I have promised 27 previous girlfriends that I would take them to the ballet. At least 27, actually, maybe more. And I have never previously succumbed, in the end. What happened on each occasion was something like this: I ask the girl what she would like to do some evening and she replies, oh, do you know, I’d really love to go the ballet. And, it being those heady early stages of a relationship, I say, wow, honey, the ballet, I couldn’t think of anything better. I adore ballet. How marvellous. Tell you what, why don’t we spend the afternoon shopping for clothes in Harvey Nichols, grab a quick salad or risotto at some babe-friendly restaurant, take in the ballet and then end the night at China White’s? How does that sound? An evening, truly, to be cherished. I can’t wait. I’ll book the tickets tomorrow.

And then, the next day, I explain that the ballet, sadly, is sold out until June 2016 at the absolute earliest. But never mind, because there’s a new Scorsese on at the Odeon and we can grab a steak at Chez Gérard on the way home.

So I’ve never been. And all of this is quite unfair because during those early stages of the relationship the girls promised loads of stuff to me and always delivered. There was no disingenuousness involved, as it turned out. Dutifully they trooped down to the Den to watch Millwall, just as they said they would. One girl dutifully trooped down to the Den on a vile, stormy night in late October to watch a goalless draw with Huddersfield Town. Not only that, but the evening was made all the more memorable for her when somebody urinated down her leg. Now they don’t do that at the Royal Opera House. Or maybe they do.

I wouldn’t know, because I’ve never been there before. But this week I went. This week I went to see Giselle, and I went for you.

On the way there, the cab driver saw me shivering with trepidation in the back of his car and asked me what I was doing for the evening. So I told him. I’m going to see the famous ballet Giselle, I said.

“You f***ing mug,” he replied and laughed long and loud.

But maybe it’s time I went to the ballet. I’m too old for all this laddish philistinism. Plus my two young sons, Tyler and Wilder, have both been to ballet lessons (at their mother’s behest) and I want to empathise. Ballet lessons have meant that when they’re playing football they ponce around the pitch like great big jessies, with their arms glued rigidly to their sides and their little hands sticking out at 90-degree angles. That’s what ballet has done for them. So maybe I should see what it can do for me.

The Royal Opera House is a very beautiful and captivating building, certainly far too beautiful for the legions of mewing bourgeoisie who have made it their home from home. Very quickly I begin to pick up the etiquette, and two important points register immediately: (a) You can’t smoke in the Royal Opera House or anywhere NEAR the Royal Opera House; and (b) it is not the done thing to play Space Impact on your mobile telephone whilst the people are dancing, no matter how numbingly, crushingly bored you might be. Nor even if you turn the sound right down so that you can’t hear the missiles hit the huge sea-snake thing on level four.

Nor should you fidget too much, scratch, cough or, in a last resort for physical succour and assurance, begin fondling your genitals. Or, for that matter, anyone else’s. You sit still, smile appreciatively and clap when everybody around you starts to clap — which is, on average, once every 11 minutes. I know this because I timed it.

Anyway, let me tell you about Giselle. Giselle is a comely peasant girl who has fallen in love with the Count Albrecht. However, she doesn’t know it’s the Count Albrecht because, in order to conceal his high birth, Albrecht has told her he, too, is a peasant. Call me cynical, but I’m not sure that’s how people behave in the real world. Giselle’s mum wants her to marry a rather annoying, bearded forester, for reasons that are never adequately explained — and it is this forester who reveals to Giselle the true identity of her paramour. Being a girly, she is maddened with shock by this revelation and stabs herself to death with a sword — though with insufficient gusto in my opinion. But, then, I always was a fan of Brian De Palma. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if she had used a pneumatic drill.

In act two, more people die and everybody is maddened with shock and grief. There are, here and there, ghosts.

Now, this plot is either infantile or timeless, depending on your perspective, I suppose. But we are not really here for the plot. And we’re certainly not here for Adolphe Adam’s cloying and over-familiar score, which has about it the unmistakable and hideous whiff of light comic opera. No, we’re here for the spectacle — and the dancing.

And you have to say, there certainly is spectacle. Sir Peter Wright’s production is set in a reassuringly childish Germanic forest glade, straight out of Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm. There are rustic huts, peasants in jerkins and pixies. In truth, much of the pleasure to be gleaned from Giselle is redolent of the nursery room, being, of course, both inarticulate and over-expressive. But, no matter, there is some pretty dancing.

I was momentarily — but only momentarily — captured by the exquisite grace and economy of movement of the ensemble and, particularly, Leanne Benjamin as Giselle and Jonathan Cope, CBE (see, it’s not just footballers and soap stars and civil servants who get the honours) as her thwarted lover. But it was difficult to engage with the piece emotionally, which is what I assume one is meant to do.

I’m not sure why this is so. Giselle is a romantic ballet, conceived not long after the deaths of those romantic poets who still have a pretty large claim on my affections. And Giselle is thematically from the same neck of the woods. It is not such a long hop from the philosophy of Giselle to The Eve of St Agnes, Hyperion, or La Belle Dame Sans Merci. So my disaffection is hard to explain.

Perhaps it is the relentless, exhausting busyness of the production that so estranges. There is altogether too much action, too many people running and jumping and pointing all at once, a cacophony of action and a concomitant lack of space and tranquility. We need a little time to reflect, but we don’t get it. Ballet is, perhaps, the most immediate of all art forms. And, therefore, also the most immediately gone.

Certainly, little I had seen clung to me as I made my way out into the rainy streets of Covent Garden, desperate for a large glass of alcohol, a cigarette and a warm place to scratch.

Anyway, I have a confession to make. A number of years ago I went to see a Michael Clarke ballet and thoroughly enjoyed it. The thing was held in some rundown rathole near King’s Cross station and, possibly because of that, one was captured by the performance rather than by the agreeable fripperies that accompany a performance at the Royal Opera House. I didn’t on that occasion take a girlfriend with me. I ’m not entirely sure why — maybe perversity.

But it’s a little churlish, I suppose, to judge an entire art form on the scanty evidence of two performances in the past ten years. So perhaps I should go to the ballet again. Certainly I shall continue to tell women that I am in thrall to the ballet and wish for nothing more than an evening dolled up to the nines in the Royal Opera House. For some reason, women seem to think that men who admit a penchant for ballet are sensitive and, therefore , suitable mating material. Or they think they’re loaded, and suitable mating material. One of the two. And by the time they’ve found out the truth, on both counts, it’s usually too late.