I've been out with middle-class men, I've been out with working-class men, and I've been out with men with nae class at all. I've tried all sorts, driven by the maxim, so many interesting specimens, so little time. It's very hard to know your ideal beef, especially when your heart is a massive intrigue of prejudices and your body a tumultuous sea of internecine desire. Well, that's my excuse anyway.

Lightning has never flashed with a middle-class man. I've been at the receiving end of the tender mercies of a flasher, but, then, my school uniform was rather attractive. I would say, in casting a scathing eye over my romantic career, which, believe me, merits a second glance if only in incredulous wonder, that I have made mistakes. Mine is a catalogue of hideous effigies and crimes of passion. There are no skeletons in my closet, not enough room, what with all my clothes and hats and everything. But I have a knacker's yard of corpses out the back. A full-scale set from the Hammer House of Horror.

At my best I'm merely human, at my worst I'm nearly human. And I have, during my rugged romantic adventures, amassed a library of thoughts, a nursery of needs, and a catastrophe of desires. I have travelled through dweebsville and dorksville and have been made an honorary citizen of both cities. I am a mascot for the confused and bewildered. Most women have a degree in men, but we know nothing.

I say all this to explain my bigotry. I am not a normal poisson, but I believe my taste in men has a certain commonality. I like to read trash and for this same reason have found I have a kindred spirit in Gwyneth Paltrow. Not to worry that I am about to quote a Hollywood star, I might masticate awhile if I thought I had any credibility, however I truly feel I have none to lose. A little undernourished in body but not in mind, Paltrow recently declared she could resist anything but a working-class guy. I'm the same. Something about the way he calls you ''doll'', and asks you to slip him a tenner before you walk into the bookies.

Being attracted to working-class men is a mysterious tendency and somewhat reckless to admit, because one is immediately laid open to charges of slumming it. Or, at the very least, of being patronising. I don't think finding strong, somewhat mute, chancers sexy is condescending at all. The problem is that

middle-class men don't have attitude, they have respectable jobs.

Gwynnie and I are vindicating what the female sex has known for ages; that the middle-class male is being emasculated. He is a pen-pusher or a software enthusiast. The successful men of this era are nerds, like Bill Gates. Modern man is a careful, obsequious geek, boringly obsessed with house prices, gardening gadgets, and the greater evils

of pension fund management.

We are all trying to cover our ass. That guy who took poetry into

the refectory to impress you is now reading the Financial Times. You married him.

No wonder we eye up the plumber. Working-class men are becoming a precious resource, the last bastion

of masculinity. Nothing like a

man being simple, practical, and uncomplicated. Nothing like a

Sex God who knows what to do with his hands.

My personal piece of tottie is the son of a miner, so he has exceptional

working-class credentials. He hasn't forgotten his roots, and has more than a whiff of the old testosterone about him. This is attractive. Technology and the needs of the market-place have not ruined him. A keyboard is no place for a man.

Bourgeois babes are suckers for conversation as a means to intimacy, and tedious types think dates should be stimulating, a play or dinner and the GFT. Something to educate you out of seduction and into the futility of stockings. Something to make you feel impotent as a vamp and as earnest as student.

Women, by the way, don't want to be taken out, they just want to be taken. I fail to be impressed by the thinking man. Mr Rainbow Braces

is only good for taking out the rubbish and going to the bar; how he chooses to implement such tasks is of no consequence.

I much prefer the swagger of brawn over brain. The middle classes spend an inordinate amount of time chasing ''the relationship'', and trying to sanitise the sex war, the conquest of which makes life and love especially interesting. Meanwhile, working-class women sensibly go to the bingo while football grounds accommodate their men. Guys were never intended to be our pals. The self-help and counselling establishment would have us believe that to speak is to bond.

However, the benefits of talking have been much exaggerated. The importance of having an intellectual rapport is the biggest con since pot pourri. One always says the wrong thing. Working-class men are scarily macho in a world geared toward matching couples through spare-time activities, such as golf or handcraft workshops. I'm more a Cookson fan than a Trollope. Well, I'll leave that up to you.