This is a recent personals ad from the highbrow London Review of Books: "I like my women the way I like my kebab. Found by surprise after a drunken night out and covered in too much tahini. Before too long I'll have discarded you on the pavement of life, but until then you're the perfect complement to a perfect evening. Man, 32. Rarely produces winning metaphors."

For seven years the LRB personals column has been producing surreal haikus of the heart like this. It began with "67-year-old disaffiliated flaneur, jacked-up on Viagra and looking for a contortionist trumpeter" and has never looked back. It has fans from Australia to the US; there are bloggers devoted to it and now an anthology of some of the best ads is planned for later this year.

This is cache, read story here