My Single Friends

To celebrate Liz's birthday, another recently divorced friend is giving a dinner party at which, novelty of novelties, four of the five men there will be single.

I am instructed to attend.

I cannot but do my duty.

To protect the innocent names will be omitted but, lo, indeed there are single men, or at the very least, singleish. One fails to turn up because he has flu, whether Swine, Whine, or merely Man, I'm not sure but he was/is married to the pretty scientist we went to Guilty Pleasures with last year and claims have been made for his attractiveness. Now, we'll never know. Another is the rakish, silver fox type, I met before at one of Eva's openings as well as at Justin Marozzi's book launch - but he seems still to be seeing the statuesque ash blonde princess, so again - not as free as previously advertised and just about to drive off to Scotland in his Bentley so he can transport his guns. Yet another - tall, dark, handsome and curly headed is domiciled in France (with a man) and bats for the other team (but you had that at handsome, didn't you?), and of the remaining two, one is seeing the hostess and the other - HOLY GRAIL - does indeed seem to be unattached.

I'm almost afraid to say this in the public domain lest bands of women beat a path to our hostess's home in Shepherd's Bush and swarm around the door. Should I add that one of our merry band of men is childless and mad about babies, I would be trampled in the rush.

Having more than enough sauce in Worcester, I'm not looking (except in idle, and perfectly, natural curiosity) so I was firmly placed on the other side of the one eligible man and sandwiched between two of the taken. Candles were lit, Pims was drunk, champagne was opened, foie gras passed around on tiny pieces of girl-friendly bread, and sea bass on a bed of potatoes was served with saffron until, eventually, as you would expect from a room full of the almost unattached - one of whom the hostess met on Guardian Soulmates - the subject of the conversation turned to internet dating. We've nearly all done it - with varying degrees of success. Single man - a recent uptaker - has only been on two dates: one with a mystical Irish woman who believed in alien abduction and whose photograph he hadn't seen before meeting her (you can see he's new at this) and the second with a beautiful gamine Frenchwoman who had 'anger' issues. He doesn't think he'll be doing it again.

'You can tell immediately if you like someone,' he claims, but the hostess's friend and I both disagree. You know immediately if you like the look of someone and think they're attractive but if that initial spark isn't there that doesn't mean that there isn't a moment later, after you've spoken a while, that they do something or say something and you just think - wow.

He isn't convinced.

'Are you married?' he asks (bless him, he obviously hasn't been briefed as thoroughly as we have).

'Yes.' 'No.' Was.' 'I am.' 'Well, no.' 'No, I'm not.' 'Or, I'm married, but I'm not living with my husband. We're separated. Apart. Estranged. Well, not that estranged. Likely to stay that way. But get on so much better now than me did.'

'Though it was traumatic at the beginning,' volunteers Liz.

'Indeed. Very.'

He looks bemused as well he might.

'What went wrong then?' He bellows over the table.

'He left me.' I call back.

'He left you?' He cried, in a way that I like to think was incredulous but was probably just a spot of indigestion while he worked out what kind of a shrew I had to be to have driven away my former man.

'Yep.'

I wait for the why question but after a moment's hesitation he decides to save me the further humiliation of mentioning the words 'other woman' and asks how long ago he has been gone. There's no real easy answer to that question either. A year, a year and a half, three years, it depends when you're measuring from.

'What about you?'

'My wife left me,' he says. 'It does get easier,' he assures me.

'It's already easier...'  I protest

'Yes, my wife left me too,' says the hostess's friend. 'It does get easier, eventually, though it's still hard.'

I think the hostess may have joined with her own pennyworth of gloom, but I can't be sure - we are all having rather large gulps of wine and looking vaguely haunted. Ah - the small talk at a single person's dinner party. Abandoned Spouses anonymous. My name is Marion and my husband left me... We could have our own group on Facebook. It could be a new way to meet people. My Humiliated Friend... She has lots of very nice coats.

'Do you have any plans for the weekend?' asks the hostess's nice singleish Guardian Soulmate's man.  He's a designer turned illustrator.  I studied graphic design, printmaking and illustration at Camberwell but he hasn't discovered this.  Though I know all about his family, his parents, his nieces, his ambitions, his house sale, his personal circumstances and his career, the first question he has asked me is what I'm doing at the weekend.  Men.  How come they make such good criminal investigators?

