'Just over an hour and a half of conducting 14 speed dates in rapid succession left most of us at the end emotionally gibbering wrecks.'

Lev Eakins experiences speed dating at Greenbelt.

It's almost 7:30pm at the new Iqabar building at Greenbelt on Saturday night and I'm about to experience speed dating for the very first time.

Around 200 single Christians have assembled in the cramped room, separated into three age groups; red: those aged 18-27, blue: 28-39 and yellow: 40+. I'm in the biggest group, the reds, and like my contemporaries am pretending not to be nervous.

Jokes and laughter are heard, often too loudly, by people wearing their least creased shirt or jeans, and an enforced smile. I am beginning to wonder whether my duties to surefish really call for what hellish experience is about to occur, but as I notice some exceptionally beautiful ladies amongst the group I resist the temptation to exit myself for the selfless cause of keeping you the reader informed. I am a saint. (And yes, it does - Ed!)

As with a lot of things with Greenbelt, things are a bit disorganised. This is mostly forgivable due to the high quality of the weekend's contents, but deducts nothing from the uneasy tension amongst us as we constantly strain to hear our organiser's struggle with the PA system.

Moving closer to the mike, turning the volume up, and not standing in front of the speakers are all simple rules to follow when addressing a room, but such rules are not easily followed by our hosts, Christian Connection, possibly because they may be as nervous as us, but slightly surprising as this is the second year that the speed dating has taken place. A couple, who met at the event last year, got married earlier this year! So it can work.

Distraction

Anyway, this does nothing to reassure us, but it does provide a helpful distraction from the current game of assessing how far up or down the eligibility scale we find ourselves in. I'm thinking I rate somewhere near the middle.

As the room quietens to listen we are told we are to form two circles in each group. The inner circle is to be populated by the girls who remain static, the outer circle by the boys who every four minutes shuffle one place clockwise.

There are no tables, drinks or chairs, which provides much discomfort later when parched mouths need water and sore legs need stretching.

The trick is to get an equal number of males and females so nobody is left out. Judging by the massive disparity in numbers at the registration queue many females would have been turned away, but it seems like four of those lucky ladies decided they would have better luck without speed dating leaving four of us men without a date.

We settle out a system that leaves four 'pit lanes' around the circle that provide welcome breaks for us chaps suffering from leg cramp and the thundering impact of what was to follow.

What followed can only be described as being hit by a freight train. Just over an hour and a half of conducting 14 speed dates in rapid succession left most of us at the end emotionally gibbering wrecks.

Fatigue

It wasn't the discomfort of room, or the difficulty in making oneself heard of hearing your date (when so cramped together the noise level was high), but the mental and emotional fatigue of attempting to find out essential information from each date (location, church flavour, current employment, music tastes, etc) and appear interesting and interested.

Of course, they all blurred into one by the end, Ruth, Carla, Kerry, Helen, Christine, all just names that mean nothing anymore. They are all blonde, brunette, dull, interesting, far too young and just about right. How I will figure out which girl it is, if I am matched up will prove impossible without some details other than names.

After about five dates I decided to hang it all and just have a laugh. I simply couldn't make polite conversation about the virtues of the midlands and how much I've enjoyed Greenbelt this year to sound remotely genuine.

Instead Helen (or was it Kori?) and I exchanged tastes in TV comedy which came as a relief to both of us. After we had relaxed a bit we actually got on, and whilst this girl was fantastically remote (at least 100 miles away, I forget where but the nearest was about this distance), and not really my type, I decided to give her a tick in the yes box for nothing more than a pint if I end up in whatever part of the country she lives in sometime.

Chat

The same happened to the next three girls as we drew our friends into conversations that turned more into the sort of chat you have down the pub with your mates and less like a formal date.

But this was not to last, and as the anxiety and pressure slowly layered upon our beaten minds and hearts we reached a stage that can only be described as 'shattered'. I opened my mouth to talk to Mary, Mary opened hers, but what words or nonsense came out of both were incomprehensible and beyond reach.

We struggled on, and managed to make enough sense to both confess our tired state, our strain and lack of strength to fight on. Our eyes could not stop darting around; we both kept stroking back our hair with both hands in order to stay awake and focused, but no good.

We had had it and our hosts could tell. By this time most people were standing not sitting and it was obvious we had reached a point where we could go on no more. I would like to say it ended there and then, but the post-mortem in the pub afterwards confirmed our rapidly declining state and only after a good drink and a couple of hours did I recover enough of my senses to convey any sense of normality.

We won't know for a few days if we have been matched with anyone, but even if we haven't, I won't regret taking part. For this speed dating, with all the strain and discomfort, was such a fascinating experience of human interaction which tugged every known mental and emotional lever, as to leave us in such an unusual state of disorientation it can after all be described as fun.

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