Red Cross Blogs

First aid flirts get hands on

By Mark Cox
October 22, 2009 at 2:46 pm

Remember the good old days when meeting a potential sweetheart was simply a matter of going down to your local bar on a Friday night? (No, me neither.) Well: changed days, my friends. Hot on the heels of speed dating, singles cruises, team dating – even singles nights at the supermarket, for crying out loud – comes the latest wheeze: singles CPR training, courtesy of the American Red Cross.

It’s true. Our American friends – in my  experience always unnervingly enthusiastic about throwing themselves into cringe-worthy situations, and refreshingly free of British reserve – are gathering regularly to bat their eyelashes at each other while a Red Cross volunteer pummels and slavers all over a plastic resus dummy.

Less elevated minds – mine, for example – might be quick to presume that first aid instruction and badly-lit community centres would not constitute the ideal conditions for finding love. You couldn’t be more wrong. The class has been a runaway hit – and apparently several attendees have already graduated from handling the CPR dummy to manhandling each other.

My other instant suspicion on hearing of this singles night was, I thought, an obvious one. The meetings, surely, would be packed full of socially inept, never been kissed, still-living-with-mum nerdy males, with nary a woman in sight.

But once again the tectonic plates seem to be shifting, leaving Cox floundering about in a changed world where he increasingly seems to lack any form of reliable social compass.

Incredibly, it turns out that 80 per cent of the attendees are women. They’ve even had to put out a special request for men, stating: ‘if you’re a single guy, you’re almost guaranteed to have great luck landing a date’ and advising them to ‘pucker up for some serious mouth-to-mouth’.

Changed days, indeed. With all this in mind, I’ve been wondering if any readers met their significant other through the Red Cross? Oh, do tell.

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Tags: cpr, First aid, romance, training, UK, volunteer

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 2:46 pm and is filed under First aid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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