this because the place was a regular boozer with all sorts of men
—old, fat, slovenly, loud—and a sprinkling of girls, maybe. And into this
space had teleported this vision. She had a short skirt—but not a mini-skirt
—which allowed just enough to be seen, and she had glorious legs. She was
on heels, obviously—they were a turquoise colour. Crazy. And she could
pull this all off. And her hair was blonde, full and shiny, and was all over.
As I went up to her at the bar, somewhat spaced out, she smiled a rather
mischievous, wicked smile that bordered on a glare, which was her
hallmark. She had a beautiful, well-proportioned face. And her eyes were so
powerful and penetrating.
I managed to muster a few words: “Hi. Nice. Your shoes match my
eyes.”
“Haha.”
We sat down outside and she polished off two glasses of wine without
any effort. She told me a lot about herself—one of the things about Monika
was that she was never lost for words. She showed me her jewellery and her
bracelet, as I struggled to show an interest in this stuff, noting a particular
teddy bear trinket on her bracelet. She explained, in a soft and gentle
moment, that she added a new trinket to the bracelet from time to time.
“Cute,” I said.
She took this as a cue to show me more personal stuff. She took out her
mobile phone and started to show me photos.
“Look at this,” she said, showing me a photo of a girl with a baby.
“That’s a good friend of mine in Poland and that’s her baby. Cute.”
This was all part of the guilelessness of a Hot Girl—she was basically
telegraphing her intentions that she was ready to get married and being
entirely transparent in the process.
I began to figure out that she had had enough of Bad Boys. She was
trying to extricate herself from a Bad Boy relationship with the Hix barman
(I later heard that he was sacked for skimming the till). So perhaps she was
torn, a victim of the terrible dual-mating strategy that Rollo Tomassi had
written about. On the one hand she wanted alpha-male, bad-boy genes, and
on the other she knew that she needed a provider to take care of her and her
children.87 I guess, looking back, that I was “right guy, right place.”
 Was I a nice guy still? I was not sure. But I was not about to play the
Mr. Nice card tonight. She chatted some more and she was quite cheeky and
we bantered about my shirt, which she accused of being too small for me.
And then after about 30 or perhaps 40 minutes I told her to grab her bag and
follow me.
“Where are we going?”
“To Sea World. To see the dolphins,” I said, then clarified. “My flat is
just next door. You’ll like the view and you can check out how I live.”
She followed me up the stairs all the way to the fourth floor, the flat
being right at the top of the terraced house. The stairs at the top are very
narrow and steep and she struggled in her heels. We walked into the living
room.
And there was Russell. Damn it! He had returned. And the sight was not
pretty.
He was, as usually, slobbed-out on our dirty old sofa with rips in it,
books piled underneath one corner to keep it balanced with the missing leg.
He was on his laptop, just plonking an ice cube out of a pint glass into his
glass of white wine. His favourite trick.
He looked round and his jaw dropped. He just stared and gorped.
She said, “Hi.”
He said, “Hi.”
“So, this is the living room,” I said, like an estate agent, now realising I
had no choice but just to show her the flat and leave. I took her into my
bedroom. She walked in. I pointed out the view and the London Eye in the
distance. She said, “Big deal. Done it three times.”
I then took her back into the living room and said, “So, what do you
think?”
 She glanced at Russell with a frown.
“Well, it’s just a single guy’s place.” She then added, impatiently, “So
where are we going?”
As we walked out of the flat and down the road to I-had-no-idea-where,
I became slightly irritated. She had been a bit rude and she had, to my mind,
completely dissed my flatmate, showing no ladylike social graces
whatsoever. Her remarks made me feel as if she was labelling us as two
losers, the sort you might find in a British sitcom. And I had mixed
emotions about her, too. She was just so out of my league. Super Hot. I had
never dated a girl like that in my life. But I was also not sure we had a lot in
common.
Anyway, the promise I had made to myself came back to me in that
moment. I was going to take risks. And suddenly, for some inexplicable
reason, I stopped in the street and turned round and stared at her. She pulled
up.
“Listen. We haven’t got much in common, have we?”
“Sorry?” she said, suddenly going very chill.
I just went for it: “Well, come on. It’s true, isn’t it? I mean, have we? In
truth?”
She said nothing, which was unlike her.
“Look,” I said, warming to my theme, “Wouldn’t it be cool if two
people, out on a date, rather than go through all the nonsense of a long date,
trying to get to know each other, when they probably know they are not
suited, spending money and drinking too much to try and get through it,
pretending to be listening to each other, pretending to laugh at each other’s
jokes, walking about feeling awkward and wasting both each other’s
time…”
 I was animated, gesturing with my hands. She was giving me her trade-
mark stare.
“…what if they just look each other in the eye right at the start of the
date and agreed it’s just not going to happen, let’s call it quits. Like two
reasonable people. That would be so cool,” I said. We were stood near a set
of traffic lights a few feet from Southwark Tube. The date had barely
started. After a while she frowned and stared at me, something clearly
having just occurred to her.
“Did you think you were going to fuck me tonight?” she said, bluntly.
I paused. This was a weighty question and a bit of a surprise. But then
again, I could see her point of view. I had got her to a date at an old boozer
a minute’s walk from my flat and walked her up and showed her my
bedroom…
So I gave the question the seriousness it deserved. I pondered for a few
seconds, like a good lawyer, and finally answered, “Yes - possibly.”
“Not in that shirt!” she immediately quipped.
I thought for a moment about taking it off and saying, “And now?”
Instead I turned. She turned with me, and suddenly silence descended for a
few moments.
We reached Southwark Tube, which was only 50 metres away, and I
offered to walk her across the traffic lights to the Tube entrance. She just
said, “Don’t bother,” before I had even opened my mouth.
And then as she walked across she turned and said, “You can text me if
you want.”
And then the glorious vision in turquoise heels was gone, down into the
Underground.
I stood there, blinking.

Hang on, I eventually said to myself, pondering once more. What had she
said? I was confused and quite energized by the exchange we had just had
and could not piece it together.
Did she just say, “You can text me if you want?”
It did not seem possible. I decided that she must have actually said,
“Don’t ever text me,” and I had simply misheard.
I walked back to the flat.
I walked up the stairs, opened the door, walked in, and plonked myself
down on a chair in the living room.
“Good god,” said Russell. “What was that?!” He laughed and plonked a
fresh ice cube in his glass of wine.

84 Often now I would give myself a pretext for going out and daygaming, such as doing a very
specific piece of shopping.
85 I guess it was also the nice guy of the past stepping into the situation. Asking a girl to go out and
help you buy clothes is “safe.” It’s something she’s good at and it’s during the day, so she’s less likely
to say no and you are less likely to get rejected. But of course ultimately it probably will lead to
rejection, because you have not projected a masculine frame and are “hiding your dick.” Which
means that there is a danger of ending up in the dreaded Friend Zone, of course.
86 A PUA told me recently that girls on average send up to 250 texts or Facebook or WhatsApp
messages a day. I can believe it in Monika’s case. She spent half of the afternoon on her phone.
87 What can be said about this, the most alarming and depressing aspect of all? This had troubled me
on the Bansko ski trip. It struck at the very roots of marriage, making it look like a sham. Guys had
this idea of purity that girls played into, in which they were virgins—to a point (after all, they would
wear white at their wedding). Yet the sad fact is, I am told, that infidelity is rife and a girl is pretty
powerless if she ever meets a real Bad Boy Alpha.

OceanofPDF.com
 13

Hobbit, Essex Boys & “The Text”

My experiences with Roberta and what I believed was now my burgeoning success with Hot Girls
fortified me in the belief that I had been right to strike out on my own path as a lone wolf. Shaheed
and Lars now felt like distant shapes in the rear view mirror. I felt I had crested the peak of a
mountain and could look down and around at the globe and enjoy my moment in the sun. What
delighted me at this point was not so much that I had “scored” but that I had applied these skills and
they had worked.
You see, a key question that had been in my mind from the very outset, “is it just a skill?” was
being answered in the affirmative, so it seemed. The BBC documentary was wrong. I still struggled
with this: how could a serious documentary producer be so wide of the mark and why had he not
delved deeper? But still, the facts were the facts and they glared at me, defying me to accept that the
world was not all it seemed.
I was not a pick-up artist - far from it. But I had managed to make greater progress in less than
one year than I had in the previous fifteen. If it was just a skill, and not a factor or facet of your core
personality, then any guy, however parlous his situation and poor his record, could turn around this
area of his life, surely? I felt overjoyed at this discovery and at the fact that it was simply a bunch of
wrong ideas and bad habits that really could be replaced with better ideas and good habits. I felt like
a new man.
The crazy stories I had heard that it did not matter if you were fat, ugly, unsuccessful in life—
even if you were in a wheelchair—were actually beginning to sound true. It made me wonder about
all the work guys do down at the gym. A part of them, subconsciously, is doing it so as to be more
attractive to girls. And yet if they only knew! They could dine out on Ben & Jerry’s by the pint and
do no more exercise than was required to take the ice cream tub from the sofa to the fridge; if they
had game, they could still get results. Nor was it necessary to be rich and successful. Girls
responded to how you conducted yourself around them and how that made them feel, not what you
looked like and not what the size of your bank balance was. It did not matter that you did not have a
Porsche in your garage or the muscle tone of a Greek sculpture.
 I now felt I was well on the way to the Palace of Male Mastery, on the gold-paved road of sexual
liberation and masculine self-realisation. My poor therapist had given up on the idea of getting me
into a relationship and was now encouraging me to read Iron John, a modern book based on an old
fairy tale about the importance of a masculine rite of passage.
Quite a lot of things started to make sense now and were not so much of a puzzle. There was
“natural game,” of course, but those were just guys who had learned this stuff whilst they were so
young they had not even realised it, like a skier or ice skater who had rich parents who took him to
the slopes or the ice rink at age five. But just as only about 10% of skiers you see on the slopes can
actually ski, so it was true of girls and seduction. The naturals were like those useless French and
Italian ski instructors who had taught me in my younger years by simply skiing and expecting me to
pick it up by just watching them, saying occasionally, “Bend ze nees!” as they glided effortlessly
and stylishly down the mountain.
I was now properly back in Wonderland. And it was amazing. I skipped happily through the
Wonderland meadows with the sun on my face. Except I had also now entered a wood without
realising it, and it was a little dark… There were patches of sun mottling the forest floor, but there
were also dark shadows in the corners and in the distance between the trunks of trees. And out of
these emerged an unlikely duo, motley characters, to meet me on my journey.

***

I had been quite active on the DGBCA Facebook forum and I would occasionally get messages
from guys from all sorts of different countries wanting to meet up and wing with me. One of these
messages was actually from a guy who was pretty local, from Essex—not far from where my family
lived and where I had grown up. He personal messaged me one day on Facebook suggesting we
might go out daygaming sometime in Chelmsford. His profile photo was very innocuous and I just
guessed he was some mediocre daygamer who had done a bootcamp, so I was not overly keen to
hang out with him as I had no idea who he was. His name was Richard Stoker. Dick Stoker for
short.
Nevertheless I felt I ought to hook up with a fellow daygaming spirit who was obviously
struggling out there in the wilds of Essex—many miles from London and civilisation—and needed a
friend or a wing to help him up the ladder. Giving back what I had learned was all part of the Fight
Club spirit of the journey we were all on.
Richard wanted to bring a friend with him, called Jack. I suggested that we meet at Balthazar in
Covent Garden, a posh French brasserie where I had by then taken a couple of girls on dates,
including one girl in particular whom I had nicknamed “Hobbit.” 88
 I found them already seated at a table and it immediately felt like a scene from a Cosa Nostra
movie. There was something about them, seated in a brasserie in the mid-afternoon, with more than
a few empty tables around them. They were both middle-aged men, both dressed very smartly, one
sipping on a glass of water, the other a Pernod. Richard was medium build, wearing an open-necked
white shirt, nice trousers and very expensive, colourful brogues of the sort you might have expected
to see in a speakeasy from the Prohibition era in the US. He was talkative, cheerful, and had a
positive vibe. But he also had a lot of self-control. He clearly worked out—but not excessively so.
He was in fact a self-made man, I later learned, who had set up a martial arts gym in Essex and
made money on property as well as in his business.
Jack said very little. He was chubby, wore a very cheeky expression like you expect to see on a
truant schoolboy, even at age 45. He was also dressed smartly, in designer clothes, and he had slick,
black hair with absolutely no sign of balding. It reminded me of something Tom Torero had said,
that all the successful pick-up artists he knew still retained a boyish charm. I could imagine him
being a barrow boy during his younger years, or a young trader on the stock exchange, now made
good. But Jack also looked to me as if at any moment, if you were to cross him, he might reach over
the table, grab your tie, drag your face to the tabletop amongst the pepper and salt cellars and drive a
fork through your hand into the table.
On this occasion all he did during the conversation was nod, purse his mouth in agreement and
throw in the occasional word or two. I later learned that he had made a fortune whilst quite a young
man with a printing business. He now owned a large country house in the Brentwood area and no
longer needed to do a day’s work.
Now, it turned out that Richard was not at all a beginner at this stuff. Indeed, it was clear that he
had been in it longer than any of the Daygame.com crew. He had learned this stuff naturally from an
early age and for him it was a great hobby and passion. He knew how to approach girls both at night
and during the day—he was an all-rounder. He had studied pick-up at the feet of one of the first and
most famous PUAs, a somewhat sketchy and unpleasant character from the US called Ross Jeffries.
89 But Richard himself was not sketchy at all, but actually very genial, if a bit too focused
sometimes. He did not drink alcohol and ate frugally. He knew all about diet and health as well as
fitness.
He talked freely to me about Jack’s credentials and successes, whereas Jack himself seemed
slightly embarrassed about the topic. It appeared that Jack was a very naughty boy indeed and slept
with girls on a weekly basis—different ones—whom he hooked up with on Tinder and online as
well as in coffee shops. I saw his profile and it projected so much. If you were to mix the Cheshire
Cat from Alice in Wonderland with a Prohibition-era gangster with a big heart but dubious morals,
you would have summed up his profile picture. He was not a dedicated daygamer like Richard, and
his intentions were very dubious indeed. He was regularly banging girls whilst he himself was in a
long-term relationship, which was something that Richard was not into at all and could not help
talking about it because he could not understand how someone could be such a moral vacuum and
yet seem perfectly contended about it. 90
“You won’t believe this bloke…” he said, nudging Jack, who just grinned and shrugged.
“He’s like… happy just smashing birds, like, left, right, and centre, whilst he’s in a relationship
with this lovely girl, Jess. She’s really fit. But also has a good personality.”
Richard was about to sip from his glass of water and then suddenly put his glass down again,
remembering a recent incident.
“He picks these birds up on Tinder or in coffee shops. And there’s this one girl, like, he drives
backwards and forwards to see… where is it?”
“Watford.”
“Up in Watford during the afternoons, and so he smashes her at about 3 o’clock and then drives
back in his Porsche Kamera down the M25 and the A12 and he’s on his phone to Jess, who’s
cooking him a romantic dinner or whatever!”
“I know, I’m a naughty boy. I can’t help it.” he grinned.
“Show him.”
Jack hesitates.
“Come on!”
Jack produced his phone and showed me a Facebook exchange. He scrolled down to a selfie of a
girl in her underwear in her bedroom. She wasn’t an 18-year-old model, but nor was she ugly. She
was an attractive 30-year-old MILF, dissatisfied with her lot.
And then Richard made him show me more.
“Aren’t you worried about your girlfriend seeing all of this?”
“Yeah. It’s a bit of a juggling act, but I’ve got two phones obviously and all that.”
“He can just bang a bird, go back to Jess, and like carry on like nothing has happened! I can’t do
that. I wish I could! I can’t be in a relationship with a bird whilst I’m fucking other birds… Look at
that one, how did you meet her?”
“Tinder.”
“She’s proper fit, right, Alex? The thing is, he’s smashed like hundreds of birds. I mean, how
many, Jack? Like three a week?”
“No, no, no, no, no. One or two. Two maybe. You know.”
“Different birds.”
“Yeah. Maybe two a week.”
“Jack must have fucked about—how many, Jack? Four hundred girls?”
 Jack laughed his cheeky, truant schoolboy laugh. I looked at him. Were they just showing off?
No, I decided. Jack was not a guy who needed to prove anything to anyone. I could tell he was a
self-made millionaire who just liked sex. His charm was almost certainly underpinned by an air of
sexual threat, and he had probably been two-timing girls since he was fourteen. His morals were
clearly dubious, and I later learned that he had paid for it: his ex-wife had taken a lot of his wealth
off his hands, and he did not have a good word to say about her. He had probably completely
deserved it.

After our conversation in Balthazar we walked around Covent Garden in order to do some daygame.
They both said very little. Jack just watched and laughed and smiled, really enjoying Richard’s
antics in the street as he approached girls. I felt comfortable around them, in the way an innocent
man does around Mafiosi who have bags of social confidence and know how to put you at your
ease, take you under their wing, and give you encouragement.
I saw Richard steam over to a bird just stepping into a shop and he went right in and opened her
and started chatting. He was very focused and I could see that he knew how to hold the frame, but
was always smiling and never aggressive. I was unable to tell whether or not the girl gave him her
number.
We then stepped into a bar called Jewel and wandered about. There was a tall, pretty girl with a
guy at the bar. Richard, who had taken a shine to me and was clearly trying to help me, gave some
advice on how to approach her.
“When you see a hot girl with a guy, just lean in and say, ‘Excuse me, can I just say that I think
your girlfriend is very attractive.’ Then walk off. If she is not his girlfriend, either he or she will
immediately correct you and then you can open a conversation.” 91
Richard was actually a very good coach. I guess this was because he had spent a lifetime taking
classes in martial arts and managing people at his business; he knew how to build you up and
encourage you. He was also very loyal and supportive, and over the next year he would regularly
message me and ask how I was getting on and call and give me advice and feedback. I once asked
him why he was helping me and he just said, “Because you’re a good bloke and you are committed
to this. And because I want to move on from my martial arts work and set up a dating business for
guys and girls in their forties or fifties.”
Richard was also a contradiction to me. I remember meeting him at an Italian coffee shop
outside Harrods in Knightsbridge. He had invited me along to join him and Jack in a coaching
session with a reasonably well-known coach called Johnny Cassell, who was a slick, young pick-up
artist. Richard wanted to learn from other coaches and was prepared to pay upwards of £400 for two
hours with the guy. I could not believe his rates. I remember watching a testimonial video with one
of his students, talking Johnny up and explaining to the camera how he had turned his dating life
around. Guys were prepared to pay silly money for help in this area of their lives, obviously.
All three of us sat with Johnny Cassell at this café. He turned up wearing a smart sports jacket
and open-neck shirt and a nicely-trimmed, ruddy beard. He had the same boyish charm as so many
of them did. After some introductory chat he did a little exercise. Suddenly he said to us, “Body
language is king. Just the tone of your voice or the eyes will do it all.”
“Right…,” we said, convinced by his voice tone.
“Okay, imagine you’re a girl,” he said to me.
“Alright.”
And he stared at me with a smile and then he asked me how I feel.
“Hot,” I said.
He looked away like a pantomime villain or magician going backstage for a moment, and then
he turned back and gave me a totally different look, piercing and aggressive.
“Wow,” I said.
“How do you feel?”
“Alarmed,” I said.
“Exactly. The ability to control your emotions is something I felt I had to learn at quite a young
age. This ability to project different emotions and to be non-reactive when necessary is what I’m
known for and is my own particular talent.”
“Whoah!” He seemed pretty sure of himself.
Johnny Cassell was clearly “high end,” holding out the promise of high-class girls such as the
kind you might approach in the Knightsbridge area.
Indeed, after drinks we did go into Harrods. I approached a shop girl, as was my want, and had a
great conversation with her that went nowhere. After a while, the four of us glided out of the shop.
Out in the street he approached a girl who was leaving Harrods, having just finished her
shopping, to demonstrate his skills to us. Whilst he had heard of Daygame.com, he did not know
much about it and he had no idea what I meant by a “Yad Stop.” His technique with the girl was to
immediately add a time constraint, and he pointed out the important thing was to project that you
were an established, successful guy who did not have time to hang around and chat. After he had
returned from the conversation he explained what he had said:
“Hey, listen, I was just with friends having a coffee and saw you. I had to come up and tell you
you’re really cute. I’ve got to grab a taxi—you look busy too—but I wanted to say, hello.”
After some banter he closed with, “Let’s exchange numbers, find a free moment, and hook up
for a coffee.”
 So he basically treats her as if she is high value, without time on her hands, and he is too. I had
not seen it before. He was appealing to the high-end, well-heeled marketplace, and his clients might
have been few but must have been wealthy.
The amusing thing was that it was Richard who had greater success out on the streets than he
did. Richard and Jack were greatly amused. Richard approached a fit blonde bird and got her
number, and then later, after Johnny Cassell had left (he seemed to be in a hurry and was a little
unprofessional and finished the lesson abruptly), he started to immediately text her. He showed me
the texts and they got pretty filthy pretty quickly, I can tell you, from both ends. 92
After the Johnny Cassell lesson, we had another coffee and Jack now also showed me his texting
style. His texts were filthier than Richard’s. And then of course there were the photos…
It was clear that this duo were a filthy pair, certainly by my standards, although you would not
know it to meet them. But they insisted that it was the girls who were the really filthy ones. Richard
made Jack tell the story of one particular girl he had met on Tinder.
“Go on, Jack, tell him.”
“What, that bird who left the door open?”
“Yeah.”
But before he could say anything, Richard told the story for him:
“He like picked her up on Tinder and—she’s never met him, right? He picks her up and she just
says she is going to leave her front door open. So Jack obliges.”
Jack grins.
“Happy to oblige, me.”
“And he drives up there in his Porsche and walks in and finds her up in her bedroom in the bed
blindfolded, right, and—didn’t you? He just gives her one and leaves, and that is it. Married, right?”
“I dunno,” says Jack, “We didn’t say much, that was the whole point. She laid the whole thing
out in advance, what was going to happen.”
“She did not even see him. No idea what he looked like. Unbelievable.” Jack was laughing.

