Have you lost hope

Are you sick of slogging away on sites such as Match.com and eHarmony.com to find the partner of your dreams Or at least the partner who will put up with your dead lizard collection, your back hair, and your difficult morning breath

Then perhaps it is time to be honest with yourself. Perhaps it is time to look in the mirror and decide that you should be at the Ugly Bug Ball. Or, more accurately, on it.

The Ugly Bug Ball is a dating site for those who are aesthetically challenged. That is the creators' description, not mine. Though I am surprised that this site doesn't already include at least 95 percent of society.

"We deal in reality", the site says. So for those who wonder whether a site for the more Shreky (and, who knows, techy) has no chance of success, might I reveal that the Ugly Bug Ball has just announced its first engagement

The Telegraph tells me that Tom Clifford and Janine Walker, two of the Ugly Bug Ball's members, are to be betrothed.

Some of the people who have signed up for the site.

If you are cynical enough to imagine that it has taken some time for them to become used to their unique features, then you are to be uniquely pitied. For it was only in August that Clifford, 36, wrote to Walker that he had "a face that makes children cry." (Personally, I feel he was using a technique known as "underpromise and overdeliver.")

Walker, 31, offered the Telegraph a moving tribute to Clifford and to their relationship: "I appreciate that Tom isn't Brad Pitt, but then I'm no Angelina Jolie either."

The Ugly Bug Ball is so pleased to herald the site's first engagement that it has offered the beautiful, happy couple a honeymoon-- in an Ugly Bug caravan in Wales.

However, perhaps the most surprising, human, and moving aspect of this site resides in the sort of people who believe they qualify as ugly. While I wouldn't dream of offering a desperate cliche about beauty being in the eye of the beholder, it seems clear that there is some extremely peculiar beholding going on in the world.

Vogue has a lot to answer for. As does the National Enquirer.

It might make some wonder how it is that certain people behold themselves as beautiful. Yes, they're the folks who put stunning pictures of themselves up on Match.com and eHarmony in the hope that no one will notice that, in real life, they bear rather more resemblance to, well, character actors.

The Ugly Bug Ball surely represents something more real and, simultaneously, refined. One can only wish Clifford and Walker lasting happiness. For richer, for poorer. In sickness and in health. In the heat of the night and in the cold light of morning.