'Yes, actually, I'm going to the country to see my lover.' I reply. In a very loud voice. Just so that everyone gets it.

Single man chooses this moment to go out to the garden for a fag after complaining none too gallantly that he can't get past my chair. I go home on the 220 from Shepherd's Bush and try not to fall asleep on the bus and end up in Harridan.

I mean Harlesden.

Road Tip

'Liz wants us to have a day out. She's doing an article for the Standard. Can you come on Sunday?' Asks Yvonna, while I'm watching Bunk vomit into a gutter at the Irish Wake (so The Wire's not all ripped bodies and shotguns).

'No, can't do Sunday. I'm doing Worcester Man.'

'Aw.' She doesn't even bother trying to persuade me as she knows it is futile. Worcester man has been in Croatia for a week and I haven't seen him since our Connaught weekend. Much as I love both Yvonna and Liz and the chance to further exploit my life in the pages of the Evening Standard, there is no contest. I say I could juggle around my work and go in the middle of the week and we settle on Wednesday for the day out.

'What's the story?' I ask.

'Remember when we went to Henry Moore?'

How could I forget? Worcester Man, who was a follower of this blog back then, felt so sorry for me after reading about me picking my way through a field of sheep droppings that he invited me out to lunch (I had much the same success with my ex husband twenty seven years ago when he asked me what I did at the weekends and I answered 'knitting'. Then I was lying. Unfortunately, about Henry Moore, I was telling mostly the truth.

'Well, we had so much fun..'

(We did? Yes, yes, okay, we did. Kinda.)

'...that Liz suggested it to her editor as an idea for a piece. Arty days out for people in London on a Staycation. She's going to hire us an open topped car.'

'So a sort of Thelma and Louise do Bexhill-on-Sea instead of Brad Pit..?'

I can't see it being big in the Box Office, can you - though a man in a pizza parlour in Boston did once ask my daughter if her 'mom was Susan Sarandon' when my hair was short and red (and presumably I looked eleven years older than I am)? Prospects of vigilante adventures don't improve when Liz tells me we'll have a photographer traveling with us, and says that I might 'wear an interesting coat.' I'm painting a picture, am I not... Three women of a certain age in 'interesting coats' and big jewellery, off to do a spot of culture. On My Single Friend - the dating site - Yvonna apparently put this on Liz's profile: 'She has lots of lovely coats.' You can just see the men beating the doors down.

We have already surmised that this is going to be a female only venture after deciding when we went to the Henry Moore house that if we had happened to run into three blokes wandering round a sculpture park, they would be tossers. Especially if, after guided tours and garden centres, they decided, as we did, that the ideal way to top off the day would be to go off and see an art film.

So there we are. A little foretaste of the future when all the men are dead and a day at the seaside means visiting a Modernist pavilion and not stripping off in the sand-dunes. In fact, when a day at the seaside means no ruddy sand at all but pebbles like bad cellulite as far as the eye can see.

I meet them in Hammersmith. Liz has been too busy to get the promised sports car so we're setting off in Yvonna's Volvo Estate (okay, it might be a BMW, but you're catching the vibe...) Liz and I should both be sponsored by LK Bennett as we're working the Mother of the Bride look in our frocks - me in the pink polka dots(it's my official photography frock) and her in blue roses (the shop assistant actually asked her 'when's the wedding?') and Yvonna has brought two dresses so she can change if she gets flushed... The photographer - a young, blonde, glamorous Southern gal from Atlanta arrives with a slow, sexy drawl, a camera bag and a six month pregnant bump.

Thelma and Louise plus two and a half in a hatchback. Yep, this is the stuff that road trips are made of. Far from Bourbon and a Beretta, the car is full of print-outs from AA route finder and bottles of Evian. Bexhill-on-Sea, on the other hand, is full of pensioners with a scattering of disaffected youth with purple hair on skateboards.

Worcester man texts: I'm sure you have brought the average age down by 50%

Nevertheless, amazingly, the sun is shining off the silver and bald heads lined along the undulating curve of the De La Warr Pavilion. The sky is desktop blue. The sea is flatter than a teenager's stomach. Yachts bob up and down like fat women's breasts in a jacuzzi. It's all quite beautiful and rela....

