I’m going to a festival this weekend.
'Amazing, so look, I’ll tell you what you need,' says my very young, festival expert friend, and without pausing for breath she launches into a list:
'A hat for the sun, waterproofs in case it rains, well let’s face it, it’s gonna rain, so definitely waterproofs, wellies, flipflops, some cereal bars just in case you get hungry because although there will be food everywhere sometimes, you know, like you wake in the middle of the night and you’re just starving and you just have to have something to eat and you don’t want to be shlepping out of the campsite looking for munchies…'
(Munchies? I think, no – no stop right there girlie, I won’t be having that kind of snack attack, but she’s still talking)
'…toilet paper, moist wipes for your body, cleansing wipes for your face, suntan lotion, insect repellant and, oh wait a minute I must just go to the loo, I’ve been dying to go since I got in and…'
Finally, a word in edgeways from me as I tell her that I’ll ring back later but…
'No, silly, you’re on the mobile and so that means you can come with me… a blow up mattress, a sleeping bag, some of those eye patchy things if the early morning light bothers you (the voice becomes muffled and echoey as she enters an enclosed space and then there is, embarrassingly, a slight tinkling sound as I realise that while other people have phone sex, I’m having phone peeing)… lots of water, she says on cue…and'
there’s a slurred sound to her voice. She has me on speaker phone which is somewhat redundant since I can’t actually speak and she seems to be brushing her teeth, so neither can she but still the words come…
'…a mobile phone so you can keep in touch with your friends and lots of protection...'
Protection? What the hell do I need with protection? I’m a camping virgin and the only thing I'm going to bed with is a torch,' I protest while she spits.
'No, no, you don’t understand, you might get lucky – it’s definitely a possibility, lots of blokes, all loved up, chilled, a bit pissed, definitely take protection. You don’t want to get the chance and then find out you haven’t come prepared.'
'Trust me, I won’t need it.'
'Trust me, you will,' she said.
I mentioned this to my other abandonee friend Eve as we were on our way to an Art’s Council thing at the Hayward Gallery - an exhibition which was everything I hate about the debate between craft and fine art, plus speeches. Upstairs at the Hayward there are two rooms in which ‘makers’ have crocheted a whole coral reef.
As I remarked to Eva, some women have even less to do in the evenings than we have.
She is internet dating since her husband left a year ago for a life of gay abandonment leaving her try and pick up her femininity from the kerb where he kicked it as he minced out the door telling her that his departure was, of course, nothing to do with his now not-so-latent homosexuality, but because they weren’t getting on.
I wondered what she might have done that would have made them get on better and therefore kept him on the straight and narrow path of marriage. Grown a moustache perhaps?
Anyway, now he wears more jewellery than she does and is just back from renting a house in Ibiza for a month with ‘friends’ and has been impressing their teenaged sons with all the clubs he went to.
He is fifty.
'Oh who needs protection,' she says, laughing, 'all the men I meet are awful.'
We do a quick round up of who she has met recently. She has found the holy grail – one with hair – who sounds quite nice and there’s also an American who works for a US television channel who is coming over from New York and wants to meet her for a classical concert and dinner.
'I can't meet him as I'm flying off to Finland the next day. You could have him if you like.' She mentions his log-in-name on the site and tells me to look him up, to see if I like him.
'I’m going to New York myself the next day,' I say. 'I'll pass.'
Eva thought she would be married for ever. We met fifteen years ago standing outside the school gates, and on football fields where small boys raced up and down assiduously not kicking a ball. We took walks together when her mother died, and cooked for each other at dinner parties. We’ve spent new year’s eve together when husbanded up, and have been in the same book club for about five years. We’ve done exams together, and results together, common entrance together, and universities together, and now, like the whipped cream on the top of the big marital banana split, we’re doing divorce together.
'Hmm,' she muses, 'I remember when I was a girl and my mother told me that I had to be careful, because all men ever wanted was sex. What happened to that? Where are they now these sex-crazed maniacs?'
Clubbing in Ibiza darling, with others of their fair sex, or previously married to me.