Richard helped me in a number of ways over these months and was one of the few people who were
consistently looking out for me. It was an odd relationship, insofar as we had little in common,
certainly in terms of our backgrounds and social circles, but this was the strange Wonderland world
I was in, where total strangers became comrades on the road to male-mastery!
He took me down to one of his gyms once and showed me a workout routine to slim up, and he
also took me to his tailors in Billericay, a private shop that had clothes that would just set you
slightly apart. Polarising yourself was an important part of game—standing out rather than just
wearing the usual clobber. Risking being “fashionable” (to a point) by making sure clothes fit and
buying a white shirt, say, but it being quality fitted, with some embroidery on the inside of the collar
or sleeves—that sort of thing.
In terms of fashion we were a lot different than many of the younger daygamers I knew. We
wore smart shirts and jackets and quality shoes. Even Monika, Super Hot Hix girl, would have
approved of Richard’s decisions. Richard was obviously keen to share his knowledge and
recognised someone who really wanted to change and improve his lot. He often used to come to
London to daygame. Once he turned up at a talk hosted by another pick-up artist, a room full of
men, with three hot Polish girls, all in their early-to-mid-twenties, dressed up to the nines for a
Saturday night out, in his soft-top Mercedes. One of them was his 25-year-old girlfriend, whom he
still dated a year later. For all his foul-mouthed dirty talk, talking of girls as “birds” and saying
things in the street about a girl like, “I would like to smash that,” he was actually loyal to this
girlfriend. He still gamed because he enjoyed it, I think, but he would not sleep around when he was
regularly sleeping with one girl. She knew about his hobby. 93
Like Johnny Cassell, he was able to control his emotions. He did not get pissed off or angry
about things, whether being cut off by a motorist on the road or on the wrong end of a tirade from a
woman. He smiled and was non-reactive. This emotional non-reactivity is something I have seen in
other pick-up artists and is perhaps something of a key to success in this area.

Now, the most revealing thing of all about meeting Richard and Jack was in fact the advice they
gave in relation to Hobbit, which is the nickname of a girl I met before I got into daygame. The
story is very relevant because my time with her straddled the two periods of my life, pre and post-
daygame. I mentioned her at the beginning of the chapter.
Well, it so happened that on that very day I had I received a text from her that seemed to be the
final nail in the coffin. I was annoyed and disappointed with myself:

HER: I was thinking about our age difference and it's bigger than I thought. I think ur a nice guy but can't
see it being anything id want. I hope u understand. I think we get on and enjoy your company, but don't want
to mess u around. X

My reaction to this message could easily be said to encapsulate why I had had so little success over
the last 20 years of my dating life. It was a horrifying repeat of so many friend-zone messages I had
got over the past. It reminded me of course of Gotia’s immortal text, “I think we need to talk.” In
fact, this text is probably the reason I am writing this book: to try and make sense, try and
understand where I was going wrong. Here I was once again with a girl I was really attracted to and
wanted a relationship with and yet had seemingly “cocked up.”
 Once more I found myself thinking, “Life is not fair!” Here I was, having met a girl and
seemingly got on well with her and now she had fallen off the radar. What had I done wrong? All
my friends and family told me I was a great guy and they could not understand why I had not found
someone, that it was all “a matter of time” and I should “be myself.”
If you are drifting off at this point in the book I urge you to go and get a double espresso and re-
engage, because this anecdote illustrates what is right at the heart of the whole issue and the
problem that 21st-century men experience: WE TAKE WHAT WOMEN SAY AT FACE VALUE.
We rarely look beyond their words. This is an underlying theme that I hope runs throughout this
book and that is critical to success with women, whether you are a professional pick-up artist or
seducer, or just a Regular Joe trying to get a girlfriend.
Sure, you need a good job and a social life outside of girls. And hobbies and other interests, etc.
And maybe you do need to learn to “love yourself” (although how on earth that is meant to work in
practice I have no idea), or you need to be positive or you need to be a happy person. But really, in
truth, all this pales into insignificance if you have no knowledge and skills. 94 So this is the mistake
that I had made and I was about to see the light, thanks to these two ruffians, as we sat around the
table at Balthazar.
I found myself confiding to Richard and Jack the story of Hobbit and I showed him these text
messages, and of course this last one in particular.
Richard explained to me that I was wrong to assume that she really believed what she said. Of
course I took her messages literally, assuming that she really did think I was too old and not
realising that in fact a woman feels things and probably was not even aware that actually her
attraction had simply waned because of the wrong action I had taken in chasing her rather too
enthusiastically. I came across as needy and that put her off, he explained, although she had no idea
why and had simply invented some random reason in her own head, that seemed plausible to her: I
was “too old.” Now Richard explained that, because her reasoning was so faulty and purely based
on how she felt at that moment, the situation could be turned around.
“But surely the writing is on the wall?”
“No, Alex, you’re applying, like… you’re a lawyer, right? You’re like thinking that is a
statement from the lead witness, right, that it is the truth? Sort of final, okay?”
“Women don’t think that way. Not logically,” chipped in Jack, for once engaging in the debate.
“Yeah, you’re thinking that she’s thinking like you’re thinking!” said Richard, enjoying his turn
of phrase.
“Haha!” laughed Jack.
“Look, right… let’s say we turn the tables round and you’ve said to her, like, ‘I’m sorry, you’re
just too young for me and I can’t see it going anywhere.’ You would mean it, right?”
 “Er, yeah. Sure.”
“I mean, you’re an upstanding lawyer, right? Word is your oath and all that?”
“Yeah, I guess I would mean it. Yes, I agree,” I said.
“Well, women don’t work like that.”
I twiddled the phone in my hand and my eyes locked onto the text once more. “It’s not
something I want. I think we get on and I enjoy your company…” Ugh! Here it was again, a
lifetime’s rejection, a girl telling me that she liked me and wanted to be my friend.
“Alright, give me your phone.” He took my mobile and composed a reply. This is what he
wrote:

ME: I'm not as nice as you think. ;) Don't you think you can keep up with my experience! Listen, I'm out
tonight with my friend Lauren but def catch up soon - Laithwaites are doing some wine tasting this month if
u fancy? X

I stared at the text. “Who’s Lauren?”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Richard. “She doesn’t know. The point is you’re showing her you’re busy
with a friend—she could be just a friend, but she’s a girl, and you look like a high-status guy.”
“But it’s lying,” I said, but quite ready to send the text nevertheless as it did feel quite strong and
disinterested.
“Just try it,” said Richard. “Odds are that this cannot be retrieved, but I wouldn’t rule it out. A
lot of times you can bring the girl round.”
I was worried that this was all a bit daft, a guy actually typing up messages, but he was making a
point, I guess. And after all, I was committed to the idea that it was just a skill and if you took the
right action you could change and improve. So I let him send it, pretty much exactly as he had
drafted it.
And to my surprise, that very afternoon, whilst we were out daygaming around Covent Garden,
she replied:

HER: Yeh that wld be great. It's wine week 2 - 8th June too so going to be plenty of events in the area I
reckon :) x

And now the crazy part was that the tone of the relationship began to change. I actually credit that
change largely to the help that I had got that afternoon. Certainly it was quite different after that.
Although I still struggled, the penny had dropped and I knew it was only a matter of time before I
turned it all around.
 After this I actually had three or four solid dates with Hobbit. And I started to get the hang of
the texting.
This below was the run up to a date in which I went round to her place for the evening. She
cooked me dinner and we watched a movie together. I now had a sudden spurt of new inspiration as
far as messaging and social media was concerned:

7/30, 10:43pm
ME: Hello Hobbit!!

7/30, 10:44pm
HER: Hey!! How's u? How was last night?

7/30, 10:47pm
ME: One of those spontaneous nights with some friends where suddenly the conversation is flowing and the
drink also - these flavoured vodkas the Spanish bar man was lining up :) I think it must be your influence
on me!

7/30, 10:54pm
HER: Ha ha love it!!! Well gotta live and the sun means u shld have fun :)

7/30, 10:59pm
ME: Your bad influence I meant! U had a good day?

7/30, 10:59pm
HER: Well I was there... So actually I've just sparked your inner naughtiness :)
7/30, 11:00pm
ME: your inner naughtiness sparked my inner naughtiness, eh? There's a thought...

7/30, 11:00pm
HER: Ha ha indeed!!!!! U love That really! Ha

7/30, 11:01pm
ME: naught is a nice word, it brings all sorts of images, school - girls, st trinians, teachers, mischief of
all sorts.

7/30, 11:02pm
HER: Oh Behave! As carry on would say

7/30, 11:03pm
ME: this chat is in danger of getting x rated, but at least its after the 10pm wataershed. Anyway, you
haven't answered my question

7/30, 11:03pm
HER: Ha ha what one???

7/30, 11:04pm
ME: How was Hobbit's day?

7/30, 11:04pm
HER: Day?? Yeh busy but gd. I went to see a college mate tonight xx

7/30, 11:05pm
ME: Ah. Good. I like the way you keep your life interesting

7/30, 11:05pm
 HER: Course!

7/30, 11:07pm
ME: So lets carry on keeping it interesting and hook up soon - for mischief of course

7/30, 11:07pm
HER: Ha carry on?? Wld love that :)

7/30, 11:08pm
ME: But you must finish your 7 other blogs first! That's the rules!

7/30, 11:09pm
HER: I think I'm ok! Ya cute :D

7/30, 11:09pm
ME: Good night cute furry hobbit

7/30, 11:09pm
HER: Ok. I'm not furry!!

7/30, 11:09pm
ME: sorry, hairy. nite x

7/30, 11:10pm
HER: Ha ha xx

7/30, 11:10pm
ME: x

There were still too many exclamation marks and it was not perfect, but I hope you can see that it
was fun, playful, and hinted at sex. It was truly one hundred and eighty degrees. I felt that I had
been fired out of a rocket launcher into space by Richard’s texting tutorial at Balthazar. It was nuts.
95

So I went round and we watched a dumb movie, What Women Want with Mel Gibson—one we
could talk over basically without getting too involved in the film. And we made out. (Although
admittedly it took me until right at the end of the movie to do so.) This was the first time it had
happened since our very first meeting, now probably six months previously, and that had just been a
drunken snog anyway. This was proper girlfriend-boyfriend snogging. Whilst by PUA standards this
was escalation at a very slow place, for me it was one of only two proper make-outs with a girl for
over 15 years!
The next time we met was during a week when Monika had been mucking me about by being
flaky and cancelling last minute on a date. I actually became emboldened and tried out a technique
from Tommasi called “pre-selection.”
We met up for a drink on a Friday night—I texted her that day and suggested a spontaneous
drink, having ignored her for weeks, and whilst at a bar I “accidentally” showed her some photos,
including one of Super Hot Hix Girl, who was a lot more attractive than Hobbit. 96
 Was this right? Ethical? Part of me felt that it was wrong to behave towards girls like this. But as
you have already figured out, whatever I had been doing for 20 years had not worked, and so it was
time to try something different. The opposite, in fact: “a thorn to remove a thorn.”
I felt resigned to the fact that I was having to resort to tricks and subterfuge and game-playing in
order to get a girlfriend. I was also resigned to the fact that this was the only thing that they seemed
to respond to.97 This was NOT what society was telling me—certainly not through the medium of
film, in all those Hollywood comedies produced in the US that I so loved. (And not just the
mainstream ones, but actually even the independent films usually have a happy ending involving
some moment of honesty and vulnerability on behalf of the man, without which there can be no
happy ending.) 98
On that date with Hobbit, we went up The Shard. She got pretty drunk, and we met some old
friends she knew and went on to a separate bar in another part of town. Before I bundled her in a
taxi, I told her, “We’re going to Sea World to see the dolphins,” and then brought her round to my
place.
I remember helping her in her high heels up the narrow staircase and flopping her over my bed,
almost like a fireman rescuing a girl who has fainted. She had gone “floppy,” as she did when she
drank. She was so feminine and attractive at those times. I stared at her as she lay there, her dress
bunched up around her waist, oblivious to how sexy she looked.

With the results I’d had with Hobbit, Richard had shown me that just taking the right actions, even
as little as a correctly worded text, could generate substantially different results -it could in fact
change the whole tenor of a relationship and spin things round.
I was still struggling to make sense of it all. Could it really be the case that the way you behaved
with women was the be-all-and-end-all? That it did not matter who you were, but all that mattered
was how well you played the game? And if this was the case and it was just a skill to learn, how
was it that it had remained so secret? Why wasn’t the world absolutely filled with companies selling
their services to men and helping them to break free from their hen-pecked lives?!
Of course, the internet had sprouted zillions of these companies, but the point was that society
had driven them underground. The firm if invisible hand of society had kept it out of bounds, even
in spite of the revolutionary change in communication dissemination that the internet had brought.
They were pilloried and scapegoated and forced to operate under the radar.
It was strange. At least 50% of the population would have given their right arm to acquire such
skills (and that 50% was apparently the stronger and more dominant 50%), so how was it that it had
taken me 45 years to stumble on it? This was some power, some propaganda far stronger than any I
had previously heard of. And what a brilliant way of keeping it from men—by implanting in them,
like robots from some kind of Westworld fantasy movie, a massive prejudice against seducers,
players, and Lotharios. 99

88 Of course that was not her name, but a nickname I had created on the date to tease her. She had objected and protested, but
eventually came to adopt the name herself when in my company.
89 Ross Jeffries, in spite of the fact he seems a somewhat seedy character, does clearly know his stuff and showed balls by appearing
in an TV show in front of an audience made up entirely of women. (And taking a lot of flak.) This was 20 years ago and so he is one
of the veteran pick-up artists in the community.
90 We all like to think - and great literature tells us - that if you have dubious morals you will be unhappy, but I am afraid I detected
no unhappiness in Jack during the time I got to know him. He seemed a contented ruffian.
91 Now this does work. I later used this little bit of knowledge on a Brazilian girl I met in St James’ Park, near Buckingham Palace.
She was with two guys and I went up to one of these guys and told him he had a beautiful girlfriend. We had a laugh as he explained
that she was just a friend, living in the UK, and he was over for a holiday. I then talked about the girl and teased her to the friend in
front of her, which was electric, and she was smiling behind her dark glasses the whole time. When I finally turned to talk to her she
gave me her Facebook. It was tricky taking it forward because she lived in another city, in Manchester, but we did eventually meet for
a date.
92 Richard advised me to sexualise the relationship as quickly as possible and to start sex-talk on text as early as possible. I never
really bought into the part of his advice. Whilst I could see the importance of not becoming “the gay best friend”on SMS, bringing up
sex too early seemed risky. But then, it worked for him. Was it the type of girls he went for? I wondered. But that very question
evidenced old, worn-out traditional thinking that said that if a girl was sexual she was slutty. The word “slut” may have had a clear,
specific meaning in olden times, but now it is one of those shaming words that people throw about, carelessly and spitefully.
93 And yet of course the sad part about it was that it just made her more attracted to him. Just as Jack’s girlfriend, Jess, would get
suspicious and angry but would nevertheless push him for a more permanent relationship, or marriage. This is perhaps one of the
hardest “red-pill” truths of Tomassi to swallow, that girls become far more interested in unfaithful guys than in faithful ones.
94 If you are reading this and identifying in any way, shape or form with what I am saying, please get it into your thick skull that it is
not you. Please do not identify or couple your identity with the ignorance of the past, or ideas that swirl around in your head that you
are “Mr Nice” or “Not One Of Those Guys”. They are just foolish labels. The only thing you need to focus on or identify with is the
true knowledge of the situation, which is that you have made mistakes but now that you have some knowledge you can correct them.
You were never lacking anything anyway. You just did not acquire this stuff naturally and were never taught it. If you are hesitating
about getting into game and yet feel that a rite of passage is important to you, think of game as “using a thorn to remove a thorn.”
95 I also met up again with the famous Johnny Cassell a month or so later. He was a more aggressive salesman and chased me up
after our meeting, having taken my contact details. I paid him to come round and help me out with text game and it was a useful
meeting. But he was also a bit too slick for my liking.
96 Like so many romantics before me, I was struggling with the knowledge that biology was powerful that it could turn a girl’s head
if she already thought you had been “pre-selected” as an Alpha Male by another hot girl. “It’s a sad fact that women are just as
shallow as men!” say the moraliser in me.
97 This is called a “jealousy plot line”.
98 Take the film Hitch, for example. It sells out in the end: it turns out that the guy who the pick-up artist was coaching throughout
the movie was actually attracting the girl during those times when he was not using the pick-up techniques he was being taught by
Hitch. Hitch’s routines did not work at all - it was only when he was “being himself” that she fell for him. Hitch himself has a
meltdown during the movie with the girl that he has been chasing and it is only when he has been stripped bare and is vulnerable that
she falls for him. So she too only falls in love with him when he is “being himself”. The mainstream refuses to accept that pick-up
artistry can work and that seduction sills are even necessary, perhaps. The time for being vulnerable is after you have worked the
magic and slept with the girl, not before.
99 I guess I was beginning to make sense of Tomassi’s “feminine imperative” and that it was in fact, pervasive in western society.
Even if it was largely unseen, a little like the story of “The Emperor’s new clothes.”

OceanofPDF.com
 14

Frame Control, Scallops & The “C” Word

So it had transpired that Monika had said, “Text me if you like” and not, “Don’t ever
text me again.”100
The day following the Ring episode we had a somewhat emotional text exchange.
After one or two mundane texts, she suddenly changed tune late in the afternoon (she
was at work at Hix at the time) and said:

HER: Don't text me anymore.

I was surprised, but immediately realised that she did not mean it. I had learned from
Richard Stoker’s texting tutorial. And Tomassi also says, “The medium is the
message,” which means essentially you should not listen to what a girl says but what
she does. She was texting me—if she had not wanted to go further she would have just
ignored me.
Now, the Old Alex would have “respected” her wishes and said:

ME: Of course, I understand and respect your right to choose. I will not text you.

And I probably would have not! But instead I texted:

ME: Sure. Okay. But there is something I really want to tell you so can I leave you a voice
mail message?
As always she came back immediately (there was no real game-playing with Monika,
or if there was it was almost child-like). She said, “Yes.”
So I left a voice message saying, “Listen, I know I was abrupt last night and I think
I was a bit hasty. The thing is I have been doing a lot of dating recently and having
fun, if you know what I mean, and perhaps I think that you are someone with whom I
would like to have something more serious, you know, and I was just nervous and
overreacted, I guess. A lot of the girls I’ve been seeing are immature.”101
It was odd, but I think what had happened was that I had become “Accidentally
Alpha.” I was like Hemmingway’s The Old Man and The Sea who hooks a fish so
large that he cannot land it into his boat. I felt that I had hooked a real big fish (Hot
Girl-wise). I had overreacted because I did not want to regress to the old Mr. Nice Guy
and be a pussy on a date, and I was now dealing with the consequences.
Monika had got herself properly dolled up for The Ring date and snuck out,
perhaps whilst her boyfriend was dozing on the sofa with a bottle of vodka, and had
been looking forward to meeting me. Perhaps I was even a life raft out of her
relationship. She was no longer a young girl, and whilst she was hot, she clearly had
felt the clock ticking (as evidenced by the photos of babies she revealed). As someone
once said, a girl dolls herself up and goes out hoping that this time it will be amazing
and she will be swept off her feet. She has this eternal hope. It is not as if a girl goes
out on a date hoping not to be swept off her feet!
Anyway, after The Ring date there were quite a few fluffed attempts at pinning
down a date in which she played about and avoided and evaded. But eventually I
managed to get her out again. I was in my bedroom staring at my phone trying to
figure out what the next step was, and whether there was a next step after she had been
ignoring me. Eventually I turned to the classic Recovery Text (which is perhaps one of
the most important contributions to text game ever invented!):

ME: Have you been kidnapped?!

HER: Sorry I did not get back to you I was busy I will call tomorrow I promiss.

ME: Ok.
My mobile phone then started to ring, to my great surprise, and I stared at it for a few
moments, unable to believe, I guess, that a Hot Girl would be calling me. I looked at it
like some sort of electrical eel, not even wanting to touch the object for fear of getting
an electric shock. But I did.
We had a short conversation in which I asked her how she was, and she talked
about her week and her new job and I just listened (she had left Hix and was now
working at The Mayfair in Green Park, a posh hotel). She seemed happy.
I kept it short and closed with a date request, saying, “I choose the venue, you
choose the wine, okay?”
She said, “Okay. But can it not be too far from central?”
I said I would text her details on Wednesday night.
She was already beginning to play “frame control” as I was setting up the date by
trying to fix the date location. But on the other hand, I had started the game-playing
with my truncated Ring Date. I was now getting the blowback. Fair enough. There was
no way I could now try the Dave Diggler trick of asking her to come down to my neck
of the woods again.

