AS time goes by, there are things I'm not allowed to write about. When the kids were little, I could get away with almost anything. But now they're getting older, I'm censored on the grounds that it's just too embarrassing.

I'm therefore not at liberty to tell you how a young man knocked on the door recently and stumbled over his words before finally asking my 13-year-old daughter if she'd go out with him.

I'm not permitted to reveal how she simply said "No, sorry," and closed the door on his hopes.

Part of me wanted to run after him and tell him to stay away from my little girl until she was at least 35 and he'd got a job with prospects. Another part of me wanted to tell him how brave I thought he was.

Anyway, because I'll be in big trouble if I go any further, I'll just have to stick to the time I plucked up courage to ask a girl out for the first time.

She worked in the same office and I knew her quite well but I'd never quite got round to popping the question.

I wasn't half as brave as the young man at my front door. Every time I came close to asking, my confidence failed me and I'd change the subject at the last second.

I decided I had to do some home-work and discovered that she was into heavy metal music. It wasn't to my taste but who cares? It was my route to paradise.

I managed to get hold of a couple of tickets to see a band called Iron Maiden at Newcastle City Hall, took the bull by the horns, and telephoned to ask if she fancied coming with me.

"I didn't know you liked Iron Maiden," she said.

"Oh yeah, big style," I replied, praying she wouldn't ask me to name any of their songs. Luckily, she didn't. She just said: "Yeah, I'd love to."

This all happened more than 20 years ago so it's all a bit of a blur, but I remember that she looked fantastic that night. We had seats near the front and we were surrounded by people wearing leather jackets and shaggy, long hair.

"This is going to be great," she said and my hopes were rising fast.

Iron Maiden hit the stage running, to the loudest noise I've heard in my life. At once, everyone in the hall started head-banging so that their hair flopped over their faces to a throbbing beat I couldn't grasp.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I thought to myself, and started head-banging furiously, pretending I was having the time of my life instead of having my ear drums perforated.

Suddenly, white clouds of dry ice hissed out from the front of the stage and within seconds we were shrouded in a thick fog. I turned to look at my date, continuing to head-bang like a nodding dog on a particularly bumpy car journey.

Unseen in the gloom, she had turned to look at me. Who knows, she might even have been closing in for a kiss. I'll never know because I inadvertently head-butted her on the bridge of her pretty nose.

My most vivid memory of the evening is the dry ice clearing and seeing a dark red trickle of blood seeping from her right nostril.

Surprising as it may seem, we never went out again.

LOVE TIPS

WITH Valentine's Day just around the corner, I've been getting some advice on chatting up women from my 12-year-old son.

He sees himself as something of an expert even though as far as I know he hasn't actually found himself a girlfriend yet. All he's managed is a poster of pop star Rachel Stevens on his bedroom wall.

"You need some new chat-up lines at your age, Dad," he said and went on to tell me his best one.

It involves going up to a girl and uttering the words: "If I was going to rearrange the alphabet, I'd put u and I together."

It wasn't really clear why he felt I needed any chat-up lines, given that I've had a wife for nearly 18 years, but he gave me a few alternatives.

"Are you a parking ticket - because you've got fine written all over you," was his second best.

And if that didn't work, I was advised to try asking a girl how much a polar bear weighs. When she said she didn't know, I was supposed to say: "Neither do I but I thought it might break the ice."

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