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Spank Me, Mr Darcy

Despite living in Australia, I check in regularly with the BBC news website which, despite its faults, contains a rich vein of useful news and interesting frippery.

In the latter category, I noticed a piece in its culture section in The many lives of Mr Darcy. My tutor at university was a fan of the critic F R Leavis, and I was readily persuaded that Jane Austen is indeed one of the really great writers in the English language there has ever been, ever. The piece was about adaptions of Pride and Prejudice. My attention was caught by a reference to a spin-off called Spank me, Mr Darcy.

I own a Kindle, which is great. I am pleased, of course, to have physical copies of all sorts of great literature, but the Kindle is great for going on holiday and also for downloading – quickly, cheaply and painlessly – things that might well turn out to be complete tripe. So I downloaded Spank me, Mr Darcy.

Before writing this thing off as complete tripe, I should say that

Speed dating strategy

Now here is a question. Suppose you want to get married, and you go to a speed dating session. How do you maximise your chances of marrying the best person you will meet? There is a simple rule here: if you move on from one person to the next, you destroy any prospect of marrying the person you have just moved on from. And, of course, when you start you have no idea of knowing who you are going to meet. And continuing to keep it simple, let’s suppose that any proposal you make will be accepted.

A standard strategy is this: you reject the first few people that you meet, regardless of whether you like them or not. Then what you do after that is to marry the first person you meet who is better than anyone you have met before.

But how many is a few? Is it 10% of the people you are going to meet? There is a danger here of setting your benchmark too low; it is quite likely that