The day of the date came round. I suggested Gordon’s Wine Bar on the Embankment,
which was halfway between us, so almost central, if a little south.
She texted back very tersely, saying, “Too far. Meet me at Leicester Square.” She
also changed the time to accommodate another job interview she was having. Then,
later in the afternoon she sent another text and changed it back again:

HER: Sorry, my interview time I got wrong can we go back to original time. Haha!

I struggled to take the frame back and texted:

ME: Okay. But meet me in the Hippodrome Casino next to the Tube so we are out of the rain.

HER: Ok.
She turned up nearly 30 minutes late nevertheless. I had started to play the tables at the
casino, putting a small bet or two on the roulette wheel next to the bar, as I did not
want to appear the chode waiting there with a bunch of flowers, tapping his feet, and
looking at his watch. It was a tactic reminiscent of my pretending to be on the phone
for our first meeting in Selfridges.
In fact, I did buy something for her: a small stupid teddy bear in a box that I had
got from a tourist store around the corner for about £1 just five minutes before the
date.102 I handed it to her and she looked inside, then shrugged and gave a short laugh.
She said, “Thanks,” then immediately asked, “Where are we going?”
I wanted to keep the frame and not be ordered around, and so I told her I was just
putting some money on the roulette.
“What’s your lucky number?” I asked. We played one short hand at the roulette
wheel before leaving.
Once we had got outside she dropped the bombshell onto my carefully-laid plans:
“Oh, I can only stay an hour or so as I have to meet people at my new work, Muriel’s
Kitchen, tonight. And I haven’t eaten all day.”
Classic. She was putting in a time frame. And to be fair she was also getting her
own back for me cutting The Ring date so short. Fair enough. But it did mean of
course that all my carefully-engineered logistical plans went up in smoke. I had
intended it to be a classic Girlfriend Sequence date, with a short drink at a first venue
and then a walk down to the cavernous subterranean Gordon’s Wine Bar where I had
taken the Russian all those months ago to create a seductive vibe.
But I had to think quickly on my feet. My response was to say, “Alright, well, if
we don’t have much time in that case let’s just walk down to Covent Garden and get a
drink there, it’s not far. I know a place. You can walk back to Muriel’s Kitchen
afterwards. It’s about ten minutes.”
We walked together towards Covent Garden and she reminded me she was hungry.
I had already decided on a spot, Brasserie Blanc, which has a balcony overlooking
Covent Garden. A bit posh, but I was only planning to have a drink with her at the bar,
although it did have a restaurant and bar food if she persisted with her food demands.
 On the way I quipped at her, “You’re tall. Were you a basketball player when you
were a girl?”
She was (well, handball) and then told me I was actually quite short for a man,
adding, “So there.”
It was kind of sweet. The thing about Monika was that she had this fearsome
outside and was direct and plain-talking, but like I mentioned with Hot Girls, also had
this innocence at times, like she was still a girl. This is something I have noticed with
the one or two Hot Girls I have dated. I guess that there are so many men around them
that they never needed to bother, a bit like an innocent, actor-celebrity who has
basically never had to grow up.
We sat down together at the bar of Brasserie Blanc. It was a Wednesday and not
too busy, so we had the bar nearly all to ourselves. And thus began an evening that the
term “shit test” or “frame test” might have been invented for.
The first thing was that, not content with the time-constraint, she decided to pull
out very early on in the interaction that classic card from the pack, the “friend” card.
So we had barely sat done before she said, “By the way, this meeting—it’s just a
friendly drink, okay?”
When she said it, she gave me her trademark glare, so that even though I had dealt
with the same line from Roberta a month or so previously this had a bite behind it. I
wobbled.
I pulled myself together and quipped, “Absolutely—yeah, yeah. We’re friends,
that’s all there is to it. Completely.”103
“Okay,” she said.
I had by now got something of a hold on date planning, as you will appreciate, and
broadly followed the structure of the Girlfriend Sequence.
There had already been some chitchat on the way to the venue. We spoke about her
job interview and how she was thinking of going back to Poland and only wanted a
temporary job, so Muriel’s Kitchen was adequate, if not particularly fulfilling or
glamorous. Now that we had broken the ice, I got onto more emotive topics.
 Now it is sometimes good to talk about childhood and perhaps incorporate a sexual
spike into the conversation as well.104 I asked her, rather clumsily, about her first
childhood romance and she said something like, “Can’t remember. So what?” So I
then talked about my first girlfriend. I went off on a long story about how I chased her
around the playground and into the coatroom after she stole my milk. I could not have
been more than eight years old and this was probably my first romantic encounter, if
you could call it that. I started to elaborate and fill in all the details, telling her that I
even remembered her name, Denise Randall, and how she was blonde and had rabbit
teeth.
Abruptly she interrupted the story and said, “Are you trying to talk about
childhood issues or something? If so, why don’t you just get to the point?”
I was stopped in my tracks. It had turned into quite a long story and she glared at
me, smiling. I struggle to recover and continued, less assuredly, for a few minutes
before breaking off and asking her, “Were you always this blunt?”
“Yes.” She smiled.
And she told me how she was always pretty direct, even at primary school, and
was always the one who could not keep her mouth shut.
“Oh, and my surname?”
“Yes?”
“My teacher at school told me that in fact it means, ‘loquacious’ (talkative) in
Polish. One of its meanings.” This was perfect for Monika, as she readily admitted,
laughing, because if nothing else there was no stopping her when she was in full flow.
During that sparring session at the bar, I managed to win back some of the
initiative once more by saying to her at one point, whilst she was rabbiting on about
some silly story, “Will you just shut the fuck up!? Please!” She loved this and laughed.
During that time at the bar we also shared some confidences. She confided that her
relationship was now over and that the barman at Hix was history and whilst she had
lapsed on one occasion for the sex, which she particularly liked with him, she had now
moved out and to a different part of London, to Clapham.
 I confided to her that what I liked about her was she was so direct and straight. I
suddenly found myself being quite passionate and loquacious myself. I told her I liked
the way she had told me about her boyfriend’s alcohol problem at the first meeting and
that she had told him she was coming to see me. I told her that it was refreshing, even
her constant chatter, as so often girls were guarded and game-players. It was one of
those moments, after saying which there was a natural pause in the conversation. I
guess we might both have wondered at that point whether we had said too much,
afraid of exposing our vulnerabilities to each other too early. Being “vulnerable,” if
only to a point, was of course more Mark Manson than Tom Torero, who would have
probably said that it was okay the once, but not to make a habit of it until we had had
sex.
There was then a pause.
“You still hungry?” I eventually asked.
We moved to a table in the near-empty restaurant, one much like Hix, and ordered
seafood starters. I let her order a bottle of wine, as she knew her stuff. She told me off
when the starters arrived and they had forgotten to give me a napkin so I leaned over
and took one from a neighbouring table.
And then she stared at her scallop starter and immediately kicked off. Hesitating
briefly to ask me if I minded her complaining, but not really waiting for an answer, she
ordered the waiter over and told him that this was all salad and no scallops. She
wanted scallops, not salad. He was apologetic and asked whether she wanted
something else and it all got out of hand, and before we knew it, the headwaiter had
come over.
Now, he was a professional and laid it on thick, full of apologies and bending over
backwards to accommodate her in whatever way he could. Naturally, you would have
expected this to do the trick, but she just used him as another excuse to escalate the
volume of her complaint even further. She was suddenly like a spoiled child, totally
engaging in Princess Behaviour, and the headwaiter was taken aback. She had a point,
of course, in that it was classic padding out of a far more expensive item on a menu,
only for it to be full of lettuce leaves—a bit of a cheap trick, in truth. She did not want
an alternative and waved him away, eventually. I just sat there, somewhat surprised
that a girl would make such a performance on a second date. But again, there were two
points to note here:

1. Hot Girls are always being hit on, and they often make no effort at
concealment of their true natures, as nearly all the guys they have met are more
interested in their pussy than their true natures (Men are happy to make
allowances for their “true natures” in such circumstances). So such girls never
really learned to make an effort. Do not be jealous—this can be a major
problem for them as they grow older.

2. She was blowing up and testing me and testing my “frame” to see how I
would react, intuitively and unconsciously. Would I get embarrassed, lose my
cool and act like a timid mouse?

After the headwaiter had left she nonchalantly refilled both our glasses and laughed
and rubbished the restaurant as being all show and no substance, in spite of its
reputation, and then she called the headwaiter a “Cunt.” She said it loud and clear.
Then she smiled, mischievously.

I could not believe it.

We were in a posh restaurant, and whilst it was mostly empty there were other diners
who probably heard.
“I’m sorry?” I finally said.
I got up from my seat and I walked purposefully round to her side of the table and
stared down at her. She suddenly looked like a naughty schoolgirl.
“Give me your hand.”
Amazingly, she did.
I slapped it—hard. Then sat back down.
She loved it.
 After that the date was on a very good footing indeed. When I brought up the fact
that she only had “an hour or so” and that we should really finish up as she needed to
meet her new work colleagues at Muriel’s Kitchen, she waved the comment away and
poured us both another glass. She was now completely relaxed and enjoying herself,
and had completely forgotten about her earlier time constraint.
We finally left the restaurant after a very good time together and we walked idly
back through Covent Garden. It was a warm night and there were not too many people
about. I put out my arm for her to take and she took it. That ten-minute walk back to
Leicester Square was magical. I was in heaven. Yet also relaxed. So was she.
Somehow I had managed to avoid being a chode and had teased her, played the game,
and had sexualised the conversation from time to time.
Even right at the end it went well, and I accidentally played the right move. We
stopped in Leicester Square outside Muriel’s Kitchen, and she was then the one who
suggested a further date.
“Maybe next week?”
“Sure,” I said.
I went to kiss her on her cheek, but somehow she moved and the position as our
faces touched making her think I was trying to kiss her on the lips. She pulled away
with a snort, like a thoroughbred horse pulling at the reins, and turned on her heels and
marched off. And that was the end of the date.
I thought about shouting after her, “It was a kiss on the cheek! You
misunderstood!” But that would have been daft. In fact, it was a good thing that she
had got the idea that I had at least tried to kiss her. One of the many strange and
paradoxical things about all of this is that the girl needs to know you want to have sex
with her. She needs you to have shown your intent, and it is not a major failure if she
does not let you kiss her. The main thing is that you try and signal your intent.105
Later on I got a text from Tom and he asked how I had got on:

HIM: How was it?

This was my reply:

 ME: I am lost for words. Only an image will do

I then texted him some detail back and forth and he ended:

HIM: Sounds like one mega dose of Princess Behaviour, but if you stay non - reactive and hold
the frame, it's really on. If you get her back to your place late one night it's a done deal.
:)

It had been a fascinating experience. And unlike the eponymous character in The Old
Man and The Sea, it looked as if this was a big fish that I was actually going to land. I
could hardly contain my excitement.
100 I had accidentally used a “push” on her and not realised. “Push-pull” is how pick-up artists describe the process
of carefully calibrating your interactions with a girl so that she becomes interested in you. You need to show your
sexual intent and flirt with a girl, but you also at times need to “roll off”, showing total disinterest, which then
piques her interest of course. The moment in the street when I broke off the date early was a perfect “push”, but I
did it inadvertently, not really appreciating what I was doing. In fact, like any Average Joe, I assumed that I had
burned it.
101 It was an interesting message. Was I being too vulnerable too early? Declaring I was nervous because she was
long-term partner material? Mark Manson in his book, Models, might have said, “No,” but Tom Torero would
probably have said, “Only get vulnerable and intimate after sex.” The big danger with a guy playing the
vulnerability ticket is that he gets confused about when to apply it, and starts telling a girl from Day One about his
childhood problems. Most guys who need to improve in this area don’t need to be told to “be vulnerable.” They
need to be told to, “Front up. Be bold.”
102 This was a trick that Tom Torero had mentioned in a video in the Girlfriend Sequence: buying each other gifts
that cannot cost more than £1. He had meant it more along the lines of getting the girl to work on a project in
advance of a second or third date, so that you both bought something to the date. But I was at least picking up on a
concept called “Parody Chode,” where you drew a laugh from the girl by imitating how a conventional guy would
behave—flowers, chocolates, winning a huge teddy bear for her at the fair, that sort of thing.
103 Following the trademark rule that when a girl throws a frame test, you either agree and amplify or ignore.
104 For example, you can ask a girl what she wanted to be when she was young. Monika had part-completed a
degree as a mechanical engineer and her interest in this area was surprising and intriguing. At least to a guy like me
who thought that Hot Girls just do Hot Girl training practice and Hot Girl drills and nothing else when not in your
company. You can also ask them what their passion is—or was from a young age. If you think it about it, it is a
good question as people often have their dreams and passions in youth and like to be reminded of them because
they are happy times. This kind of question often takes them away from the dreary world of daily work they now
inhabit! They of course may ask you about yours and you can even play a truth game—focusing things from
childhood you did that were naughty, for example. Since the first edition of this book, I have written a second book
called, “52 First Dates” which covers dating skills more comprehensively.
105 As with so much “game,” this is so counter-intuitive. A guy wants to play safe, and in a way that is rational—
wait until later and a chance will come, surely? Softly, softly… But the truth is that it is a law of diminishing
returns and the chances will get fewer and further between, until he is in the dreaded Friend Zone! But the thing is,
by trying he cannot lose. Even a clumsy grope is better than nothing. And yet a man’s ego and fear of failure and
rejection kick in.

OceanofPDF.com
 15

Elusive Hotties

Meanwhile I had a surprise call from no less than Jessie. She phoned me out
of the blue. It had been over three months since she had left that note and
disappeared to Dubai. “Hey, hey! How are you?!”
“Jessie?”
“Hahaha… sorry I have been out of the picture a while…”
“You’re in Dubai, right? What happened?”
“Actually I’m in Monaco. Yeah, I’m doing my law degree online now
with the BPP and I’ve been real busy.”
“Cool. Well, it’s great to hear from you,” I said, realising that I really
was genuinely pleased to hear from her.
“I miss you. Our time together was amazing and I learned so much from
you.”
“Well, I’ve missed you too. It was great having you around and it’s not
the same without you Jessie Rouget, you daft bitch,” I said. I felt
affectionate and emotional and wondered whether I should curb my
enthusiasm a little. But something about her had always been so infectious.
“Listen, we’ll have to meet up. There’s soooo much I need to tell you.
Good god, it’s been ages. Hahahaha,” she fizzed, her bubbly effervescent
feminine self. “I may be coming to London later this year for exams…”
 “Well look,” I said, “I’m busy right now at work, but let’s hook up on
Skype this weekend.”
“That would be cool. Message me then, honey! Haha!”
I was excited. Jessie was back online. And obviously had felt she had to
meet me. Maybe the dreamy relationship in which I had sex with this
gorgeous young 26-year-old and then we became an item was really going
to happen. I started to fantasise once more about how I was after all the
mature, intelligent man and the rock that she needed. A man who was
steady in his career—but artistic too! I vainly gazed at my reflection in the
window for a moment, but it was difficult to make out.
Mm… I’m the perfect match for her and will help her settle down and
put her party girl years behind her, I said to myself.

We Skyped that weekend. She was in her pyjamas and still in bed, and she
told me about some guy who had pissed her off and was having a go at men
in general.
“Men are such assholes. Go out to work, tell you they’re coming home
with flowers and a bottle of wine for a quiet romantic meal—or they’re just,
like, married and they tell you all sweet stuff on the phone from work all
day and then they come in at 9pm, telling you they’ve been for a workout at
the gym when in fact they’ve just fucked the secretary, taken a shower, and
popped into a petrol station for flowers and a bottle of some rubbish.
Hahaha!” She laughed.
We talked about her career and her studies and what she was doing in
Monaco and she explained that she had been approached by a television
producer who wanted her in a lifestyle programme. It obviously involved a
lot of good-looking women, a bit of a spin on “Keeping Up With The
Kardashians,” and she was the smart hot lawyer girl, I surmised. She told
me about how well the meeting with the producer had gone, and how they
had got on so well.
The call finished with her saying that we should not leave it so long
next time and stay in regular contact on Skype. She led me to believe that
we would meet when she came to London for exams.

I was growing in confidence. Two proper Hot Girls were in my life, and like
an air traffic controller, I decided to bring these two planes into the runway
and let other options fall off the radar. But whilst I had done well with one
or two “nice” girls, getting the really hot ones out on a date and then taking
it to the bedroom was proving surprisingly difficult. It was like catching a
fish, landing it into your boat and then it wriggles out of your hands and
leaps back in the water. Except these fish were no ordinary fish. They were
super-sized marlin and took a huge amount of reeling in. And once in the
cockpit they would probably have wrought total havoc.
There now followed a series of skirmishes with Monika, who was now
keeping her distance, lost somewhere deep down in the dark blue waters
and refused to rise to the bait, in spite of my attempts to lure her into a third
date:

Attempt 1 (+1 Day after Covent Garden Date)

I text her:

ME: it was a great night in Covent Garden, and when is she free?

HER: was fun. Yes.

Attempt 2 (+2 Day)

I take the bold step of phoning her. I do it in The Baltic, an atmospheric bar
where there is chatter and background music so she thinks that I am
enjoying myself whilst out with friends. I leave an upbeat message:

ME: Hey you, Alex here. Trust you're keeping out of mischief. Early night? Sweet
Polish dreams.

No reply. So I text:

ME: Monika?

She replies! She texts:

HER: Sorry, been busy. Will call you later! I promiss.

Two days pass.

Attempt 3 (+ 4 Days)

I text her:

ME: Dead or Alive?!

HER: Haha! No, just been busy.

That was it.

 But then, later that night, as I sat in my flat depressed, idly watching
television, my phone burst into life! “Monika” flashed up on the screen.
I answered, “Hey!”
“Hi. Sorry I did not get back to you, I’ve been busy with my friend,
she’s had a couple of days off and we’ve been shopping and stuff.”
“Paulina, I guess, that fellow shopaholic!”
“Ah, yes, that’s right. You remember.” I was pleased with myself for
having scored a brownie point for remembering the name of her best friend.
“Well, listen,” I said, cutting to the chase and not allowing the call
stretch on and on. “Let’s hook up next week, I’ve got a spot in mind. I’m
free Tuesday or Wednesday, when are you free?”
“I can do Monday. It’s my day off.”
“Okay, well, I think that’s okay, but I’ll just need to check, alright?”
“Okay.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
I texted her on Friday.

ME: Okay, Monday fine, there's a funky bar on near Tottenham Court Road. Let's
meet around 7pm.

HER: Ok.

That was it. Not sure whether she was on or not. No texting for four days.
Was it on?
I texted her Monday morning:

ME: Hey you, see you today at Jewel 7pm. Dress smart so we match ;)

HER: I will not come out today. I do nt feel well. Perhaps other time. Bye.
I was really annoyed. And really angry. And really hurt. I was so looking
forward to seeing her. I pondered that morning, and finally texted a
daygame mate. He told me that this was really bad behaviour and I should
not put up with this:

ME: But maybe she is unwell, surely?

HIM: Come on, Alex. It's an excuse.

This was all infuriating. I fumed for the rest of the morning and then I went
out at lunch and went to a local restaurant called The Refinery (where there
was a restaurant manager I liked). Then I fumed some more.
Finally, I whisked out my phone and dialled. I left the following
voicemail message:
“Listen, I don’t know what you’re playing at and I will say that I am
attracted to you and sure I want to fuck you, fuck you all the way to the
moon, but that does not mean you can just muck about, and flaking on the
morning of a date is bad behaviour, Monika. I’m not impressed.”
I felt better for having left the message and returned to work, although
of course this did not alleviate my disappointment and hurt for long.
I knew what she was like, by now, what any Hot Girl is like. She had a
pretty mercenary streak. I remembered her telling me, laughing, how over
New Year’s Eve she and Paulina had had the whole night paid for,
champagne and Mayfair Club included, by some rich Provider guy.
Stringing guys along was just standard behaviour, and of course having
everything paid for was the norm rather than the exception. I was irritated at
myself for having allowed myself to be put into the same box, and imagined
that this was what had happened. Cancelling a date in this peremptory
fashion was something she was clearly used to. She had learned that guys
always come back for more, so it was not as if she needed to do any work
or obey any code of etiquette.

Attempt 4

I “rolled off,” as they say. The worst thing you can do is follow up the next
day or two. So I tried to let it go and I did let it go. A few more weeks
passed.
And then somehow another opportunity presented itself.106
I cannot quite recall how or why—perhaps it was something that
happened on Facebook—but we lined up another date. And once more, like
I had been for the earlier cancelled date, I was full of trepidation as to
whether or not she was going to agree to the date. The morning of I texted
her the details:

ME: See you at Gordon's Wine Bar, let's say 6.30pm. It's just on the Bridge
between Waterloo and Tottenham Court Road.

I was attempting to confirm a place that was equal distance between where
she now worked, just off Leicester Square and where I lived. The memory
of the truncated Ring Date and her refusal to meet anywhere near my flat
now was still strong.
I waited, apprehensive, for her reply, then I decided to phone.
 “Hey. Let’s meet Gordon’s, it’s a cool—”
“No, no, no, no. Look, listen, I’ll meet you in Clapham, I’m not going to
central London and your flat. I’ll meet you at the station at 6.30pm.”
“Er… okay,” I said.
The clock ticked by to lunchtime. I felt uneasy. She had properly taken
the frame and I was now wondering where all that daygame training had
gone. Still, the main thing was, as Tom Torero once said to me, “Lose the
battle in order to win the war.” Sometimes you just have to give them the
frame so that you can then meet and then you can work your magic.
But then I got a message at four that afternoon:

HER: I have changed my mind. I will not meet. There is no point.

