Extra-marital affairs profit flower trade

An interesting e-mail made it through the corporate spam filters to arrive in my Inbox this morning.

Together with a chance to buy a year's supply of Viagra and an interesting investment opportunity in Nigeria, there was an e-mail from IllicitEncounters.com - "the UK's largest and longest running extra-marital dating site".

Having been married for less than a year, I was not about to avail of their services. (Give it time, I hear you say!)

But I was intrigued by their claim that people having extra-marital affairs in the UK spend around £60m a year on cut flowers.

Apparently that amounts to over 2.5% of the £2.2bn fresh cut flower market, with men who take mistresses spending an average £120 a year on flowers. That compares with just £41 for those who are not having affairs.

How can they possibly know this? And who is it who is actually having all these affairs and spending all this money on flowers?

According to IllicitEncounters.com representative Sara Hartley, it is typically "high-powered businessmen with a great deal of expendable income". So that presumably rules out most farmers....