No romance without a GSOH and solvency

Country Living with Francis Farragher

On an evening last week, it was a sign of bad television and of even worse weather, when, with the main part of the Farmers Journal read, I latched onto the inside back page of the magazine section of that publication with the very simple title of ‘Getting in Touch’.

For a mere €30, if you are lonely and single or maybe both, then you can place an advertisement in the page, outlining your little personal CV (curriculum vitae) and giving some basic specifications, as to the company that you desire.

I have to admit that the page was somewhat addictive and while stressing that my interest in the contents was not of any prurient nature, this was a gushing stream of little bubbles of personal snippets, all to be replied to via the good old fashioned box number.

Back the years, the box numbers in newspapers were a real popular means of advertising something in a confidential manner, with the replies being sent to the publication, who then forwarded them back to the sender.

One of the banes of my life in newspaper writing and journalese is to come across abbreviations without the writer explaining what the letters stand for, like CIE standing for Córas Iompair Éireann or NATO for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

However when it comes to lonely heart pages there are certain abbreviations that are taken as ‘a given’. N/S and N/D are obvious enough I suppose – non-smoker and non-drinker – but not being a regular reader of such pages, I was a bit flummoxed by the GSOH one.

As with all queries in the high-tech world of 2015, Google came to the rescue citing its regular usage in the ‘find a friend’ section of newspapers and magazines.

‘Good sense of humour’ is the right answer, although some of the alternative usages might also be appropriate in these pages such as, ‘good salary, own house’ and ‘good standard of hygiene’.

Most of the ‘Getting in Touch’ CVs had the GSOH attached with one male (40s) in the Midlands area describing himself as ‘a single, solvent, full-time farmer’ putting himself into the slightly higher V(very)GSOH category.

This guy, had by far and away, the biggest quantity of personal detail in his advertisement, and for the life of me, after reading it, I couldn’t quite figure out how he had escaped the clutches of the romantic females around the Westmeath, Offaly and Longford regions.

He was ‘intelligent, smart, good looking, a practising Catholic, trustworthy, energetic, had a dislike of arrogance and was a lover of travel, music, and dining out. As extra bonuses, he was a N/S and just an O/D (occasional drinker) while he had no baggage (a wife and kids, I presume).

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.