I was flabbergasted. What did she mean? And how outrageous. I texted
back:

ME: Well, Monika, that is your decision and I respect it if that is the case but
I think it is bad manners and that you should honour your word once you agree to
do something.

HER: Okay, but not tnight, I am busy, maybe other time.

ME: If not tonight, then not at all.

HER: Not at all then. Bye.

“Bye,” I wrote, then, “Good luck,” with finality. As if that was a firm and
strong closer, similar to Dr. Watson giving a ruffian a good crack on the
knuckles with his walking cane.
But this hit me hard. I had put a lot of work into this girl and I had been
real close, according to Tom Torero, to finishing the deal. What had gone
wrong? How had this happened, and how had I let this big fish slip through
the net, when I had played it so well? I resigned myself to defeat… for now,
at least. Richard Stoker had said that you can retrieve a girl like this, but
you have to roll off for months…

Attempt 5

Time passed. I resumed reading Mark Manson’s book, Models—the chapter

on vulnerability. He was big on this, that a guy should not be afraid to show
himself and his inner side and his feelings.
It was as I was sitting in a Costa Coffee around the corner from me on a
Sunday morning that I felt inspired, after reading this chapter, with my heart
melting at the pain of it all, to ping Monika once more:

ME: Hey you, what's up?

HER: Hey. Im good. How r u?

ME: Missing you, to be fair.

HER: Missing me??

ME: Yes, missing you, you crazy BIATCH!

HER: Hahahaha!

In PUA circles I was now properly hooked: having tried to hook the fish, it
now felt as if I were on the line. It was like that Australian girl all those
years ago had said. It’s women who are the fishermen. They reel men in and
take a look and then throw them back in the water. I had been properly
reeled in and felt that at any time she might throw me back into the water.

Attempt 6

And then I tried something even sneakier. A month or two passed and she
was pretty much completely off my radar at that point. But then I was out at
the cinema with Roberta in Leicester Square and we had an hour to kill
before the film. I suggested an Italian place, where Monika worked,
thinking that this would be a cool way to meet her with another attractive
girl on my arm (I had told Roberta about Monika and by that point we were
just friends).
And to my delight Monika was there, and she served us. But I felt as if
she saw right through my ploy. She was blunt as ever, and then afterwards
Roberta waited outside whilst I went up to Monika at the cash register to
grab a few words with her.
For some reason I was apologetic and I said, “Hey, look, sorry I have
not been in touch recently—”
She cut me off, “Whatever, I’ve had a long day and I’m tired.” And then
she went back to what she was doing.
I stumbled out of the restaurant, feeling foolish and like a school boy
who has just been told off by the matron.

It looked as if I was really out in the cold with Monika, and so I checked in
on Jessie. I messaged her on WhatsApp, our normal mode of
communication now that she was living in Monaco.
 ME: Hey you, whatsupp Princess?

HER: Hey! How are you!!! I'm getting married!

I could not believe it. What about us? Surely she understood that we were to
be married one day? I felt like I was on a boat and we had suddenly hit a
big wave and I lost my footing. I wandered around my flat trying to make
sense of this news. It seemed impossible to me; we had got on so well on
Skype the previous month. She had been nattering away in her pyjamas and
I had even thrown in some flirtation about her pyjamas being big enough
for both of us. Now what was going on?
I managed not to show my disappointment and texted:

ME: Oh my god. Seriously? When?

HER: Not been fixed yet.

My mind raced. Was it the producer from the television series? Had he
bought her a ring in a romantic moment? I felt sure that it was. It had not
been long since we Skyped and she had told me nothing about a
relationship even.
And then, two weeks later, I got a text out of the blue from her:

HER: The marriage is off. Ugh. Turned out to be just some schmuck.
I was relieved that I still had a shot with Jessie, but I had been momentarily
knocked off balance. This whole exchange had been an unpleasant shock,
coming as it did after the countless failed date attempts with Monika. I was
pretty bruised and battered after it all, and the fact was that I was still
struggling to convert with Jessie, and although the logistics were not right,
it was still annoying that it was taking so long to actually get an opportunity
to escalate with her.
I had by now got into the notorious Nick Krauser’s work, in particular
his weighty tome Daygame Mastery, and was an eager student, trying to
figure out text and Facebook game and how to generate attraction at long
distance where the opportunities for escalation in person were not there.
“There is all the time in the world,” his book said. So I took solace in this.
And friends told me that, whilst she was clearly a princess (and should be
avoided in truth), since I was determined then the strategy should be to get
her in person and escalate hard and fast.
This now became the challenge. But the problem was, it would be
suicide for me to get on a plane to Monaco just to see her.107 So the
question was, when would she visit London? It all seemed so illusive.
Trying to pin Jessie down was like trying to grab an eel, or bottle lightning.
I felt as if it was drifting away from me and I could not do anything about
it.
But then I got another break. A call came through from Tom Torero
once more. A Facebook message:

HIM: Hello Mister Forrest. Strapping on the skis and chasing the snow -bunnies
again this year? :) I hear Poland is good. ;)
106 Interestingly, she had been quite open early on. I remember ringing her in the very early days
when I was in Covent Garden. I suggested a date one or two days later, but she wanted to meet me
that night, after work. Only over time did I move out of any “lover” frame and into “provider / long-
term-boyfriend territory” (or towards that terrifying place, Friend-Zone Land). Yet more evidence of
the fact that the longer it goes on the harder it is to escalate sexually.
107 Many men have tried and failed catastrophically. You turn up in a foreign town, spend a lot of
money on flights and accommodation, and all for one girl. And then she is spooked by the fact that
you are there and suddenly changes her tune and her loving overtures expressed over Facebook a
thousand miles away turn to dust. She does not return your messages, as you idly wander around a
foreign city, kicking tires and feeling like an idiot, or worse, she just messages, “Sorry, I’m busy this
week. I can’t see you after all. Sorry. Hope you enjoy Barcelona/Madrid/Paris/Berlin/Prague. It’s a
great city!”

OceanofPDF.com
 16

Zakopane Hell

We arranged to go to Zakopane, the St. Moritz of Poland. Well, perhaps

more like Blackpool, actually. Still, we were both happy enough as we were
still in the mountains, it was snowing and the prices were very good indeed.
In fact, I had travelled down from Warsaw by train as I was at that time
considering an experiment of moving and working remotely from Poland,
as I was experiencing financial difficulties in my business at that time, and
living and working in an Eastern European country was one solution.
I decided that this trip was the pick-me-up I needed. I had run into real
difficulties and now that it was to be just me and Tom Torero I could really
discuss this stuff with him and learn at the feet of the master. Zakopane was
a small town and there were bound to be some hot Eastern European girls
about—snow bunnies on holiday. I was about to blast off—and burn off my
chode roots for good.
Things got off to a good start. We arrived at Zakopane whilst it was
snowing and looking its best, and we quickly found a superbly cheap hotel
and then a terrific little restaurant that had all the Slavic charms you could
wish for. It was called “Karcma Po Zboju.” It was filled with Slavic bric-a-
brac—I could not stop taking photographs of it all, and even video-recorded
the traditional Slavic folk music band who played all night.
 We caroused, living the single, bachelor life. Although in fact Tom had
at that point acquired a girlfriend and he was momentarily experimenting
with returning to normal society and leading a normal life and doing a
normal job—if only for one day, it turned out. I had met the girl and she
was fantastic: a beautiful young Ukrainian in her twenties who was also
very family-orientated and looking to settle down.
But Tom had begun to have doubts. The very fact that she was perfect
and yet he did not want to marry her made him realise that marriage was
simply not for him. If not with her, then really it could not be with anybody,
he reasoned.

After the first day’s skiing and finding our feet on the slopes, we returned to
the hotel about 4pm and Tom suggested we hit the streets of Zakopane and
do some daygaming. He wanted me to do some filming for his YouTube
channel, still his primary source of business, and so we ventured out into
these beautiful, rustic, snow-laden streets.
It was snowing, making the filming tricky, and so after a fluffed take or
two we gave up on filming and tried out some daygame in the shops. Tom
cruised right into a Zara clothes store and starting chatting quite naturally
and flirtatiously with girl shoppers, whilst I did my best and opened up a
conversation or two, but without much success.
I wandered about the shop for a while and became more and more
disoriented. Tom was treating me like a fellow player, as if I knew what I
was doing, and I felt I had to live up to the standard, even though I started
to feel like fish out of water and became uncomfortably aware of the
crowds around me (the spotlight effect again). Perhaps it was the ski resort
location, which now reminded me of numerous ski trips from the past in
which I had felt both intimidated by the good skiers as well as the beautiful,
posh girls who had frequented the expensive hotels where my father used to
take us (and whom I had lusted after but never got anywhere with). I
suddenly felt little or no enthusiasm for any of this daytime seduction stuff
and felt that it was all wrong.
More significantly, I seemed to lose confidence quite quickly. As I
stalked about in my cumbersome ski-jacket and boots and hit on poor,
random Polish tourists, old fears and doubts crept in and I started to think
things like, I am a 47-year-old guy. I am not the sort of guy who goes
flitting about amongst the female population of holidaymakers at a ski
resort, trying to chat my way into bed with them. This is nuts. At this time of
life, I should be putting on my children’s ski boots and buying a family ski
pass.
Worse, I was in the company of someone who appeared completely
natural at this sort of thing. He was totally at home on the streets, and that
made me depressed. Comparing yourself with others is a dangerous and
insidious business. My expectations that a top daygame coach was going to
take me to the next level rapidly evaporated. The beautiful Slavic girls
whom I thought were just waiting for an English gentleman to swoon in
front of now seemed like cragged, forbidding and fearsome mountain
peaks; to attempt an approach could cause serious damage to my ego.
This reminded me of those natural ski instructors, who were great at
skiing but rubbish at teaching? Well, this was how Tom looked to me as I
wandered about the streets. I just felt inadequate.
I tried to pull myself together.
This is stupid! I am a grown man, for god’s sake!
 So I shook petrol over the flames on my angst by beating myself up for
being angry in the first place. I started to soliloquise.
How is it I cannot resist these negative feelings!! Haven’t I made any
progress at all? It feels like I have gone backwards.
I did not stop and consider that in fact one year was a ludicrously short
amount of time in which to change one’s behaviour in any substantial way.
I decided that the remedy was just to approach harder and harder.
But now the girls started to ignore me or look alarmed. I sought refuge
in an empty optician’s, of all places, where I had earlier spied an attractive,
if bored, young girl. I started up a conversation but a manager appeared. In
fact, neither of them understood a word I was saying. But they were Polite
Polish and smiled and chirped. It took me 15 minutes to explain that I had
come into their shop just to tell one of them how attractive she was and that
I did not want to buy a pair of glasses, which then confused them.
Eventually they got it, but I was talking too fast and their English was not
great, and suddenly there was a terrible pause and the moment regressed
into a painfully uncomfortable hiatus.
Retreat! I backed out of the shop.
Back outside in the snowy streets I felt myself truly back at square one,
stumbling about and muttering to girls without any real expectation or
confidence that they would have any idea what I was talking about, let
alone that I was flirting with them sexually. I was flapping about and
babbling at them and they all hurried off.
Oh my god, I suddenly thought as I remembered the fear that had
gripped me from Day One, just before the bootcamp, when my female
friend had told me that she had never felt any sexuality around me.
 I am simply not sexual, I concluded. This is not something that you can
change or cure. This is part of your nature and character. It is who I am. I
am that lovable, cheerful chappie who played the fool at Haileybury
College—and I remembered myself stood on the back of a chair swotting at
a wasp in order to impress pink, talcum-powdered Rebecca. That was my
sexual strategy. To be a clown!
I now started to look around and notice one or two couples, ski tourists
out to enjoy a bit of mountain romance. They probably all had little log
cabins halfway up the mountain, with bearskins on the floor and roaring
fires in front of which they made love passionate, fully expressing their
sexual sides. And here was I, trudging about the streets and walking up to
strangers like a street chugger or beggar.

And then everything got a whole lot worse.

After a while of standing in the snow feeling rather annoyed with myself
and the world, Tom appeared at my shoulder. He was full of smiles and
enjoying himself and wondering how I had got on. He suggested that we go
back, since it was now snowing quite hard. As we walked down the road
towards our hotel we both saw a very good-looking voluptuous (obvious
even through her bright blue ski-suit) blonde girl walk past on her own.
Dynamite. She was walking casually and it was a perfect chance for an
approach. Tom encouraged me to go for it, egging me on, but I was
resolute. I was stoutly determined not to risk any more rejection. At a real
low ebb, having decided that this daygame stuff was childish, sordid
nonsense.
 Tom looked at me, alarmed, as she waddled off down the road in her ski
kit, fearful of a terrible lost opportunity, like a game hunter who sees a fat
pheasant flop into view out of the undergrowth and watches as his buddy
does nothing, not even raising his gun.
“You don’t mind if I do?” he asked, animated.
“Sure—”
But he was already gone, jogging down the snowy road. I watched him
stop her and open up a conversation, and she hooked. I stood there, arms
crossed, grim and grouchy, in the cold. The conversation lasted some time
and it was still snowing. I got colder and colder. Good. It suited my mood.
He was tall and she was on the petite side and so he towered over her,
looking dominant in his woolly hat, furry jacket, and black, slim-fit jeans.
She was like a little turquoise bunny-rabbit and he was like a lean wolf. I
saw phones being produced…
Eventually he returned. He was full of bounce and declared that she was
a Ukrainian, had a couple of days left in Zakopane at the tail end of her ski
trip, was bored and was on her own!
“Would you believe she was with a ski party and they all left early as
she was scheduled on a different flight! She’s been alone and at a total loose
end. It was the easiest number I’ve ever got.”
“Very good.”
“Yeah! Sometimes, God just provides.”
Right, I thought. Doesn’t he just.
On the way back to the hotel he waxed lyrical about how sometimes
you just hit the jackpot. She was a really fit girl who had nothing to do with
herself on the last two days of a ski trip.
 How depressing! As if God had wanted to rub my nose in it, here he
was, at my lowest ebb, throwing a bone to me, and I had failed to bound
over and grab it in my jaws.
For a short while afterwards on the way back to the hotel and over
vodka at the bar, I clutched at reassuring, comforting thoughts. I tried to
wallow some more in that sense of social superiority, secretly dwelling on
how disgraceful and sordid this whole business was. Running about trying
to get fucked. It was uncivilised. Uncouth. Un-gentlemanly.
This stream of thought quickly ran dry. I then tried to find fault in Tom
for not helping me out of my hole. But of course he had no idea I was in it
because I had been as silent as a stone.
The bastard stole my girl! I complained, inwardly.
As I drifted off into sleep and my mind turned on the events of nearly
20 years ago, when I had tossed and turned in the Australian outback in
Wagga Wagga, I reassured myself that things always looked better in the
morning.
They did not. The next day was just as bad.

The next morning I hoped that there would be a chance to put the whole
painful episode behind me as we had both agreed to try skiing on Kasprowy
Wierch. This was a spectacular mountain peak, perhaps the best skiing in
the whole of Poland, and we would ski it together. Indeed, it was looking
like it would also be a glorious, sunny day. Magnificent.
But instead it turned out that the girl and Tom had been texting each
other and it was very much on. I now had to show support and
encouragement and be a proper buddy and a solid wing. He had been a
proper mate and told her that he was skiing with a buddy on Kasprowy
Wierch and so she would have to come up and join us there. We arrived at
the station at the foot of the mountain, which apparently was huge and a
major feat of mechanical engineering. I tried to remain upbeat and positive
as we stood in the long queue of skiers for the famous cable car, the only
way up the mountain.
It took ages to move forward and we ended up standing in the queue
behind some cool young stud in a fancy ski jacket with a crazy woolly hat
as he necked a really cute girl in front of him. She playfully pushed him
away. But like a real man (though barely out of his teens), he ignored her
resistance and instead she broke into laughter as he slapped massive wet
kisses on her from behind, grabbing and squeezing her, careless of how she
would react. She slapped him and he pushed her over in the snow. He really
did not care. She laughed and seemed to love it. He fell on top of her and
squashed her some more. She got angry, but she then seemed to love that he
ignored her protests.
It was crazy. There was such dissonance in me, to this. All my life I had
been on eggshells around girls. Being nice to them. Being respectful. Where
had it got me? A sour sense of superiority for not being a chauvinist pig?
Admiration from my sisters and my sisters’ friends? Admiration from
society? Could I have so badly got the wrong end of the handle for so much
of my adult life? What had happened?
The idea that it was terminal reared its ugly head yet again, except now
it was wistful and philosophical. It was fate. Who had been responsible?
Who had dealt me this card in life? God? He was a bastard, or at the very
best a comedian. It reminded me of a game my family used to play after
dinner, “Masterpiece,” in which you had the choice of character at an
auction of fine art, the objective being to hold all the priceless works of art
by the end of the game and leaving the losers with the forgeries. Each
character in the game was carefully drawn, with a photo on one side and a
resume on another. Why had I not been dealt the card of the mysterious
Russian Count who had a background fighting the resistance during the
war, the womaniser who now combined a career as an art expert with that of
a pilot? I could not believe that fate had dealt me such a crap hand. It really
was so unfair.
I stood and watched as the queue inched forward, the youth’s cheeky
conduct a bright mirror in which my own failings were reflected.
Meanwhile, Tom had been busy in a text exchange with the Ukrainian.
Throughout the magnificent journey up the mountain in that famous cable
car he was texting her. He was doubtless “checking her buying
temperature,” mixing “pull” and “push,” and combining “comfort” with
“spiking” and “teasing.”
But she would not come up the mountain. She was a princess and
wanted to be waited on hand and foot. She was having a mini-drama all on
her own. She had woken up late and missed the bus. She could not find the
cable car on a map, had gone to the wrong piste and was now lost and
needed rescuing. And so it was that after barely a single run down the
slopes Tom announced that he was sorry, but he would have to go back
down and help her make her way up. She was seated in some freezing cold
coffee shack, somewhere on the wrong side of the mountain, pouting. And
that was the last I saw of him during the remaining daylight hours.
It is funny how human beings can go about their business and no one is
the wiser as to the internal architecture of their soul. Funnier that we can so
convincingly hide this from the world, from everyone and from ourselves. I
was by this point feasting on the worst kind of toxic, emotional stew. Sullen
and dead inside, I nevertheless pretended to enjoy myself and enjoy the
beautiful mountains with the beautiful slopes and the beautiful skiing. I
stopped off and had a drink at a traditional Slavic beer hut. I skied
magnificently and gracefully through pine trees, enjoying the sunshine on
my face. I took artistic photos of everything I saw. I chatted to the beer man
at the beer hut. I was even about to open an attractive skier who had
decided to stop and wait outside the bar and seemed to be on her own—but
then I realised I had lost my skills and it would only result in third-degree
emotional burns.
Of course, whilst I was skiing down through those beautiful pines I was
cursing Tom for deserting me. I decided to ski deliberately badly to make an
angry point to myself. I got to the bottom of the slope. Miserable. I grabbed
a taxi and returned to the hotel, hoping that the driver would ruin me with a
dodgy and excessive fare, so that my misery could be complete.
Back at the hotel, I fully expected to see Tom about, but he was
nowhere. Don’t say he had managed to escalate with her on the same day! I
vowed never to go on a skiing holiday with a PUA again.
I changed, had a shower and had a nap. I meditated. I read some worthy
spiritual book on self-improvement. I heard nothing from him. Not a single
text. If he did text me, at least, I pretended he had not. Eventually I
wandered down to the restaurant and started drinking. I was there for much
of the evening when finally, at about 9pm, Tom showed up, exhausted but
still perky and full of a boyish wonder at what he had just done, eager to tell
someone the story.
As if the approach the day before had not been insult enough, as if the
entire day’s skiing (ruined) had not been bad enough, I now had to listen to
the story of how, whilst I had conquered the mountain, this paled into
insignificance with his particular conquest. In fact, plenty of tourists
conquered the mountain daily, but not many had managed to bang a hot
Ukrainian princess in about 24 hours from meeting her in the street.
It appeared that luck had followed him at every stage, ever since that
first, serendipitous approach. How could divine serendipity be laid at the
service of such sordidness? He had found her somewhat by chance at the
first piste we had skied. He explained that this was classic behaviour as
girls are chaotic random things who put every conceivable obstacle in your
path, making it virtually impossible for them to enjoy what they really
want.
So he gave her a lesson of sorts and she kept on falling over, but she
was such a princess that she blamed her skis and her boots and the slope,
rather than her own lack of ability, “The ski. The ski,” she pouted, pointing
at them.
“Er, yeah. Sure,” he said, helping her to her feet and using it as a chance
to escalate.
“She was hot, but a useless skier,” he said. Perhaps he sensed my
disappointment, and was trying to make me feel better.
He had then managed to talk her back to town where he had taken her to
the fantastic little restaurant of our first night. He had then “bounced” her to
the hotel. He criticised his own performance for taking this detour and not
bouncing her straight to her apartment, blaming it on a tendency he had not
yet eliminated of being too nice and personable. He was now running
through the technical aspects of his performance.
“Diggler would just take her to a pub on the corner, one drink and then,
‘Right, love. Come with me,’ and would have walked her straight out and in
through his front door.”
 “Ha. Yep. Right.”
He actually brooded over his detour for a very brief moment. This level
of “comfort” was unnecessary, he explained. I just could not believe it. He
was about to have sex with a girl barely 24 hours after meeting her and was
critiquing himself for being “too nice”?!
Was I meant to sympathise with him? There, there. Don’t be so hard on
yourself. You’ll fuck the next one quicker.
“I should have grabbed her by the horns, Mr. Forrest!” He then perked
up and flagged down a waitress.
His words were like salt ground into my wounds.
In the background the folk music broke out again; this time it was like
fingernails being scratched down a blackboard as the soloist struck up with
her stupid, Slavic caterwauling. If she even so much as glanced at me for a
tip I would get up and punch her face in.
After a couple of drinks at the apartment he had walked her back to her
apartment and they sat on the sofa and fooled around for a bit. Her
apartment was a total mess—just as you would expect from a princess, one
assumes, who would not have known how to clean and tidy. Then he
escalated. He popped into the toilet to give himself a brief pep talk and then
he returned and they had sex. She then promptly rolled over and kicked him
out, telling him that she had to get up early the next morning for her flight.
Tom said “fine” cheerily, and headed off.
And here he was, with a cheeky smile like a kid who has just returned
from scrumping apples. My face by contrast probably looked like a
smacked arse.
He elaborated on the whole topic of seduction:
 “The sex was alright, but actually I don’t really have that big a libido. I
like the game, you know, like catching a fish.” He warmed to this analogy,
seeing many parallels. “In fact it’s just like fishing: keeping just the right
amount of tension on the line, but making sure it does not snap. Spike here,
bit of physical escalation there. Lead and keep the tension on the line and
reel in, of course—but then pay out some line and pile in with some
comfort when you see her hesitate.”
I felt yet more righteous indignation. He was talking about a fellow
human being! A woman whom he had treated like a sexual object.108 He
was now rating his performance. It was just a game, whereas for men of
high value and accomplishments such as myself a woman was a fine thing
to be highly prized and respected. How could he tarnish and debase such
fine, female currency with such a crude analogy as catching fish?
This was too much. Here I was, a bleeding heart, imagining myself
condemned to a life of misery as a singleton, hearing a pick-up artist’s post-
match debrief of doing a cute girl that I would have sold my soul for. He
might as well have taken the knife from the tough Polish steak that I was
dolefully eating and stabbed me in the chest, then shaken the salt cellar over
the wound.
All I could do was look interested and let out a “Hrmph!” I then acted
like any good mate should and did my best to congratulate him on his
performance and listened carefully to his critique.
Later that night, I wandered about the room unable to sleep, bumping
into furniture because the lights would not work properly. It was too hot,
but I could not seem to find the radiator to turn it off.
My mind did inner gyrations, trying to make sense of it all and
understand why it was I had led such a celibate 20 years and why my life
had been so unfortunate. I had “fucked up,” it seemed to me, or indeed I
was the “fuck up” in this scenario.
The trouble I had was that Tom was no sketchy pick-up artist with inner
demons and wild with insecurities like the mass media or Neil Strauss’s The
Game had led me to believe. This was a personable guy who actually
seemed to be principled. He took an interest and cared for people around
him. He wanted to help guys climb out of the hole they had dug themselves
into. He did not force himself on girls; he just played the part they wanted
him to play. It almost seemed as if they were the ones with the greater
libido. As if he was just performing a service for them. The problem was, as
hard as I tried, I saw no fault with him and was boggled at the lack of
recourse to criticism of his conduct. There was therefore no relief from my
own sense of inadequacy. I had come too far and seen too much to swallow
any of these weasel-like justifications and self-affirmations in order to make
myself feel better. I was out of scapegoats.
Of course, the whole incident grated painfully on me, like a sword on a
blacksmith’s anvil, grinding against decades of conditioning. I do not mean
to disparage a “respectable,” more “Christian” upbringing but just to clarify
that up until this day my value system was White Knight. I had White
Knight DNA.109
And yet even still my mind struggled, like an eel trapped in a net,
thrashing to get out. The whole incident was absurd. I had seen this girl
walk by and I had seen her chatting. She was a lovely, nice girl who was
looking for a nice man, surely? But in fact, she had just wanted to engage in
a 24-hour role play, be a total drama queen and then have herself properly
fucked. She had then kicked him out once she had had her fill.
This was outrageous. Disgraceful. Surely, not all girls were like this?
 More to the point, Tom’s behaviour was surely not how you won over a
respectable girl? After all, this was not how Jane Austen depicted it, not
how Dickens depicted it, nor a hundred other, respected literary
heavyweights? I had read War & Peace. I had seen love scenes depicted on
television. I had seen Pierre propose to Natasha and say, “As much as I am
unworthy of you, so undeserving, could you perhaps yet come to like me—
love me, even? Dearest Natasha, in your hands lies an answer that could
make me the happiest man alive… Say you love me…”
And what does Natasha say? She says, “Oooohhh, yes! Yes!” And then
they start smooching.
Ridiculous.
This was not the evidence of my own eyes. This is not what I had seen
in the queue at the bottom of Kasprowy Wierch. That kid had stuffed his
girlfriend’s face in a pile of snow and she had slapped him and then they
had made out.
How could such great literary heavyweights be wrong? It was so
dissonant. My mind flitted briefly back to something my stepmother once
said: “You’re a romantic, Alex.” The truth was that if a girl was proposed to
in the way Leo Tolstoy depicted it, Natasha would have groaned and put
two fingers in her mouth. She would have squirmed inwardly at the speech,
but nevertheless smiled sweetly at his supplicating tone, before wriggling
free of his cloying company as quickly as possible. She would then have
promptly hopped off and jumped into the bed of Anatole Karagin, or some
other street tramp, and lifted her skirts down a dirty back alley.
Shocking? You don’t have to tell me!
And no one had bothered to tell me the truth. Not my parents. Not my
siblings. Nothing from my older sisters, of course. Not my brother (who
was younger). Not even my friends.
Even my father had done nothing, except draw me a picture of a vagina!
That was my total sexual education.
How could they all have let me down? For 20 years! If this really was
all true, how could they have allowed me to labour in such a huge fiction
for so long? It was a travesty.

