Last week, The Times reported that an elderly gentleman in Hampshire was advertising for a drinking companion. Having recently moved into a nursing home a few miles away from his village, Jack Hammond, 88, has yet to come across a soulmate in his new local. And so his son, Mike, has placed an advert in a local shop window. “Wanted: Person to accompany elderly gentleman to the pub,” the advert reads. “Possibly two evenings a week, probably two hours per evening. £7 per hour, plus expenses.”

As Hammond Sr holds two degrees - one in physics and one in maths - the average pub chat (rain; A-roads; whether all bar-nuts have wee on them or just the ones in “gentlemen's clubs”) won't quite do. Hammond's preferred topics are, apparently, golf, the day-to-day running of a power station, and his experiences in Kuala Lumpur during the Second World War.

Clearly, this all - plus the fact that he doesn't want a woman for his pub companion - puts me out of the running. I think my top-end of degree-standard power-station chitty-chat would be “So, is there a big ON/OFF switch, then?” I, alas, will not be answering that ad.

But what I would like to try to do instead, is answer the question that the ad raises.* After all, I'm sure that there are those who will look askance at the idea of someone advertising, and paying for, a drinking companion. I can imagine half-a-dozen joyless harridans in the Daily Mail using this as a jumping-off point to bewail the young, the old, modern Britain, pubs, money, insects and the concept of linear time. And they would, as usual, be touching a slight, communal, nerve. There's a part of us that feels that pleasant conversation down the pub should, surely, be free. If you're going to have a desultory evening of moribund pub chit-chat and slightly disappointing beer, then we feel that everyone there should be losing money on the deal, not running up a profit. And should things get heated towards the end of the evening, and one of your party ends up in a gutter, being shivved by a “yoof”, you don't want to worry about paying him overtime for bleeding as well.

But then, if you look at our culture dispassionately, we do have an almost random concept of when it is, and is not, acceptable to pay for human interaction. For instance, it's absolutely fine to pay people to spend all day caring for our children. This is a bedrock belief of middle-class Britain. We would no more seriously question someone paying to love our children - for hours at a time - than we would belittle someone's use of Ocado. Yet we believe that it's wrong to pay people for sex - which has far fewer long-term psychological ramifications, takes only about 20 minutes and very rarely involves important things such as, say, explaining where Father Christmas comes from.

Similarly, we will pay people to remove faeces from our colons, blackheads from our noses, and hair from our buttocks - but yet, somehow, among all socially acceptable commerce, it seems a bit, well, inappropriate to advertise for some conversation. If Jack Hammond hadn't asked for a drinking companion but simply asked instead if he could drink half a Fosters during a psychotherapy session, it wouldn't have made page 15 of The Times. Yet because he wants to pay to talk in a pub, the story has gone all around the world. I don't wish to seem faux naïf, but really, we are quite an odd species, aren't we?

Anyway, emboldened by Hammond's admirably no-nonsense approach to getting some pretty specific social scenarios going, I am considering advertising for applicants to fill several key gaps in my own life. These are, currently, as follows:

Someone with a car and a genuine interest in spending three hours in The Market Place at Ikea, looking at different sizes of candle. Since my husband's impressively decisive final statement on Ikea, at the end of the Absent Skavdor Bookcase Crisis of 1999 (“I love you, but if you ever make me come here again, there'll be murder”), this has been a sorely felt vacancy. Yes, theoretically I could just go there and back in a taxi - but that £40 fare is a potential bag-full of Skov, Prot, Lav and Plopp, and the miser in me just can't weather it. You can't take a £20 cab back from somewhere where a plate of meatballs is 99p; that's just wrong.

A dancer eminent in the techniques of jazz, tap, street, hip-hop, disco, Latin, Lindy-hop, Northern Soul, R&B and whatever the hell it was that Kate Bush was doing who is willing to teach me wicked moves when we're both five Breezers to the wind. In my front room. While dancing solely to the soundtrack from Hairspray. This vital human pivot of my emotional wellbeing still hasn't materialised. Private dance instructors are apt to listen to half my employee requirements, then pirouette quietly away from the phone. Without a handsomely remunerated dance-friend, my dancing style is limited to a generic Indie Shuffle, punctuated by sporadic outbursts of unseemly Janice-Battersby-as-Björk-on-Celebrity-Stars-in-Their-Eyes “interpretive dance”. I'm attending a wedding in July. I will do drunken dancing. I know this is a situation that can't go on.

Someone indistinguishably similar to Gok Wan from How To Look Good Naked. This boon to my existence will, for £7 an hour, stand on the landing when I'm getting ready for a big night out, actively enjoy the fact that I'm trying on 15 different outfits and scream “You look FEROCIOUS, girlfriend” every time I emerge in a new “look”. Even if that look should consist of a 1982 all-in-one motocross jumpsuit, neon-pink driving gloves and a very, very tiny top hat, like the one Slash from Guns N'Roses wears, at a jaunty angle.

Yes. I shall be placing ads in The Lady on the morrow.

*Mmm, I was quite impressed by that link, too.

Playing a corpse in the dead of night
A burglar who broke into a funeral parlour in Spain tried to fool police by playing dead. Neighbours of the business in Burjassot alerted police when they heard the door being forced in the night. When the police arrived the burglar lay on a table in the “viewing chamber” and pretended to be a corpse. He convinced the police until they saw him breathing (always a deal-breaker in a pretending-to-be-a-corpse scenario) and arrested him. They still have no idea what the 23-year-old was trying to steal. “There is nothing in a funeral parlour,” a spokesman said. Come on, guys! This was no burglar. He wasn't in there to steal anything. Have you read no psychological thrillers in the past 20 years? Have ITV1's prime-time dramas taught you nothing? He was there because he liked lying around dead bodies, pretending to be dead. The answer is staring you in the face. Well, lying on a slab with its eyes closed, pretending to be dead.

What a conception
The pregnant man in the US (a sentence I both didn't and did think I'd ever write) has had an ultrasound on Oprah. He really is pregnant. It is not a TV prank by Ashton Kutcher but the miracle of a new life. Though it's understandable why the two might become confused. Now I must admit that when I first heard about this, even my peerlessly liberal, chillax, “Hey, maaaan” attitude was a little challenged. A woman who became a transgender man, married a woman then inseminated himself with donor sperm and got pregnant? Make your mind up which toilet you belong in, already. But you know what? If this guy has the balls* to invent a totally new kind of human being - transgender men who get pregnant - and be the first, wholly on his own, to figure out how to make it work, then the absolute best of British luck. Really. What a fascinating, incredible, admirable pioneer. You go, girlfriend! Er, I mean boyfriend!

*Obviously that was a bad choice of phrase.

caitlin.moran@thetimes.co.uk

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