Trains, smoking areas, and other liminal places where you glimpse the love of your life you'll never see again

YOUR beautiful one true love has a habit of turning up in certain places then disappearing from your life forever. Here’s where to feel heartbroken over what could have been.

Trains

On your commute you can see as many as six loves of your life. On the Tube, pretend to be fascinated by the vitamin advert above their head and sneak fleeting glances before wistfully imagining the future you’d have had together if they weren’t getting off to do whatever their life consists of in Ladbroke Grove.

Smoking areas

A club’s smoking area is famously the natural habitat of cool sexy people, and you’re sure the James Dean lookalike you shared a cigarette with after six tequilas was your true love. Devastatingly, he vanished shouting ‘Wahey!’ when he heard the DJ play Come on Eileen, so you copped off with someone more like Marlon Brando in the ‘pies’ stage of his career.

Coffee shops

You meet your soulmate twice in a café. First, there’s the hot barista who talks you into ordering an unimaginably expensive frappuccino. Then, when you sit down, the world’s most beautiful human is working on a laptop nearby. You expect they’re doing something creative, and must be an incredibly deep and romantic person, until you go to the toilet and see they’ve been playing Minesweeper for an hour.

Social media

You see more beautiful strangers on the internet in ten minutes than a medieval peasant would have seen in their life. Michelangelo would have smashed his David with a hammer if he’d clicked on the #hotguy Instagram tag. Unfortunately, you accidentally scroll away from your future spouse and they’re lost to the digital ether forever. At least in medieval times they got eaten by a pack of wolves and you had some closure.

Airports

Aim to fall in love after security. You don’t want your true love to witness you taking your shoes off – you’ve got gross sweaty airport feet – and explaining why you’ve got that tub of vaseline. Wait until later, then impress them by pretending you can afford a Rolex in Duty Free.

The zoo

Somewhat niche, but there’s nothing more romantic than seeing someone in a dark green t-shirt and shorts throw raw meat to a bunch of ravening animals. It’d be like going out with Virginia McKenna in Born Free, and she’s lovely. So if you were the zookeeper feeding the lions at Whipsnade Zoo on 3rd August 2016, please text 07700 900102.

Man mocks 'safe spaces' from very safe space indeed

A MAN has derided the idiotically woke idea of ‘safe spaces’ from an extremely safe location in his Cotswolds home.

Norman Steele went to his basement study in his large house in a tranquil village to go online and decry the new-fangled need for vulnerable people to feel secure.

Steele, who lives in a low-crime area but has a state-of-the-art burglar alarm, said: “The trouble with these self-styled ‘marginalised’ snowflakes is that they don’t understand danger builds character. 

“Do you think the Somme was a safe space? Or Dunkirk? Of course not. I know. I was there. In the cinemas, watching the films.”

Retiree Steele, who no longer has to deal with even workplace stress, castigated transgender groups in particular for wanting to congregate in places where there was unanimous agreement they should be allowed to exist. 

He said: “We never had safe spaces in my day, thank goodness. My private school was such an unsafe space that its former headmaster was sent down for 15 years on multiple counts of child abuse.

“Anyway, I must go and lock all the doors. There’s been a trans crime wave according to the Telegraph and you can’t be too careful.”