My mind was still spinning over breakfast. Surely it was wrong that the
only way to get a proper girlfriend was to apply these skills. It felt wrong.
Ordinary, everyday society would surely frown with severe disapprobation
at such a disappointing view of womankind.
The way to a woman’s heart was with a poem and a handwritten
declaration of love, not to treat her like a fish on a line and then bang her
when you had got her out on the riverbank, as she flopped around, gasping
for breath.

It was a pretty painful trip back from that stupid Zakopane, I can tell you.
The transfer mini-bus turned up at some ungodly hour because we were
booked on some dawn flight with a budget airline.
Tom did some work on his laptop in the back seat. This did not make
sense, either. How could a womaniser also rise early and be so dedicated
and organised about work? The mini-bus drove through bland, misty, icy
countryside. It was all painfully depressing. We even drove past a sign for
Auschwitz-Birkenau on the way to Kraków Airport.

108 I conveniently forgot that she seemed to treat him in very much the same way. She was getting as
much out of it as he was.
109 In fact, I am using a PUA term a little too broadly here. Whilst my conduct was of an old-
fashioned, knightly complexion, the technical meaning in pick-up circles is a guy who has joined the
feminist bandwagon and stands up for feminists in order to ingratiate himself with women (with
whom, of course, he wants to have sex). He is Society’s Angel in this regard. Women often despise or
resent him but would never say so openly.

OceanofPDF.com
 17

The Battle of Lancaster Gate

If you look into the annals of literature you find characters like Ahab from
Moby Dick or Santiago from The Old Man & The Sea. These are men who
(blindly) follow a goal to its uttermost limits, and risk death and destruction
along the way. There is a fine line perhaps, between sticking to your goals
and stubborn bloody-mindeness while on a path to self-destruction!

Imagine me in my bed, dreaming happily of Monika… When I dreamed

about Monika, I felt sure we would make a perfect couple. She was direct,
strong, and had a career as a restaurant manager and would perhaps run her
own restaurant one day. I had always hoped to find a girl that did not need
looking after, but with whom I could stand shoulder-to-shoulder. There was
definitely something about the chemistry of our relationship! I was no
doormat but a foil for her powerful female personality! I was able to tease
her and challenge her. She usually laughed when I pulled her up, didn’t she?
Yes, of course! That was right… I was a strong man who had never let her
get away with being a princess.
Even as I woke and slumbered, the imaginings continued…
Surely we were meant to be together? It was pretty clear that,
approaching 30, she had extracted herself from a relationship with a Bad
Boy, had now wised up and was looking for a sorted, respectable guy like
me for a long-term future. And a guy who was her equal. She had met her
match. At last. She would fall into my arms. Well, not quite. That was not
like her at all. But she would submit to my will…
Guys on the secret Facebook forum, the DGBCA, told me she was a
“bitch” and could not understand why I was still having anything to do with
her. They were just jealous detractors, of course. And other, closer daygame
friends whom I had now gotten to know out and about in London were
simply misguided when they told me that it looked tricky and I should
move on. They insolently told me that with each date that I did not close by
having sex with her and with the passage of time, it was becoming less
likely that I would ever have sex with her, and so was rapidly entering the
“friend zone.”
I would prove them wrong. And one or two of them had to admit that, if
she did come onto the radar again, I should use it as an opportunity to
escalate hard and see where it took me. I might pull it off. After all,
provided I still had other leads and had not over-invested in her, I had
nothing to lose and so why not give it a crack?
Anyway, my detractors had not been there on our dates—they had not
seen the chemistry! The beautiful chemistry!
Do not forget that after the last date Tom Torero’s advice had been that
it was definitely on.
I now strapped on my armour, ignored the voices of doom, and went
back into battle.
I arranged a third date with her (fourth date, if you include the shopping
date).
Monika had at this point decided to return to Poland and her hometown of
Bialystok. When I set up the date, she was simply housesitting with a friend
near Lancaster Gate. A friend who had a dog and so she needed a dog-sitter.
Once more she called the shots and told me to meet her near Lancaster
Gate, then realised she had got the location wrong and texted later to meet
me at Notting Hill Gate. I tried to hold the frame by texting this:

ME: Ok. But I will need more time. See you at 7pm, not 6.30pm.

HER: In that case let's meet 8pm. I can take the dog for a walk

All I could say was, “Ok.” She had the frame, well and truly.

On the way to the date I went via a couple of these daygame buddies I
mentioned. These two were dudes who worked in the city of London. I had
met them through the DGBCA and they liked to daygame in the city, after
work. I often did a bit of daygame with them after hours, sometimes during
rush hour. James looked at me and sighed when I said I had to leave early to
meet up with Monika. He knew the story and suggested that I had gotten
properly over-invested with this girl and was now running around at her
behest. This was complete anathema to the daygame and seduction
community; the whole point was that you had abundance and options in
your life and were not a victim of neediness and scarcity. This was so you
did not end up a victim of “oneitis,” saddled with a thing for one girl whom
you went about chasing. Over-investing was a cardinal sin.110 As I said my
goodbyes, James just said, “We’ve all been there.” I was annoyed. What did
he mean by that?
 Monika was late, of course, but I was ready. I took her to a hotel bar that
I had scouted before the date. She was dressed very casually, and wore
glasses. She was quite different from the dolled-up girl in the turquoise
shoes whom I had met at that date at The Ring. She was very
conversational, as usual.
We found an area in a bar with a sofa and sat together. I was pleased to
have chosen the location, and congratulated myself on having organised
logistics so well. We shared a bottle of wine together and she talked a lot
about her love life, in particular a main boyfriend during her life in London.
“There’s this guy—I was working in the Savoy at the time and he was a
junior waiter there and a bit quiet, and I had no idea but then a friend of
mine set me up. I got home one day and he was there just in the room,
sitting there and saying nothing. And anyway, I had changed my plans and
forgotten about it all and I needed to go to the hospital for a check-up. And
he came with me! It was really hard work as he said virtually nothing and
he just sat there in the waiting room. So weird.”
I could not quite believe what I was hearing. He sounded like a nob.
And yet Monika was Super Hot.
“He was Turkish. Anyway, I enjoy sex a lot - yeah - and finally after a
year or so of the relationship he was starting to be difficult, and he did not
want sex. Can you believe it?”
No, I could not. The guy sounded like a nerdy loser. How was he even
with her in the first place, and why was he not having constant sex with her
day and night? I put my hand on her leg and remarkably she let me leave it
there—she was talking so much that I am not sure if she even noticed.
“So we go on a long beach holiday together, and we’re at the hotel and
he’s like avoiding me and I’m getting mad. I mean, that’s not normal,
right?”
“What?”
“Not to have sex when you’re on a romantic holiday with your
boyfriend? My mother never liked him…”
“Nope,” I said. “Not normal.” I listened a lot to her life story. How her
father was not on the scene, how she looked after her mother, and how she
was planning to go back to Poland now, to Bialystok, to resume her studies
as a mechanical engineer (which seemed strangely odd to imagine for
Monika). I listened to how her mother disapproved of choices. I listened a
lot and I told myself that this was a good sign, a key quality with women
and dating. And she had let me leave my hand on her leg, after all.
We went to a second venue and I put my arm around her waist but she
immediately jumped away, “What are you doing?!”
I decided to push on through this objection. At the second venue I chose
logistics badly and we were across a table in a pub in two deep wooden
chairs, some distance from each other with no way to bridge the gap. I
began to drink too much.
And then I brought up The Ring date, when I had ended things
suddenly. My intention was to try and explain what had happened, why I
had ended it early, but it was history and actually I had already apologised
in the voicemail I left after the date. It was probably a topic best left
untouched. But still—I ploughed. And then, when I said the word “date,”
she immediately said, “It was not a date.”
“Well, whatever,” I said. “It certainly looked, talked, and walked like a
date to me.” I drank another glass.
“Listen,” she said, “the whole reason I cancelled the Clapham Junction
meeting was because I was worried you would get the wrong idea and think
it was a date. We’re just friends.”
Ouch.
But I remembered my training in, “What to do when a girl puts you in
the Friend Zone.”
“There’s no such thing as friends between men and women,” I said.
“Yes, there is,” she retorted. “I’ve got a good friend and we’ve known
each other ages and he’s a guy. We even joke that if we don’t find anyone
else then one day we’ll get married.”
“He’s not a friend. He wants to fuck you.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“Come on, Monika, you’re kidding yourself. I mean, haven’t you seen
When Harry Met Sally? There is no such thing. Girls always think that they
can be friends but the guy always wants to have sex with her. He wants to
fuck you, no question.”
I had another swig of wine. I was feeling tipsy.
“Or there’s this other US comedy—I forgot the name. With Lake Bell in
the romantic lead. A ghost comedy thing. Anyway she has this gay friend
that she shares a flat with but it then turns out that he is not the ‘gay best
friend’ at all, but a regular guy who is in love with her, but just has never
had the balls to act on it. He declares his undying love in a wild climactic
scene—which freaks her out, of course.”
After I had finished my speech I looked across the table at her. She was
just glaring at me. And then eventually she asked venomously, “How old
are you?”
“Eighty-seven. Good plastic surgeon. Haha. Anyway, it’s rude to ask a
guy’s age.”
 I had another swig of my wine, nervously, but the glass was empty. She
had asked her question with such withering power and it had actually hit
home. I really did feel that I was floundering, and whilst she was stone-cold
sober I was the drunkard.
“You know what?” she continued. “What you did on that ‘date’? It was
not manly. That was what I thought. Since you bring it up.” This was a low
punch. I sat there, not knowing what to say except to repeat what she had
said.
“Not manly!” I laughed in mockery. I went for the bottle—but it was
empty.
Eventually we finished up. The game was lost, or being lost. I hated the
thought. I hated myself. But I knew it to be true. I decided to call it quits
and told her I did not want to finish the wine and we got up, paid the bill,
and walked outside.
Outside I gave her a hug. That was it.
I had planned to bounce her to her flat. After all, the logistics were
perfect as she was housesitting in someone else’s flat, obviously alone, and
it was only just round the corner. I momentarily fancied that maybe she had
arranged things so that she could take me back there and have sex with her,
but it seemed unlikely. She had not turned up dressed for a date—it had all
been very informal, and she had reacted badly to my sexual advances.
Now I was beat. I could not even suggest a bounce. I had been friend-
zoned, well and truly. The hottest girl I had ever been on a date with. Jenny
Woodhouse 2.0. And like Jenny Woodhouse this was the closest I was
going to get.
Sex? Are you having a laugh? Nope. I resigned myself to a sexless life
and an ultimate death and legacy of having not fathered or sired a child of a
Hot Girl.
I walked off, asking her for directions to the Tube, when I already knew
them. I thought to myself, She is right. I am old. Too old. It really is too
late, mate. I cannot change.
I had even paid the entire bill. What a Provider. What a Chode! She had
used me as little more than an emotional tampon, confiding to me about her
personal problems. She had not dolled up for the date - a clear indication of
lack of sexual interest - and I was clearly now little more than a Gay Best
Friend to her. I had lost the battle.

But my run of bad luck didn’t end there and there was another incident
which seemed to drive the nail home.
That week I had hoped that I might meet Jessie, who had informed me
that she had exams and was visiting London for them. At last, after six
months, I will actually see her, I thought, and get a proper chance to
escalate and spin it round into a sexual rather than social relationship. And
so I messaged her to arrange to meet. I teased her to work hard. She stayed
in constant contact with me during this period, but did not come out. She
was busy with exams, she said, she had to really focus.
“It’s sooo annoying!” she messaged, and sent me this very odd image of
a girl being eaten by a monster. I believe it was meant to illustrate what it
felt like for a Hot Girl to have to endure a period of many hours on her bum
answering exam questions. She kept on hinting that she should be able to
find time and I kept on teasing and trying to “reel her in,” to use Tom
Torero’s fishing analogy, but I was clearly applying too much strain on the
line and she was not playing ball. I grew increasingly angry and frustrated. I
had failed with Monika, and now I was unable to even get Jessie to meet up
with me. In desperation, I suggested a coffee date. But she would have
another exam, or some exam prep that she needed to do.
Two weeks passed with her in London and me in London and us texting
frequently but not once did she agree to meet. She kept on putting me off…
and off…
And then in the end her trip and her exams came to an end and she went
back to Monaco.

There was one more incident with Jessie, who just kept bouncing back into
my life like a rubber ball. It was a phone call “out of the blue,” although
random and unexpected events with Jessie were becoming the norm rather
than anything unusual. She was still in Monaco. It was a call on a Friday
night and something of an “SOS” call in nature.

HER: Please! Can we Skype darling? I need to talk to you!

What’s this? I thought, deluding myself that she was perhaps about to tell
me that she loved me and could we get married next week?
I phoned her later and we briefly talked on WhatsApp.
“I can’t meet you now, sorry—I am packing out of my ex’s flat. Will
talk later please,” she said.
“Sure. Listen, let’s Skype later, at around 10pm.”
“Okay.”
At 10pm I was sat in front of my laptop ready to give her my full and
undivided attention.
She however was out with girlfriends getting drunk and had totally
forgotten. When I messaged her, she texted back:
 HER: Oh, sorry, just out with a girlfriend. Back soon? What time can I call?

Frustrated, I said that we could talk tomorrow and let’s fix a proper time.
Saturday night, 7pm (I was running around for a girl and setting aside my
Saturday nights for her!).
But she did not show and just messaged again on Sunday, apologising
that it had been a difficult and crazy time for her and she was out with
friends again. I got really pissed off and did not call her later as I promised.
It was now crystal clear to me that I was properly friend-zoned with her.
And had been for many months.

And then, around about the same time, I started pinging Monika again, in
pathetic desperation, whom I knew had moved back to Bialystok. It was
while I was taking a trip back to London that this message exchange
occurred:

ME: [Photo ping of plate of perogi at the Baltic Restaurant] Perogi at Baltic.
Yum Yum ;)

HER: Hi. My perogi is best.

ME: When are you next in Warsaw?

HER: Maybe weekend for night our with friends

ME: Cool. I come back to Poland on friday. Let's meet then, friday night.

HER: I will let you know. Can you bring me some smoked salmon? Pleeaase!

ME: Sorry? I'm your pack mule now, I see ;)

HER: From Selfridges? Theirs is best! And a bottle of Archers at the airport :)

ME: I will see what I can do

 HER: Thanks

I duly obliged: I went into Selfridges and bought some smoked salmon, and
also a special ice bag for the trip. At the airport at Gatwick, I searched
around for some Archers.
What on earth am I doing? I said to myself, as I ran around the shop
like her personal butler. And yet I still carried on looking, checking every
shelf in the duty free area.
I arrived in Warsaw, and of course, this happened. She pinged me on
Friday morning:

HER: I am ill. I will not come to Warsaw.

We never met and I did not give her the salmon, which I ate myself.

110 It is worth pointing out that this does not mean you do not take an interest in a girl and just sit
back coldly. It would be easy to criticise daygamers and seducers as people who are not prepared to
become involved or be open with a girl and express enthusiasm for being with her. The point is that
you do this only after you have had sex with her. Only after the chase is over, so to speak. Too much
investment at too early a stage of proceedings is to be avoided.

OceanofPDF.com
 18

My Eastern Bloc Graveyard

My dreams of getting a Hot Girl into my life had been dashed. Worse, it
seemed that they had been playing with me all this time, as if I was that fish
on the line. They were curious enough to land me into the cockpit of their
boat, but then they waited and watched whilst I gasped, flapping about on
the floor, deprived of oxygen, before throwing me back in the sea. Without
me realising it until too late (and without them even knowing what they
were doing, as girls simply do this unconsciously, it being hard-wired into
their biology) I had been consigned by them to the dreaded “Friend-Zone”.
It reminded painfully of that ill-fated trip to Wagga Wagga, Australia,
nearly twenty years ago and the pen-pal girl that had told me, “Women are
like fishermen and men the fish. We reel you in, take a look and throw you
back again.” I felt I was back to square one and that rather than having
reached the top of the snakes & ladders board I had inadvertently slipped
down a very long snake to rock bottom.

