It seemed a strange place to try and attract the lonely creme de la creme.

The High Society Matchmaking Club ad was plastered almost on the roof of the metro. It told of an elite dating club, starting price 10,000 rubles, which has psychologists, makeup artists for the uglier elite and a psychodramatist, whatever that is, who works with "people who want their lives to be full of love, joy and pleasure."

And who will then laugh at the end of every sentence till the end of time. Every sentence. Tee hee.

Now, I'm not saying that Moscow's high-as-a-kite society doesn't use the metro -- they do -- but strictly when they are in Paris or London.

If you look at their web site (www.vs-clab.ru, the clab meaning club as in clab sandwich) you see that each clab client gets their own svakha, or matchmaker. The web site has 24 pictures of them, all women, with first name and patronymic listed underneath. All the photos look remarkably similar.

You can see that the pictures were done in a studio, so 90 percent of them are sitting on the same chair, with the same laptop in front of them and with their fingers poised in front as if to write the same urgent love letter on your behalf.

Each of the matchmakers has their own rather smaltzy pitch about finding your partner.

Serendipitously, I read something similar on the back page of Komsomolskaya Pravda on Thursday.

"Do you want girls to run toward you when they see you, and sometimes run after you? Do you want them to impatiently wait for you at all times and in any kind of weather?"

"Come and work as a bus driver at your local bus depot."

Back at the clab, Inessa Borisovna seems to have her own chair, although Olga Nikolayevna does have more than 30 thank-you letters from happy customers.

The web site has a computer graphic of a man and a woman sitting opposite each other on what is presumably a date. He looks like a keen, young Moscow Times journalist, she like somebody who wouldn't go out with him even if they were of the same species. The pair sit so far apart that they could be in different time zones.

The club's application form offers a number of choices for the lovelorn: marriage, flirt and sponsorstvo, or sponsorship.

When one of the svakha answered the phone, she wasn't too keen on going into details on the latter.

"Sponsorship is for somebody who wants to be sponsored or somebody who would like to sponsor," she said.

I do not understand. What is this sponsorship you speak of?

"Perhaps you can come into the office on Saturday," she said.