By Catherine Portland

Crammed under a particularly vile armpit on the tube this morning, I found myself contemplating one of life's great questions. Why is it that girls only ever bump into the objects of their eternal desire when they have spinach in their teeth/great weeping cold sores/some other form of temporary yet severe physical deformity?

When we're looking good, the horrible (and clearly male) hand of fate ensures we never come within a mile of a "chance" meeting with our intended target. Even when we travel the same route to get to work, sit in offices 20 metres apart and arrive at the same time, we never find ourselves staring at each other smoulderingly over copies of the Metro.

On a good hair day, I can be guaranteed to bump into everyone I'd rather not on the way to work, including all the people to whom I owe money. Trek through the rainforests of Borneo and you are sure to round a bend and find yourself face to face with that girl you never liked at school. But a chance meeting with your beloved when you don't have a giant bogey on your face? Not in a month of Sundays.

Clearly, needs must and girls have been known to take matters into their own hands. Who hasn't got off at the wrong tube/bus/train stop to walk "casually" past their beloved house? But WHERE ARE THEY? Are they ever conveniently popping out for a pint of milk or doing the gardening? No, they are not.

A friend has taken her surveillance techniques a step further, developing a web of female office spies who will alert her by text if her target moves more than ten metres in any direction. This gives her the opportunity to sprint off and arrive at the suspected location before him, thus employing the age-old "I can't be your stalker if I got here first" theory (and haven't we all).

It just seems a shame that such measures are necessary. We are all busy people, and lurking furtively, when it's done with conviction, takes up a lot of your day. There are far more productive things we could be doing, like discussing afore-mentioned targets with endlessly patient friends.

But this is clearly a battle we women must continue to wage. In our efforts to snare our beloveds, fate must be given a gentle nudge, or a hearty kick up the backside, as the case may be.