***

It was at this point that the tides of life washed me up on the shores of
Poland. Warsaw, to be precise.
 I had not been giving proper attention to my legal business and
suddenly found myself faced with serious financial difficulties. Owing to
these increasing difficulties I had taken a bold step and moved over there
for a few months to drastically cut costs and try and sort the problem out. It
seemed to fit my mood perfectly. Grey, cold, and forbidding, with its wide
streets and ugly Communist buildings. Like me, Warsaw had been laid low
and had a painful past, a city reduced to ruins. I walked about the cold,
windy streets, perfectly at home.
Warsaw is my graveyard, I thought, grimly. Here my tombstone will be
erected: Mr. Nice. Mr. Romantic. And it seemed fitting that I should end up
in the country of birth of the girl who had first kick-started my calamitous
decision to get into women and dating and daytime seduction: Gotia.
Remember her?
Will you be my girlfriend?
That would be a better epitaph, I decided. I could see the stonemason
tapping away the words with his chisel in my mind’s eye.
And calamity had hit not only me but also the entire daygame
community. Society was winning. Daygame.com now folded as its founder,
Andy Yosha, fell into financial difficulties and then fell out with Tom
Torero and Jon Matrix, his two lead coaches. I could hear that intellectual
documentary broadcaster at Radio 4 crowing over this business, his
conclusions vindicated. Daygame could not work. It was just a few sketchy
street characters, like pickpockets, pariahs of society with childhood
problems who lifted money from poor, sexless, spotty innocents whose only
relief from their sad and sorry condition was to enjoy sex vicariously
through PUAs and their seedy secret YouTube channels and vlogs.
Society had won, it seemed.
 The Wonderland days of the daygame bootcamp were now a faded
memory. My intrinsic character, contaminated by society’s conditioning,
reasserted itself like a great metal prison door slamming shut. Indeed, I was
back in the “Prison of Society.” I was washed up. Down and out in Poland.
I found an apartment in a massive Communist block near a Metro called
“Plac Wilsona,” and there I holed myself up in my room and buried myself
in my legal work. I had the perfect excuse and the perfect stick to beat
myself with: I’ve neglected my law business! I told myself. It’s all because
of this stupid hobby of running around the streets hitting on girls! The voice
sounded like my father’s—hard and pontificating in its tone. I should have
focused on my career. That was the way to get girls anyway—not by trying
to become a pick-up artist.
I now had no savings—in fact I had credit card debts of five figures. I
had some worthless pension I had not paid into for years, but otherwise I
was penniless.
I was a living vindication of society’s message: knuckle down, get a
good job, and get married to a plain girl. I had not, and now I was down and
out and without anything.111
And so it was alone that I wandered about those wide, cold, and
desolate streets of that Eastern European city. Of course, being alone in a
foreign city gave me a great deal of time for reflection. I occasionally
wandered out into the cold. It was spring, but it was still brutally cold. I
would hop onto a derelict tram and stay on it until the end of the line,
getting myself completely, and quite deliberately, lost. I kidded myself that I
was exploring the city, but in truth I was just trying to lose myself, to escape
the pain of life.
 The language was impossible to pronounce, let alone learn. I bumbled
my way through conversations and did a lot of pointing and gesticulating.
My internal monologue ran thus:
How could I have been so stupid to think I could change? I have spent a
lifetime as Mr. Cheerful, friendly guy. Was I really just going to turn myself
into a Casanova at age 46? And my father was the same—he knew nothing
about women. And actually, when I think about it, Tom Torero’s father did;
he told me so whilst skiing once. No wonder he is so good at this stuff—it is
in his genes.
I paused in my inner monologue to stick a paper ticket into a tram
ticket-machine and it whirred like a clock, as if still in the mechanical age
of the 19th century. The rusty tram shook and juddered as it pulled its way
out of the tram stop.
And how could I have been so stupid to think that I ever had a chance of
sleeping with Jessie or Monika or making them my girlfriend. Ha! How
naive! I had thought that I had been gaming them, but they had been toying
with me, cat and mouse, doing what they could do better than any man:
getting their own way and pursuing their own agenda. I was further from
Hot Girl heaven than ever.
I reflected on the chronology and order of events with Jessie and
realised that it had all been just a tease. I was no better than a thousand
other men in authority or a manager in a business who thinks that if he
advances a girl’s career or gives her the job because she looks pretty in
interview, that she will therefore (at some distant point) have sex with him!
Dreamers! Yet the fantasy is so powerful that they delude themselves. In
fact, I was worse than these guys. I should have known better. I had delved
into the world of PUAs and seduction and learned the secrets of what was
really going on. And yet I had fallen for the classic mistake. Rather than
manning up and taking Jessie out on a date and fucking her I had given her
a fucking job!
The tram shunted into its final stop and I looked to see where I was. I
was across the river, without having realised. I was in Praga, an even more
derelict spot than the rest of Warsaw. Here the Russians just waited until the
Germans had defeated the 1944 uprising and killed all the Poles who would
have put up any resistance to Communism. It was a brutal massacre.
I waited and did not leave the tram. Eventually it started up again, went
round a sort of siding, or bend in the track, and started going the other way,
back to Plac Wilsona.
And even worse, it was all so clearly laid out for me to see with my own
eyes. She phoned me to announce that she was getting married! And then
she bloody phoned to tell me she was moving out of her boyfriend’s
apartment! I had become that guy—the Man Friend to whom she confides
all her emotional problems.
And yet I had also been engaging in snake-oil seduction.112 This was a
horrifying realization. I was so far off achieving my goal of sleeping with
Jessie and making her my girlfriend, I had no idea. She was playing up to
this role of pretty girl helping me in my law firm just to get a training
contract, which is gold dust in the legal profession in the UK.
Once again Tom Torero had been right. He had called this out quite
early on, after seeing only a few messages between us on my phone and
hearing only the broad brush details of our relationship. She was a Princess
and she was lost, in his view. At the time I could not believe he could write
off a human being like this. It was disgraceful!
 But his point—and the point of a number of the more experienced guys
from DGBCA or whom I had met on my travels—was that I was so heavily
invested in her. And for what? I was not getting sex. I was not in a
relationship with her. I was turning into her uncle or older brother. And I
was happy to put such a low value or price on myself, so that this was
somehow enough, or all I could ever achieve and that I was entitled to or
deserved.113 I sincerely believed that somehow, at some point, Jessie would
come round to me and we would fall in love and get married and live
happily ever after. It was just a matter of time. Eventually she would tire of
the bad boys who were fucking her and throwing her out.
Wouldn’t she?
No. That was the painful truth.
The more I thought about it the more the sad truth seemed to be that Hot
Girls were like wild horses. It needed a lot of skill and experience and talent
to handle them and break them in. I had not succeeded—not with Monika,
nor with Jessie.
And what of Monika? I did not want to think about it. I had allowed
myself to become her little pocket doggie. Guaranteed to run around after
her, panting and nuzzling, and at any time she could pull on the leash or
blow the dog whistle and I would come running. What was her game? One
(quite attractive) theory is that she just liked playing cat and mouse. For
cruel pleasure. But the truth is probably that it was just built into her DNA.
As she ages, a Hot Girl needs to keep as many men around her as possible.
Who knows when you may need a Provider to look after your children?114
And after all, I was something of an establishment figure with a career as a
lawyer.
 I had been waiting for both these girls for what seemed like an eternity.
And I seemed happy to wait. Here I was, even after all of the insights and
education I had had into the world of game, still acting like a Chode. Still
prepared to do all sorts of tricks and backflips and ping little texts and try
and set up meetings and be their little emotional trampoline and listen to
their relationship problems. I could not believe it. I had learned nothing.
The tram finally pulled in to Plac Wilsona. It emptied its passengers and
I considered staying on and going back to Praga again.
It was a dark realisation (my fate, I mean, not the risk of another tram
ride). It was terrible to behold. I thought I had been making progress in my
own personal journey of sexual mastery. I thought I was able to change.
And now, as I cast my mind back over the last six months, I realised that
my nature was so strong it had been forcing me along the same tracks I had
always followed. The Mr. Nice Guy, Mr. Romantic tracks. The tracks that
had been laid down by me at the time of my birth and cemented by my
upbringing.
Actually, it was perfectly fitting that I was on a tram. I was like the
tram. On the outside I could kid myself that I was doing things differently,
fiddling with the controls, pressing the horn, speeding up or slowing down,
taking on passengers, but ultimately my nature, the tracks that the tram ran
along, was dictating my route and the destination of my journey. I was not
in control and I had not even been conscious that my nature was at work.
And what was the destination? It was the graveyard of lost male souls
who have never had a girlfriend, never passed on the genes of their
ancestors, never become the man they had always dreamed they might—
one day, one distant day—become.
 I heard words in Polish (translated), “Er, excuse me, mate? I’m
knocking off now. This is the final stop. We have to take the train into a
siding at the Praga shed?” I looked up and saw the tram driver in the
deserted carriage, packed up with a brown paper lunch bag in hand and
ready to go, staring at me.
“Sorry, Angielski,” I said. “I don’t speak Polish.”
“It is end. Final stop.”
He hesitated.
“Do you want sandwich?” he said, opening the bag.

111 Was this really the truth of the situation? It probably had more to do with the learning curve you
go through as a start-up business and it was also part-blowback of mistakes I had made in 2012
before daygame, in an ill-fated decision to partner up with a larger law firm. It was a relationship that
went badly pear-shaped—and cost me money. But the pain and frustration at the lack of success I felt
had to have some outlet and I decided to blame daygame. It was classic denial that arose as I reverted
to Mr. Nice.
112 This is a PUA term that means a guy will not show his intent towards a girl from the beginning,
often from the fear of rejection, but will try and find some other way of slowly getting into her
knickers. He may play the old-fashioned boyfriend card. He may buy her presents, take her fancy
places, give her a job in a business he runs…
113 I have heard guys use the expression “attention whore” in this regard. It applies to girls who just
enjoy having a guy round making them feel better, with absolutely no intention of letting them get
anywhere near them. It’s a bit of a harsh term, but there is truth in it as it can be really draining and a
guy needs to lay out boundaries and be honest with both himself and the girl.
114 As I say, these books like Sperm Wars or The Evolution of Desire would say that a girl’s dual
mating strategy means that the ideal for her would be to fuck the bad boy and have a wealthy Mr.
Nice provider bring up her family (including the bad boy’s child, of course). These books delve into
various parallels in the animal kingdom as well as producing depressing stats from studies of female
behaviour. The cuckoo is the obvious example. And blue tits are interesting: statistically, 30% of
nests will have another male blue tit’s children in it, being looked after by her permanent male
partner. Female blue tits will routinely fly off to other, higher-status, more aggressive males in other
territories to get inseminated, then fly back to their permanent mate (presumably after a shower).

OceanofPDF.com
 19

Warsaw Spring

“Why Warsaw?” Everyone asked me that.

“Why not?” was my reply.
It has a great exchange rate, the people work twice as hard as the
British, for half the pay, and like me, it has been brought low, but like a
phoenix it looked as if it was rising from the ashes! The people have a great
attitude—by which I mean they do not have “attitude” like the British or the
French, for example. They are not proud and do not have an air of
superiority. Their city has been smashed by the Germans and then rebuilt by
Communists. Himmler literally chalked the corners of streets that were to
be demolished in 1944 after the Germans successfully and brutally put
down what would otherwise have been the liberation of the first capital in
Europe at the end of the war. And this was after they had been invaded and
deserted by the Allies once before in 1939! Hardly surprising then that they
have developed a sense of “que sera, sera” and are pretty chilled. They are
creative and resourceful and do not need all the trappings of modern
civilisation. They have toughened up and know how to survive. They are a
city of philosophers.
And beneath the grey, post-Communist dereliction, there are pockets of
vibrancy and life. The thing about Warsaw is that it is all on the inside.
London is this magnificent shining (and highly expensive and crowded)
capital on the outside, whereas Warsaw is an ugly great breezeblock on the
outside, but everywhere you go there are funky places, bars, cafes, clubs,
and restaurants. Ugly on the outside, but beautiful on the inside.
And the bizarre thing is that the quality of life is actually high. So, for
example, there are regular trams, trains, and buses that run on time. There is
proper heating in winter. And the other odd thing that struck me during my
time there was that quality of produce is higher. So basic products like
bread, tomatoes, butter, meat, and so on are fresher and taste nicer. I do not
know whether or not this is because capitalist competitiveness has squeezed
the flavour out of produce in the UK and the US, where “organic” has come
to mean “normal, healthy, home-grown food.” But there are not as many
massive superstores in Warsaw, to speak of. I remember buying some
tomatoes in an innocuous little shop on a corner of a street where I was first
staying, Plac Wilsona, and saying to myself, “Hang on. Wow. This is what
tomatoes actually taste like…”
One of the first restaurants I tried was an Italian. On the outside it
belonged in a documentary on the deprivation and poverty that remains in a
post-Communist Bloc country. On the inside, though, it burst into life like
flowers in spring. Colour, great delicious food, relaxed and chilled people.
I started to go out. Or perhaps I should say that I started to “get out”—
get out of my head and out of my world. I spent a fair bit of time walking
about the city, going into Regus on Emilii Plater a few days a week,
walking out to a coffee shop each morning and taking public transport
everywhere.
Things began to change. Winter started to thaw into spring.
 I was beginning to sort out business matters, even whilst, or perhaps
because of the fact I was overseas. It was then that a new lawyer left his old
firm and partnered up with me. He persuaded me that it would be fun to
attempt to run my business remotely from a foreign capital (he was
something of an IT whiz and loved to travel himself) and so had had a part
to play in my Warsaw experiment. He now advised me to extend my trip
until the autumn to see whether or not it might be possible to set up a
business there. His arrival injected some much-needed fresh energy into the
business. He had been trapped in a dead-end job for years and had finally
made the move and was now starting from scratch, building his own legal
practice using my firm as an umbrella. We had weekly Skype meetings with
me in my local Communist-era coffee shop, which had become my default
office.
And then one day, one of my big legal cases came in at last. Starved of
cash for nearly two years, I had won a case and suddenly I was out of the
danger zone as £35,000 fell into my account. If we had lost the case it
would have been £0. It had got right to the wire and had been a painfully
close-run thing. I remember that I simply started crying, as I sat there in this
old, Communist-era Polish restaurant, on Skype to my new business
partner.
Meanwhile, the brother and sister I was renting a bedroom from in Plac
Wilsona started to introduce me to their social circle. The girl was young
and resourceful and she had started up quiz nights at her father’s local bar,
and it was proving a big hit. Quiz nights had not arrived in Poland—she had
lived abroad in Holland, as I recall, and she had been smart in introducing it
to her father’s bar. When I went to visit Prague, she helped plan my
itinerary using BlaBlaCar, which is this amazing AirBnB-style invention for
people who travel a lot by car and have spare space. It’s a big hit and I
travelled through Europe with it, meeting foreign travellers along the way.
I also advertised for a part-time assistant and I found this great and
positive Ukrainian girl, Solia Popovych, who helped breathe some good
feminine energy and society into my life at that time. She was the antidote
to Jessie. She had no qualms about being a total secretary and looking after
me and my business activities. We started to work from the business lounge
at the serviced offices in Regus, and it only cost us £10 a month—we
simply converted it into our office as no one ever seemed to use the
business lounge. And yet it had great facilities—coffee and tea, reception,
printing services, and best of all, a fantastic view of the whole of Warsaw
from its top-floor location in one of the tallest buildings in Warsaw. When I
stumbled on a new line of legal work, she ran around setting up meetings
with Polish lawyers. The busyness of it all lifted my spirits.

And spring turned quite quickly into summer and now it was warm.
Suddenly the streets were filled with attractive girls. Of course I could not
ignore this forever, however deep my self-flagellation. It was only a matter
of time before I could not help myself and ran over and started to approach
one or two of them.
It started with one or two hesitant approaches with girls in the tunnels
under Warszawa Centralna Main Station. They seemed polite enough and
stopped to chat. I started to notice that the girls were really quite attractive
and I wondered whether they were more attractive naturally than the
women I had been used to approach in London? But I started to conclude
that in fact it was their attitude and their conduct and the way they dressed
that made them appear more attractive. There were also a number of
Ukrainian girls who were living and working in Warsaw. These girls were
distinctive, as they had quite a different look from their Slavic counterparts
and were nearly always extremely well-dressed. There were definitely a lot
of attractive girls here. Not necessarily super hot, but genuinely attractive
and sweet natured.
I think the thing about the Polish girls was that they were a perfect
blend of East and West. They were feminine.115 They had traditional values
and they were “nice girls.” But they were also Westernised: Warsaw was a
growing city of potential, and they all spoke very good English (those under
the age of 35 did, at least, as the language changed from Russian to English
over night after the Iron Curtain came down).
I guess also for me it was a clean slate and I felt the “foreigner effect,”
which is a subtle thing whereby you feel a freedom from not having any
past that you are carrying around in your new world. No baggage of ideas.
One approach stood out in particular.
It was not far from the famous central monument, “The Palace of
Culture,” which dominates the main square. A girl was walking along the
street in front of a parade of shops, and she was confident and she was
smiling and she had an energy about her… and she was not unattractive, of
course. She was in her late twenties or early thirties, perhaps, reasonably
tall, and she had a strong walk and just a general air of confidence. The
minute she started talking, I could tell that she had visited the UK as not
only was her English good but she was clearly well-educated, smart, and
successful in her job.
After a few minutes of banter she said, “Listen, I have to go.”
I said, “What could be more important than chatting to an interesting
stranger?”
 “Well, okay, but I have a train to catch.”
“What time?”
I actually then said, “Listen, let’s go. We’ll walk together, I’m going
that way anyway.”
And I started walking with her.
Now you will remember that back in the bootcamp nearly 18 months
previously I had stepped into line with a girl and walked alongside her and
followed her. It was a disaster: I just felt like a little dog and she had been
slightly weirded out. Jon Matrix had said it was not a good idea to do this.
But what you notice is that after time and when you have gained some
confidence in talking to enough girls, you can play around with the basic
structure. At the end of the day, she needed to catch a train, and I still held
the frame by suggesting that we walk together, or rather telling that I would
walk with her.
She did of course have plenty of time to catch her train116 and we ended
up sitting down in a Starbucks in the station and drinking coffee together. It
turned out that she lived in the UK much of the time now. She did a lot of
the talking and this felt comfortable to me somehow—she was that sort of
girl, and if you get that sort of girl to start talking then clearly she is
comfortable. The conversation flows and you can focus on sitting back and
being more silent and masculine and focus on the flirtation and escalation.
She bubbled away for a while—she was actually a really confident as well
as attractive woman, and I liked girls like that as there is far more to bounce
off—and then she let it slip, or she revealed deliberately (who knows?) that
she was married and her husband was currently in the UK and she was here.
It was a happy marriage, too. I probed a little and asked her about her plans
for life in the UK.
 “Yeah, we are thinking of buying a property together. Well, more than
thinking. We are pretty much going ahead. We’re just a bit torn between
areas, you know.”
“Right, so, like—have you drawn a whole detailed wall- chart and
compared prices with each and every specific region of London?” I had by
now established she was a project manager and an events manager, and so
had naturally teased her on being organised and anal, an easy way to go
with the conversation and a pretty reasonable assumption to make, of
course.
“Pretty much! Hahahaha,” she laughed.
“Oh my god. You’re a total control freak who’s got her life plan sorted
out. I bet you know exactly the street you will be living in, that you plan to
buy a cat, and requisite square-footage of the garden and whether it will
have a patio, and I bet your poor husband is terribly henpecked, right?
You’ve already chosen the wallpaper for your kids’ room, haven’t you?”
She hit me on the arm and laughed.
This mini-date (or meeting) was really interesting to me because there
was a lot of male-female polarity about it. I had led her, I had chosen
Starbucks, I had checked her train time, and reassured her that she had
plenty of time (she was totally organised and clearly always turned up for
things way ahead of time). And I had now managed to spark her into talking
about her entire life.
“You’re in love, I can tell. It’s very sweet, especially if you’ve been
together five years. I can’t say I’m not disappointed as I’m attracted to you
—you’re one of those fun, confident attractive girls that I like. I’m not good
with wallflowers—pretty-pretty girls. You know, like pedigree dogs:
beautiful, but no real use for much other than the basics.”
 I grinned. The sexual tension was out there, but it was playful and both
of us knew it would go no further.
It was interesting that this was so different from those interactions I had
thought you were meant to have, from as long ago as my time at University,
in which you treat a girl as a bloke, or a regular male friend. It just does not
work, unfortunately. There is a polarity there. But it had taken me half a
lifetime to acknowledge it and enjoy it for what it was. “Vive la difference!”
as the French say.
And it had come about, of course, as the result of what I had learned:
the scaffolding structure of the London Daygame model (approach –
compliment – assumption stack – vibe on topic – ground the conversation –
close).117 This was not a technique that was recommended by Dale
Carnegie in How to Win Friends and Influence People—this was flirting
and generating attraction with the opposite sex.
At the end of coffee, she got up to catch her train. We exchanged
numbers but I did not follow up. Nor I guess did she expect me to. She went
away happy and energised, as did I. An otherwise boring wait for a train
had turned into something fun and fizzy… and flirtatious. Girls love to be
reminded—especially in marriage—of their feminine appeal and
attractiveness, and so for a man to bring this out of them is a great blessing.
I had spent a fabulous 40 minutes. I had taken time out from work, but it
was not sacrificing work. Quite the contrary. My routine had become to
work from around 8.30 until 3pm with a short lunch break, and so by the
afternoon I was actually in danger of being counterproductive if I carried on
through. A break was needed. I was a lawyer and spent a lot of time alone,
working on legal stuff. Reading papers. Writing letters. A break was just the
tonic I needed and to take a walk and approach attractive women…
 Suddenly it occurred to me: What better way is there to spend an
afternoon?
It was social, it was exercise (rather than the boring treadmill at the
gym), and might lead to love. Or sex. Or a relationship. Whatever. In fact, it
could actually be enjoyed for its own sake, and I was starting to take an
interest in the simple skill of it and to become interested in social dynamics
generally, including the extent to which I could apply it to work.118
I think this was one of the most important moments of the journey,
when I finally started to really enjoy this crazy pursuit for its own sake and
at quite a deep level. I guess it’s this communication with other human
beings that we need. Our bodies need oxygen to breathe and our souls need
feminine company or strange things to happen, just as they do when our
body is deprived of oxygen. As a singleton I had always assumed, because
society told me so, that the only way to find this sustenance was in a
relationship or marriage, but perhaps I was actually able to find it in the
company of many other people. I do not kid myself—it needed to be with
women and it would not have been the same otherwise. Men need women!
And women need men! (But perhaps not necessarily just one and not
necessarily for a lifetime.)
Of course, this makes sense of why men are often looking for mothers
in women. It’s not really their mother, it’s the feminine nature and spirit that
they cannot live without, they just make the mistake that they have to find a
mother because they have not realised that it is not limited to this one type
of relationship.

I then started to experience this strange flurry of success. There were a

number of girls I met during this time and with whom I had fun
interactions, such as “Squirrel Princess,” “Prick-Tease Blonde Twin,”
“Outraged Grocery Store Girl,” “Coffee Girl on Train,” and so on.119 After
a few dates with a number of these girls that were fun but did not go
anywhere special, I found that I unexpectedly hit a rich vein of sexual
success. I guess my “vibe” was up and my spirits rekindled. I got more
good news on my cases, and the partnership had really rekindled my
spirits.120 I had got some new cases in a new area of law that were more
profitable than my old cases against the banks that had given me so many
grey hairs. And I was finding that I really was able to run the law firm
remotely, as my partner had suspected.
Anyway, over a period of a few weeks that included a trip back to
London for a few days, I made out with the manager of a local restaurant, a
beautiful Russian MILF and I also made out with another mysterious,
incredibly sensual and sexy girl whom I approached in H&M in the main
shopping centre in Warsaw. “Duck Girl” was to become her moniker. We
were to have quite a journey that goes beyond the scope of this book.121
The manager of the restaurant was one of those incidents where you
have been out daygaming and your spirits are up. You settle down for a
drink with a mate and you just strike up a conversation with an attractive
girl out of thin air.
In this instance, I was with a British buddy; a couple of other British
guys had been tempted over to Warsaw. I had at that point been
instrumental in setting up another Facebook group to replace the DGBCA
which, although it was still going after the collapse of Daygame.com, was
struggling, and my fear was that it could at any time be shut down or
changed by new management. And so I had organised something of a coup
to move the key contributors on the group over to a new group, and it
became a fait accompli that the remainder of DGBCA came over to. I guess
I wanted to make sure other new guys had access to this great “alumni” or
“brotherhood” of dudes and benefitted from it just as I had. Without it I
would probably have never gotten through the difficult times.122
Anyway, I was with this British buddy and I got bantering with the
manager of a local restaurant on Chmielna, near to where I was living at the
time (I had by now moved out of Plac Wilsona) and it had gone like this:
“Hey you, how’s it going? You’re looking really cute for some reason
today. Must be the sun’s out. When are we getting married?”
“Er… how’s Tuesday?” she laughed, playing along.
“Mmm… Tuesday’s difficult, what about Wednesday? You better give
me your number in case I get cold feet and desert you at the altar.”
She gave me her number.
“Cool,” I said, “I could do with a wife.” And I gave her a squeeze and
made sure my cheek was pressed firmly against hers as I pulled her in and
ran my hand through her hair.
A few days later she was in my flat engaged in an extremely heavy
make-out by my front door.
A few days after that she was stark naked in my bedroom and the
grinding had moved from a vertical to a horizontal trajectory.

And then there was the MILF. I met her on an ordinary Tuesday night, one
of those times that I was getting away from work and using daygame for
exactly the best reason—as a tonic from work. She was a woman who was
just in incredibly good shape. I was walking through the garden outside St.
Paul’s Cathedral in London to meet my city daygame buddies when I saw
her on a park bench, feeding the squirrels. I bent down, politely.
 “Hey, can I say something very quickly?”
“Sure.”
She looked up. She seemed to be idly waiting for someone and had all
the time in the world, which was quite a striking contrast to the extremely
busy streets in the City of London.
“You look really beautiful and I just had to break off on my way to my
friends and say hello.”
“Oh, thanks!”
“I guess you realise you’re engaging in a highly criminal offence:
feeding wildlife in a public park in the Square Mile of the City of London?”
“Really?!” she said.
“Yep, contravention of all sorts of local byelaws.”
“Really? Are you a policeman?”
“Yep. And you’re busted. Get up, bitch, so I can put the handcuffs on.”
“Hahaha!”
“You’re not English. You’re Ukrainian, right?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
There is something about Ukrainians, I do not know what it is, but they
have a very distinctive look, and I had by now met enough of them in
Warsaw to be able to tell.
“What are you doing, idling away so far from home?”
“Oh, I come in regularly for business. I’m in the health business,
massages, hypnotherapy, psychotherapy—all that good stuff.”
Katya was her name and by Thursday evening we were in a bar by The
Globe. She was very late, and I feared that the interaction had just been far
too smooth to be real and she had flaked. But it turned out, like a lot of
girls, she had just got the logistics completely wrong and was in the wrong
place. I got a message from her, “I’m here. Are you coming?” from another
bar.
The escalation in the bar was effortless. Some girls just make it easy and
are completely at ease with the male-female polarity. I was quite bold in
terms of touching her quite a lot on the arm and playing with her hair. But I
think it was not so much me as the vibe she gave off that allowed this.123 I
put my hand through her hair quite early on, and tried a classic Tom Torero
“floppy test” in which I pulled her into me and she was really into it.
I bounced her from The Globe to The Baltic, the bar just underneath my
flat, and somehow I managed to get her upstairs into my bedroom, where
she playfully resisted. But I was quite commanding and threw her onto the
bed, which she laughed about and seem to really like. But we did not have
sex, as she was quite well organised, ran her own business, and was
concerned as she had to get up at 6am the next morning. A woman nearing
40 with a career and a child is a slightly different proposition, perhaps, and I
actually felt that she knew the game intimately, and was at a stage in her life
were she enjoyed playing it, but within limits she had prescribed. It was
unfortunate that logistics got in the way of going much further—she spent a
lot of time travelling outside Europe and I was based in Warsaw. It is a
shame, as I think I would have learned a lot from her. But I was just
delighted to have been able to escalate a girl again from the street to my flat
so quickly.
Now with Katya, the manager, and later with Duck Girl, I got quite a
long way after only the first or second date, and in the case of one of them,
pretty much all the way, in fact. But I had not had proper sex since I arrived
in Warsaw.
 But then I approached a girl outside Centrum Metro Station, just as she
was about to go down the escalator. She gave me little more than three
minutes as she was in a hurry to catch the Metro, but she gave me her
number nevertheless. It was the most innocuous approach I had done for a
while and the initial impression was almost that she had just given me her
number to get rid of me.124

115 I hardly saw a pair of UGG Boots about the place, the fashion-curse of the West, though two
years on, as I write, I see them finally sneaking in. ;)
116 Never take a girl literally, of course! Especially when she says, “I have to go,” or, “I’m busy.”
They have to have some basic shield against guys during their day-to-day, otherwise they would be
swamped. Guys get hurt and call this a “bitch shield,” but it’s just basic female time-management.
117 This is how I tend to run it these days. Grounding is really important—telling a story about
yourself and explaining that I am working in Warsaw and not just a sex tourist. Also really fishing for
that topic by making assumptions and then vibing on that topic.
118 I do not know what friends or work colleagues would say, but I certainly feel far more open-
hearted, socially intelligent, and friendly after daygaming. And I am forced to drop the “lawyer role”
and play a different part. It is easy to become identified with your work persona, and daygame
brought me back down to earth and taught me how to just handle basic human interactions.
119 Why do guys use these epithets rather than use their actual names? Well, because when
daygamers are talking to each other about a girl they are pursuing it is impossible to remember the
names, unless you ground it in a story about how you met them:
“Katya.”
“Who?”
“You know, the Russian girl trying to feed a squirrel in a park?”
“Oh, Russian Squirrel Girl! Yeah, yeah. Got you. So where are you at with her?”
120 It goes without saying that approaching girls is far easier when you are in a positive frame of
mind. But then, of course, when I was first starting out, approaching them when I was in a negative
frame of mind often helped get me into a positive one!
121 In order to reduce the book to a manageable length I had to leave out the chapter involving,
“Duck Girl”, who I touched on earlier during my Warsaw adventures. Please go to the end of the
book if you would like a copy of the short story, “Mysterious Duck Girl”. This tells the tale of this
sexually-charged encounter as well as another more recent girl with a similar amount of chemistry,
which quickly escalated to the bedroom.
122 This was now a group of dedicated daygamers, a global network with guys from all corners of
the world, from the US, Europe, Australasia, Asia, South America—basically everywhere. And a guy
who is travelling can tap into this, simply to have other guys to meet with in new cities, regardless of
any seduction aspects.
123 Guys, including me, get hung up on how well they perform on a date: what they did right and
what they did wrong, the result, etc. But most times it’s just down to the girl.
124 You discover doing daygame that there is often very little correlation between how good you
were in the street with a girl and whether she responds or not. Apparently there are just so many
external variables and so many other things going on in a girl’s life. Or, as in this case, she just feels
“open” to some adventure and you caught her at just the right moment.

OceanofPDF.com
 20

Sweet Summer Fling

It was now summer 2015 and I had come back to Warsaw from an extended
trip to the UK. Whilst I had therefore not had the chance to get the girl at
Centrum Metro Station, Dagmara, out on a date, I had been texting with her
quite freely and in spite of the brevity of our meeting there was a lot of fizz
in the texts. It was interesting to me that the interaction had been so short
and yet the texting was easy, and she simply responded almost immediately
to any text I wrote to her. Our texts were pretty spontaneous, reasonably
lengthy and she did not hold too much back. I did not have to scrutinise
everything I was writing - as was often the case—and yet I was grateful that
I had taken the trouble to learn how to text properly over the past year and a
half, as it did seem necessary to me to engage in sexual banter at this stage
of the relationship.
The first date was at a bar that myself and two other daygamers from
the UK used to use for dates, The Loft, on Zlota Street. It had an upstairs
area with seats, rather than chairs, so you could sidle in next to a girl during
a date, to escalate the interaction. We chatted about a range of topics, the
subjects of which I cannot recall now, before I bounced her to my flat,
which was literally 20 yards away in one of the three great residential tower
blocks on Zlota Street.
 How did I “bounce” her back? I had seeded the bounce-back by means
of a reference to a YouTube video as she had claimed that she had watched
and followed a UK comedy TV show but could not remember the name,
and I said that we would go and look for it as my flat was only next door. It
was called “Coupling”.125
It was all so effortless and reminded me of the date with Italian Roberta,
in which the date routine did the work for me. It was like clockwork. Again,
my finer, Victorian sensibilities were slightly appalled and outraged:
Are you seriously going to treat this girl like a border collie, giving the
right signals and exhibiting the right behaviours such that she will respond
in a predictable way? It’s an absolute disgrace!
But somehow that voice was tamed, or silenced—it appeared only as a
faint echo in the back of my mind. The counter voice ran:
Whatever works, my friend. Throw the daygame toolbox at her: engage
her about her childhood dreams, talk about star signs, read her palms, play
the truth game and the strawberry fields game and tease, challenge, spike
and qualify.
Back at my flat—the same one that I had taken Duck Girl to, with the
amazing view of The Palace of Culture—I got her to sit down, poured her a
glass of wine and then insisted she give me her hands. She had been
laughing a lot and so I used this tried and tested technique:
“Give me your hands.”
“Why?”
“Listen, you’re a veterinary surgeon, okay? You have to deal with
clients and look after animals all day… you can’t go round laughing and
being silly all the time. You might give an animal the wrong dose and kill it.
I am going to give you the seriousness test, to see how much of a
responsible adult and professional you are.”
And then I took her hands and looked her in the eyes and counted to ten,
and she tried not to laugh. It got to about five and then I took her hand and
gave it a playful smack. She laughed and I tried again.
Slap!
Now she pursed her lips and really tried… one, two—
Slap!
“This is hopeless,” I said, dropping my head in disappointment.
“No, no, no! Give me another go! Please!”126
So there we were: on the 17th floor, and it was a beautiful evening and I
invited her to take a look around the flat and I also pointed out the view.
She looked about and then wandered to the window to look at the view over
Stalin’s Palace of Culture. I busied myself in the kitchen, properly
observing the rule that once you have got a girl in your place you should let
them acclimatise and back off, leaving them alone whilst you busy yourself
with an odd chore to two and get out the wine. The mood was great. I
reflected for a moment. I could not believe that I had been able to bounce
her back to my place within about one hour or so of meeting her. We had
known each other the grand total of one hour and five minutes, if you
included the street approach, and whilst there had been some texting in the
interim when I was back in the UK for a couple of months, really we were
complete strangers.
I knew I had to make my move. We sat at the laptop to watch the
YouTube videos, but could not find the show she was thinking of and did
not really try anyway. Eventually I started to play with her hair and I used
the classic seduction trick of looking in a triangle between the girl’s eyes,
then lips, saying nothing for a moment and imaging myself having sex with
her and having my cock in her mouth.127 I kissed her.
We then drank a little more wine, watched another video or two, and
then made out a bit more passionately. I do wonder whether I could not
have had sex with her there and then. Probably. It’s bizarre but it seems that
the quicker you escalate, the easier getting her to have sex with you
becomes. Long conversations and prolonged, boyfriendly dates seem to
take you nowhere. I could only wonder at what I had been playing at,
eighteen months previously, with Gotia.
At any rate I felt that we had gone far enough for a first date and if I had
pushed it further might have “burned the set,” as PUAs say. Instead I was
keen to bring the date to an end on a high, using “push” to generate even
more chemistry the next time we met. I said I had an early start and some
work to do to prepare for meetings with Polish lawyers in the morning and
that my new Ukrainian assistant would be turning up for work very early.
Dagmara also had an early start, she said.
I held open the door, kissed her once more, and she slipped out with a
bright smile.

***

The second date got off to a good start and I thought it would be easy…
I used a date location that the mysterious Duck Girl had introduced me
to—Klaps, that seedy but erotic bar—and it felt very weird taking her down
into the dungeon below. So low-lit and so seedy. I took her to the sofa and
we sat down. Every time I went there since, for other dates, it always felt
like there is simply no way that a girl in her right mind is going to follow
you down there. On the few other occasions I almost expected the girl to
immediately say:
“Good god! Are you serious?! This is a sex pit? A place you would find
in a brothel or some other spot. And it’s so dark. Do you seriously think I
don’t know what you are up to—and do you seriously think that I am going
to go along with it?”
But of course, for some strange reason, they do go along with it. You
can literally lead a girl anywhere if you are confident and relaxed enough
about it, short of the men’s toilets, I guess (and for Dave Diggler, even
there).
Whilst we fooled about on the sofa for a while, we also talked. And I
decided at that point to deal with something that had been troubling me: she
might think I was looking for a long-term girlfriend when actually all I was
looking for was to have some fun. Was this outlook a contradiction with my
original reasons for getting into dating and daygame? I guess it was—after
all, you will recall those immortal lines at the beginning of the story, “Will
you be my girlfriend?” Or maybe I was just protecting myself from
rejection? I like to think now that I realised that the most important thing
for me was to fully immerse myself in a rite of passage that I had never
really been through and not to stop, just because I was getting some
success.
In any event, the conversation reached a natural point when it felt
appropriate to raise the issue. I knew that I had to have this conversation
with her.128 We had drifted onto the subject of relationships and so I said, “I
should probably be clear and say that right now at this point in my life I’m
just having fun. A couple of years ago now I decided that, rather than
moaning about being single and being long-suffering about trying to find a
partner, I would just take time out from it all—a sabbatical—and basically
have fun and date and all of that for at least 18 months. So right now in
Poland, that is what I have been doing: dating and fooling around and
having fun and enjoying the adventure of it all.”
To my relief she said that she had just come out of a long-term
relationship and that she too was not looking for anything serious. That was
my cue. Any residue of tension that there had been was now totally
dissipated. We fooled about some more down in that subterranean smoker’s
corner in Klaps (I do not think that anyone would have noticed, let alone
disapproved, if we had had sex there).
I took her back to the flat with the excuse of a half-bottle of wine and
promised to cook something in case we were hungry. Getting back to the
flat was easy—it was a perfect spot for seduction because it was so central.
I remember using the balcony we had in the flat to escalate. I invited her to
wander out and enjoy the view. As she looked out at the sunset, I stepped
behind her. This was a Dave Diggler trick: it is easier to escalate if you are
both standing up. This time I had learned from my Duck Girl experience. I
had judged the mood right and I stepped up from behind her to give her a
fresh glass of wine and pressed myself into her. We kissed and then stepped
back inside.
And now the opportunity for sex well and truly beckoned. We had
already had a couple of glasses of wine and were quite relaxed by then. The
opportunity of sex with this beautiful girl presented itself. And I realised
that I had judged it perfectly in keeping the first date short. I realised that a
lot of times in the past I had felt I had to escalate in order to prove to myself
that I had the skills, whereas now I felt more as if I had a steady hand on the
tiller, if you understand me, able to assess the situation and calibrate my
conduct accordingly and perhaps a lot of it stemmed from a mutual
attraction between us and arose quite naturally.
And so I looked at her.
She put her glass down.
We gazed into each other eyes…
And then, just as the opportunity of sex with this beautiful girl presented
itself, I started taking about economics!
I’m deadly serious. I have no idea what got into me, but something had
crawled in there and was now trying to sabotage it all. I think it got a handle
because Dagmara must have mentioned something to do with the Palace of
Culture (which we could clearly see from the window) and asked me
whether I knew the history. I have said before that girls like to put obstacles
in a man’s way. They do not do it consciously, of course, but do not expect
them to ever make it easy for you! There seems to be some chaotic force of
nature in them and you have to stay firm. So she told me about the famous
story that Stalin offered the Polish people the choice of a metro line or a
dumb Communist palace (there are six others just like it in Moscow alone).
They chose the dumb Communist palace and so a seed of massive
controversy was sown. I then found myself picking up on her train of
thought.
“Ah, yes—and you Poles can be quite sensitive about Communism and
socialism. Actually, I was on a taxi ride with a friend and the driver actually
made a small detour so that he could wind down his window and deliver a
broadside at a harmless-looking socialist march in the street. Actually, there
have been some good things about Communism, I have heard. For example,
their farms are all small-holdings and under Communism the state owned
the land, which stopped unhealthy private property speculation.”
 What the fuck?! What was going on?! What was I doing?!
Politics is a downer in conversation, but economics? And I suddenly
started pontificating on the problems of the private acquisition of land by
property developers and how the real causes of the boom-bust economic
cycle were caused by hundreds of years of land speculation.
I had no idea where this was coming from. Some door had been opened
in the internal caverns of my mind by the Victorian Do-Gooder and now a
whole weird topic of conversation jumped out. And I kept on going. On and
on and on:
“Yes, a lot of people do not realise—they think that land value taxation
is some sort of socialist step that is going to deprive them of their property.
You know, in England it’s especially controversial as everyone wants to
own their own property. ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle.’”
Dagmara stared, her glass in her hand.
It was as if my mouth was hijacking me. I felt suddenly at sea and
totally out of control, as though a powerful gust of wind had taken the sails
and ripped the wheel from my grip and I was now at the mercy of the
elements. It is indeed like the wind—Mr. Economics had suddenly burst
onto the scene, out of nowhere. It was that bloody Angel in disguise! Came
out of nowhere suddenly. I wobbled, losing my balance in the seduction,
which until then had been so effortless. I felt this horrible toxic anger or
hatred—whatever it was, it was a lethal and corrosive substance and it took
me suddenly back to that time with Gotia when we went to the play and I
had my nose bleed and then afterwards at the Lebanese restaurant I did
nothing and I walked her back to the tube station entrance and just petered
out… “Goodbye.”
 And I could not believe it. I was actually about to fail. Fail! Just as I
had done with that long line of girls all the way up to Duck Girl. Just when
I was so close. It was so “on” at that point, it is unbelievable, looking back
on it, how I could have suddenly got blown off-track. I think it has to do
with powerful habits we have acquired over our lives, or inherited from
family genes—that somehow come up, bubbling up from our deep
subconscious at the wrong moments and wrong-foot us. Those strange,
unseen aspects of our natures, deeply ingrained, that we can see operating
but somehow seem powerless to ignore or transcend. I was once more on
the tracks of my own nature, like the tram from Plac Wilson to Praga, or the
Scorpion with the Frog.
What must Dagmara have been thinking all this time? She looked
surprised. She had been effortlessly seduced up to that point and was as
sexually charged and full of longing as I was and must have thought, What
the fuck?! What’s going on? He was rubbing up against me on the balcony
five minutes ago and now he is lecturing me on the Georgist Model of Land
Acquisition from 1878.
In a flash of insight I saw myself at that point falling back on my
identification with my IQ, intelligence, etc., which intelligent guys tend to
really closely identify with. They value it so highly that it tends to hijack
them at inopportune moments. They cannot let it go. It reminds me of
something that someone once said to me, perhaps a player, perhaps not. It
was that often intelligent guys found it hardest of all to learn this stuff,
because they could simply not let go of the fact that they ought to have been
able to figure this out. They could not accept that the fat, fart-bag, bed-sit
buddy at college who ate beans out of a can and did no work and had no
social airs or graces, nevertheless used to bang all the girls. Outrageous! We
cannot accept it and our intellect is appalled and angry. Maybe now this
intellect was thrashing about, unhappy about losing its dominance over my
psyche. Perhaps it was just not wanting to do the dignified thing, accept
defeat and leave the room and leave us to it.
But fortunately that dastardly Angel of Sex, the renegade Torero,
fluttered onto my shoulder and thrown a right hook at the Dr. Watson
Angel, who flopped off, dead as a stone.
Habit formed from constant practice now reasserted itself.
I took the glass out of her hand and ran my hand through her hair. We
started kissing. I led her to the sofa and she sat down. I took my clothes off,
and then she started doing the same. The whole thing happened in complete
silence. Not a word. With growing intensity. The sun shone through the
balcony window. Stalin’s great phallic contribution to the Polish people
towered above us both as I rolled on top of her. We started fucking and then
we both rolled off the small sofa onto the floor and fucked there. Stalin
must have grinned.
We had sex again that evening…
And then the next date a day or two later we fucked again…
And again and again…
And each time it was more fulfilling and nourishing and refreshing. And
each time it went deeper and deeper.
And we did it in all variety of situations as well as positions.
I remember we did it at her flat in her living room “in secret.” She had
just put her little sister into bed early and it was highly likely she would
reappear at any minute. She flicked the lights off and took off her clothes in
a major hurry and slipped on top of me on the sofa, under a blanket. We
fucked quietly and breathlessly.
 And then there was this fabulous Thursday afternoon when we hired a
car and drove out to a place called Zegrze, where there is this huge lake in
the country and a beach. It was a scorchingly hot summer. It was towards
the end of the season and so the beach was not too crowded.
Dagmara had a lovely figure and came with her bikini and we dressed
and undressed behind a tree near the beach when no one was looking. Then
we dived in the water and swam out together and basically canoodled in the
refreshing water and played around with each other, like teenagers, me
ducking her under or throwing her up in the air. After, we sun-bathed on the
beach and watched some cheeky Polish kids playing about, and then a great
flock of swans steamed into shore suddenly and the kids leapt into the water
after them and shooed them away, splashing the vain and indignant
creatures with delight, before they swam away with as much dignity as they
could muster.
Later that same day we drove round to a quiet, secluded part of the lake
and had a beer and then went for a walk, following a narrow footpath
through thick trees along the lakeside, party obscured from the lake and
from the main footpath. As dusk was falling, we found a bench looking out
at the lake. For all we knew we may have stumbled through a narrow
gateway into the bottom of some wealthy Poles beachfront country house. It
felt somehow that we were trespassing. I sat down on the bench. And there
she got on top of me and lifted her skirt. And so we had more illicit, teenage
sex. As we were doing it, people walked by and probably heard us, but dusk
was now turning into night and they would have barely been able to see
anything.
Wow.
For all the pain that there has been in this area of my life, before and since,
it is worth remembering with gratitude those few months with Dagmara.
Because really, for all the whining and moaning and complaining about lack
of a girlfriend, lack of a love life, lack of regular sex… I was blessed during
those summer months. I guess not many men actually get that, or get it
more than once or twice a lifetime. Certainly not when they are in their late
forties. When they are teenagers they are probably too young, shy, and
gauche to enjoy it properly. The big satisfaction of it was also that I was
pleasuring her to the same degree that she was pleasuring me. That really
heightened it.
It was not exactly a relationship for either of us. I had been clear from
the start that I was only in Poland as an experiment and would have to go
back to London by the autumn. I had already extended my trip a lot further
than I had originally intended. This seemed to set the tone of the
relationship somehow. She was a veterinary surgeon and was in the process
of setting up her own business and that old problem, “logistics”, got in our
way.
I sensed by the end that she would have been happy to turn it into
something more and was hoping I would extend my trip. She was upset
when I told her that I was going back to in a few days and she knew that
was it. But she was upset in a very cool way. We were sitting on the small
sofa in the flat under Stalin’s Palace of Culture. I had just cooked for her
and we were sipping our wine after dinner and enjoying some late summer
sun and she said, “Oh, bugger! How annoying!” And she put her head in
my lap for a moment, which was very sweet.
But she never sent needy messages, never bombarded me, and so if she
did feel the loss (and I think that she did), she also played it very nicely and
always sent messages after my return to the UK that were playful but never
demanding or needy. It gave me a very high opinion of Polish girls.
She was so cool about the fact it was nothing more, but nothing less,
than a fabulous “summer fling.”

125 Bizarrely I bumped into the lead actress in this show in Selfridges a few months later. So I
approached her, of course. We had a chat and she took the compliment very well, “I’ll take that!” she
said.
126 By deploying this trick (or others of a similar hue) you have then successfully escalated towards
kissing and beyond. Holding hands is a key step, in fact, and hands can be extremely important in
generating comfort. It is an important rung in what PUAs call “the ladder.” You cannot just jump on a
girl in the first few minutes of a date and get physical straightaway; you have to “calibrate.”
Calibrating is a little mechanical, like a car engine, perhaps, so the analogy is not a bad one. You
need to make sure you inject a little oil from time to time (comfort) but not flood the engine. At
times, you must also just walk away.
127 Somehow, this weird trick, taught to me by a dastardly Essex PUA called Richard Stoker, brings
sex out of the dark subterranean subconscious into the open, and often opens the door to kissing.
128 This is a strange thing. The PUAs I have met have been quite honest with girls and have told
them upfront not to expect anything more. It was the same with the guys on the DGBCA, the secret
Facebook group. It was almost a code: you don’t lead a girl into thinking that you are going to be
long-term, if that is not your intention. Whereas it seems, from observation, that there is a lot of
duplicity outside Game. Guys are duplicitous all the time in order to get sex. It was an irony to me—
society pilloried these guys - but in truth I can’t help thinking that the television presenters who
pillory them on daytime tv are probably up to more mischief than their targets. Tomassi would
probably say that it had something to do with scarcity. If you do not have abundance, you are driven
to do what it takes to get sex, including being dishonest, of course.

OceanofPDF.com
 21

Return to Selfridges

After my three month sojourn in Warsaw, I returned to London. The clouds

had lifted and I found myself surprisingly refreshed and reinvigorated.
What did I do on my first weekend back? I went to Oxford Street, to
Selfridges, of course! I approached a beautiful blonde Russian student (and
got her number), then I approached a sleek brunette, a model (and got her
number) and then a woman over from Turkey, in the streets outside the
department store, who was only in town for two days and had a diary full of
business meetings (but could nevertheless not help giving me her number).
Seriously. It was nuts. Three girls and three numbers.
Around about the same time I went out with a buddy, a fellow
daygamer, Dan, on a Friday night. We ended up in a well-known bar in
Covent Garden on Maiden Lane called, The Porterhouse. The bar was
teeming with people and we were separated. When I found him he was with
a young (twenty one), pretty, dark-haired and sultry-looking girl from
Germany who was on an extended visit. Dan was in fact in a relationship at
that point with a radio producer who he had met on Millennium Bridge,
London whilst out daygaming with me during the previous year. He was not
really interested in going anywhere with this girl because of this, but still
liked to hang out with me and “wing” wherever possible.
 We had a quiet conversation and he said that he was going to phone his
girlfriend to see whether she wanted to join us and we worked out, with
something approaching military precision, how the whole night would go
down. He would invite his girlfriend to a bar we both liked near my flat,
The Baltic. That would give the girl an indication both that he was not
available and also provide comfort, as there would be another girl around.
He would then leave me to see how far I could get.
I opened up a conversation with her, while Dan phoned his girlfriend,
and eventually suggested that we change venue and we all jumped in a taxi.
His girlfriend turned up at The Baltic and I ended up taking her outside, just
the two of us, to enjoy the warm evening and there I ran the routines with
which you will now be very familiar. It was not long before we were
making out. Dan and his girlfriend left and the two of us ended up in my
flat.
It was this incident that finally put to rest any ideas I had that an older
dude could not attract younger girls.129
I still thought about the missed opportunities, of course and how I had
“failed” with Jessie and Monika. But really my ego had been on a adventure
all of its own, desperate to prove to myself and others that I could score
with Hot Girls, but only succeeding in getting itself badly bruised. And I
may even have had a lucky escape. Monika and Jessie were both quickly
married not long after my escapades with them ended. It really does seem
as if Tomassi was right about girls hitting the wall in their late twenties or
earlier thirties where there is this massive need to get hitched and have
babies. When I reflect on the guys they chose, whether Hobbit’s dour
partner, Grant, or the dudes I saw on Monika and Jessie’s Facebook, I
cannot help but think that there was a certain hastiness in their choices.
 In fact, after my ego healed, I could not help but look back at those
rather mad few months (eighteen months to be exact) without genuine
gratitude. At the time it did not feel I had anything to be grateful for! I was
going through hell at points, fighting my way through a jungle, with little in
the way of a path to follow. I was often lost in my own little world, angry at
not achieving greater success, in spite of the fact I had come so far. I
compared myself unfavourably to others and, like a petulant child, had little
tantrums or went into a sulk because I had not had sex with any super-hot
girls.
I now look back and think about those daygame adventurers - Tom
Torero, Dave Diggler and Jon Matrix and it occurs to me it must be such a
difficult job, to encourage guys along the same route they have travelled
and to deal with their howls of protests at having to make such fundamental
changes to their lives and their way of thinking.
I also think about daytime approach itself. It had come out of the same
crucible as the pick-up industry and it was tarred by the same brush but yet
at its essence daygame was simply a skill, vehicle or mechanism by means
of which men could meet and date women. Nothing less and nothing more.
It was beautifully simple. Many of those men, myself included, were never
going to be the next Tom Torero and to be honest were not very interested
in pick-up. We were just Average Joe’s who had run into problems or
inherited problems in this area of our lives and wanted to sort ourselves out.
But we were Average Joes who were also smart enough to be suspicious of
dating by synthetic, electronic means or the artificiality of speed dating and
singles nights. Nor did we want to delve into the deep, dark night and end
up in noisy, drunken bars and clubs, labouring until dawn in order to get
ourselves laid. We wanted to become socially-calibrated and know how to
strike up a proper romantic connections and be good around women.
In fact all that we wanted was some basic mastery in terms of doing
what is perhaps the most natural and ancient instincts of all - to approach
and chat up attractive girls. For some reason - I do not quite understand why
- Society disapproves of this. (At least in the West - excluding Italy, of
course!) What is wrong with a man opening up a conversation with a girl at
a bus-stop, in a shopping centre or coffee shop during daylight hours? And
in fact, to return to those PUAs, Dave Diggler and Jon Matrix both became
far more interested in genuine relationships after their daygame rite of
passage.
It is odd, when you think about it rationally, that society says Tinder is
okay, that dating with a computer is okay, that noisy, drunken night-clubs
are okay, and yet going up to a girl during the daytime is “wrong”.130
Sure it does at first feel a little weird and unorthodox, when you are a
beginner, running around the streets paying compliments to girls as you try
to get over your approach anxiety, but beginners need to learn and practice.
How else do they make the attempt?131 But at the heart of it what could be
more amazing than, in a calibrated and emotionally-intelligent way, opening
up flirtatious conversations with girls? My experience with the vast
majority of girls who were simply not interested was that they took the
compliment and many of them said, “Thank you. You made my day”. The
criticism you find in the media about guys who approach girls is really
being levelled at guys who are utterly uncalibrated: the cat-calls, outright
sexual remarks, shifty looks and the creepy stalkers. Put them all through a
daygame bootcamp and the problem disappears.
 It has to be said that there is also some fair criticism to be made about
the excesses of the pick-up industry online when it comes to filming,
particularly covertly in the bedroom, of course, where they breach a very
basic principle of treating others as you would wish to be treated yourself.
Who would want to be secretly filmed naked, in a situation of extreme
intimacy, in a very private location, entirely without their knowledge? Pick-
up companies have milked the voyeuristic appetite amongst men for some
form of escape or to enjoy seduction vicariously, and this unfortunately
sells, but it also tarnishes the image of daytime approach and seduction
skills and puts off men who are sincere about simply wanting to improve
their dating lives.
For my part there is also something inherently unattractive about doing
daygame merely in order to add notches to the bedpost. Guys do it partly
for the sexual satisfaction, of course, but also, I suspect, in order to inflate
their egos and fill a hole in their soul. It seems akin to guys who go fishing
in a stocked lake and compete with each other to see how full they can get
their nets, or that ugly pursuit of grouse shooting, where farmers pen birds
in cages in a woods and fatten them up, beating them into the air when they
can hardly fly, in order that some rich foreigner can riddle them with lead
shot and boast about his kills at the pub afterwards. The word “game” is an
unfortunately one, and my view is that it is better to see it as a dance.
Romantic interactions with the opposite sex is an art form, not a sport.

In any event, I was always looking to become good with women so that I
was in a better position to attract a great girlfriend. For me daytime
approach was just an amazing gift. Simply astonishing. Awesome.
Unbelievable. And it became part of my routine and part of my life.
Especially when I was daygaming in Poland: I would go out for a walk at
about 3pm, when I was just about done with legal work and my brain was
beginning to fry, and I would come back without a care in the world and so
much better able to deal with whatever work issue I had left behind. It was
such a tonic. Such great therapy!
And the cost of this therapy? Zero. Cheaper than expensive drinks at
bars and entry to high-end clubs. Cheaper than subscriptions on Match.com,
eHarmony and Tinder. No entry fee to a speed-dating event or a singles
night. Even a salsa club costs you money. It was a veritable democratisation
of the dating process! And it even kept you fit. Walking around the streets
for a couple of hours probably lost me more calories than the gym.
For many of us who are more socially-calibrated the terrible problem is
that we have never been on any sort of rite of passage and worse, have
believed all this time that you are either good with women or not, and there
is nothing that can be learned to change that. This is what turns men crazy
and leads to creepiness or downright abuse. The idea is that it is they who
are at fault, that they are to blame and that they are inherently unable to
generate attraction in the opposite sex. They are “no good with women”.
They bottle this all up and they have no idea that it is their upbringing and
society that is to blame, that has robbed them and continues to rob them of
their masculinity in this way.
But now I am soap-boxing.132
So it was that I learned how to integrate daygame into my life. I was
now able to meet girls and generate dates without going anywhere near a
bar, club, dating app or website. I realised that not only had daygame helped
me get dates, and lots of dates at that (far more than the Average Joe) it had
also helped me enjoy those dates and of course escalate on those dates and
do what every man needs to do, which is to lead a girl, whether quickly or
over a gradual period of time, to the bedroom. Because let’s be honest with
ourselves: as men, that is what we want and that is what we are wired up to
do. Whether it is a fling or a long-term relationship, the sexual component
is essential.
In short I started to enjoy the dating and mating game for its own sake.

129 Without flashing his wallet or any of that nonsense, or being in some higher-status position.
130 And you may even in future be in danger of committing a crime, at least in Scotland. This year a
pick-up coach, “Addy A Game” was convicted on 5 counts of abusive and threatening behaviour
likely to cause distress or alarm. As I say in my YouTube video on the subject, I believe he has just
become the latest media scapegoat, just as Julien Blanc was in the US. He covertly filmed girls and
had a criminal record for other crimes and was something of a soft target.
I think it is an exception, but there is always the danger in these politically correct times that the law
might change across the UK. Creating more laws in the grey areas between actual crimes and just bad
behaviour might be well-meaning but in my view it is dangerous. It starts to come close to curbing
free speech and is therefore a subtle form of censorship. From the dating perspective it is in danger of
making guys afraid of approaching women. Which is something that guys need to learn to do and
they are going to make mistakes along the way.
Cat-calling, wolf-whistling and crass sexual remarks are of course loutish and socially dumb things
to be doing, but is turning them into a criminal offence wise?
131 These days I tend to approach a girl simply as I am going about my normal day to day,
admittedly easier for me as I live right in the middle of a city.
132 So I will carry on sop-boxing down here. One of the saddest indictment of the current
predicament is an advert I saw for a new dating website on the London Underground recently that
declared, “This is the End of Dating.” As if a dating website could end something - and would want
to end something - as beautiful and ancient as the dating and mating game. We seem as a society to
want to cut out, or somehow side-step, the whole dating process as if it is some unpleasant nuisance.
But I wonder whether it is not in fact an essential part and the foundation of a good, long-term
relationship.
A romantic, sexual connection in which there is a clear polarity between the man and the woman, the
masculine and the feminine, could be said to be key to a successful partnership, in which this polarity
is honoured. The idea that we can somehow defy nature takes you in the direction of futuristic, brave
new worlds, like Aldous Huxley’s, where the animal in us is not honoured but anaesthetised.

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 Epilogue

Apart from the fact that I owe a huge debt of gratitude to an Oxford Street
department store, I also owe a debt of gratitude to those maverick nutcases
who dragged me out onto the streets of London and put me through my
paces in the most ludicrous, adventurous weekend of my life. Most of all
Andy Yosha, who I never actually met until a year or two after my
adventures, and his company Daygame.com.
Unfortunately, the company, Daygame.com no longer exists. Andy
Yosha, John Matrix and Tom Torero moved on.133 I suspect that it is on
account of the very fact that they were idealists. Certainly Andy was,
especially in terms of his belief in the power of this stuff to change people’s
lives and that it was a rite of passage every man needed to go on before they
could make a real fist of a relationship with a girlfriend. So it was never run
as a proper business, I learned later, and Andy was too focused on
marketing and making nice seminars, videos, and podcasts. It flowered
beautifully but all too briefly. But I think that, particularly on those early
podcasts they used to broadcast on their channel, they had a real vision for
the disenfranchised men of they world. Naively, though, they
underestimated the power of society to close the doors on it all. And that
vision was swallowed back into the world of pure pick-up.
I had been through a journey that had taken me from a clueless Mr Nice
to a guy who could hit on girls, get dates and enjoy a proper sexual
connection, after decades of being in the wilderness. I did not suffer from
incurable personal hang-ups, I was not a victim of childhood problems and I
did not need therapy to effect a cure. I was not gay and nor did I need to
speak to the spirit of my dead step-father. I was a man and I had achieved a
great deal in coming to terms with my sexuality and masculinity.
Moreover a wonderful new world of opportunity had opened up to me
as the result of stumbling on this rather unusual skill. Admittedly I had
acquired it at quite an advanced age, but at least I did go on that rite of
passage I felt I needed. (Perhaps had I been any younger I would have not
thrown myself into it in quite the way I did.)
I had not found a long-term girlfriend and nor had I become a pick-up
artist. But I felt I was so much more free and uninhibited in this area of my
life and there were fresh opportunities everywhere.134
So what were my next steps: was I follow the path of Jon Matrix and
find myself a relationship or was I to follow in Tom Torero’s footsteps, the
lone wolf and maverick, and take a darker and rather different route?
Well, that, of course, is (as they say) another story.

You can find an additional short story on amazon from the Warsaw period
covered in this book called, “Mysterious Duck Girl”. It contains this tale as
well as another, more recent, sexually-charged encounter which was very
similar in terms of the considerable amount of chemistry generated within
the first few moments of meeting. Alternatively, if you would like to be sent
this story electronically email: alex@streetstories.co.uk. I will send you a
free copy and add you as a subscriber to keep you posted on future releases.
Since writing this book I have been on an intensive series of dating
adventures, “Fifty Two First Dates”, which can also be found on amazon,
either as single books or in two volumes:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/52-First-Dates-Parts-1-6-
ebook/dp/B07NGMVPT6/ref=pd_sim_351_5/260-6868050-3432336?
_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B07NGMVPT6&pd_rd_r=da0bd688-86a3-
457c-80bd-
71c983328167&pd_rd_w=pBPh9&pd_rd_wg=19IaP&pf_rd_p=6a30fab2-
6ed5-4400-920a-
f4b0f59e4ff9&pf_rd_r=EBKRW5ZJ3RX6V9B7P3TF&psc=1&refRID=EB
KRW5ZJ3RX6V9B7P3TF

The YouTube channel “52 First Dates”:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEfPBXIIk2n55CSikul4K7Q

If you enjoyed this book please do leave a review! Reviews are gold dust for
writers and any feedback is gratefully received, even a one-liner:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Too-Late-Mate-Daygame-Memoir-
ebook/dp/B08258ZZQH/ref=sr_1_1?
keywords=too+late+mate&qid=1576932850&sr=8-1

133 Although I believe the famous Yad still keeps it going in some shape or form.
134 For an active daygamer it certainly is true that “there are plenty more fish in the sea”.

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