'Look at me. Smile. Now talk amongst yourselves. Look interested. Raise your glasses. Smile again. Hold that pose.' Says Rachel, click, click, clicking her camera.

...xing,

Or it would be if we didn't have to hold our stomachs in while the geriatric population of the south coast tutt at us disapprovingly for blocking their view of the sea, wondering why three large ladies who are obviously not models for anything other than Matron Monthly, are looking delighted and slightly deranged as they clutch glasses of rose, while having their photograph taken, endlessly, by the young pretty, pregnant one.

We are not the most popular people on the balcony, or the beach, or indeed in Bexhill.

'Can I have my picture done?' asks a small, fat boy of about twelve puffing on a cigarette, as an old man with a belly that hangs almost to his knees remarks that we seemed to be stalking him as everywhere he goes the three of us are posing for photographs. As I look around me I keep thinking of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock and the lyrics from that song by The Crash Test Dummies:

Someday I'll have a disappearing hairline
Someday I'll wear pyjamas in the daytime

but substitute 'iron perm with Dame Edna Average curls' for the disappearing hairline. Someday, I'll wear polyester because it drips dry, and pants that come up to my armpits. Someday my stomach will follow a beat behind the rest of me (as my backside already does according the chap who told me recently that I had a 'musical' bum which he insists was a compliment). Someday I'll not order the steak because I won't be able to chew it. Someday, I'll be a National Trust Nazi and show people round a local heritage site and scowl at other old women who ask questions. Someday I'll always wear interesting coats and bleach my moustache.

God.

Thankfully, our next visit to Charleston, where Vanessa Bell et al gave 'interesting' the sort of meaning I hope it will still have when I'm in my seventies, was a foretaste of the sort of old age I would quite like to have. Yvonna and I had both been there before but she does the guided tour again because she has 'forgotten' (flushed and forgetful). I remember it all only too well. I went during my Jocasta Innes phase and still have the painted floorboards, furniture and one door in the kitchen as proof. Instead, Liz and I sit outside with the photographer and eat cake in the garden surrounded by hollyhocks and drowsy bees, reading the Guardian and engaging in scurrilous gossip. Behind us an old man in a Panama hat listens intently and makes old man harrumphing noises, or snores. Though he seems to be awake at the time.

'Isn't it lovely,' gushes Yvonna with a dreamy smile on her face. 'Why don't we all buy a house in the country and have an arty commune where we spend our days block printing and painting. We could all cook together and be surrounded by nature.'

Liz, who feels about the country the way I feel about Birkenstocks, looks horrified, and frankly, what with the three hour traffic jam on the motorway on the way back (thankfully we were too late for the visit to Anne of Cleves' House in Lewes - something fun for another day, huh?) nothing short of an open marriage is going to get me to settle down in the bosum of the countryside or a commune of arty women.

Though Worcester is not without its charms.

Not that I've actually seen any of them. Most of its attractions, so far, are to be found indoors.

Wired

I've had whine flu.

It starts with a sort of sore throat that makes you reach for the boxed set of The Wire and put it on standby beside your bed with a bulk purchase of Paracetamol, Lemsip and Lemon Barley Water. I've had my emergency kit since the first symptoms a week ago which, thanks to the power of suggestion, coincided with my desk neighbour Fran falling by the wayside, and my friend Nel taking to her bed (where she still languishes).

Last Friday, I left the office early, feeling bruised and slightly nauseated by a particularly nasty article about Pedantic Press in BookGrudge, which tipped the sore throat and aching limbs from Amber to Red, get-out-the-thermometer and cancel-all-weekend-plans alert. After a slight detour to see Scarlett Johansen arrive to a store-wide Awwwww in Selfridges (my daughters insisted but, I confess, it wasn't a hard sell - she's absolutely gorgeous and sweet) I was home where the kitchen , predictably, was decorated with its usual slovenly collection of unwashed crockery (none of it mine) where I went straight to bed and closed the door. Jimmy McNulty, here I come...

For those of you who have not yet discovered the gritty, mother-f***ing sheer, unadulterated joy of The Wire, I assure you, it might almost be worth getting Swine Flu to watch the whole series - and when it comes to Whine Flu, there's no down side. First of all it saves your nearest and dearest from having to listen to you moan about your sore throat, and your aching muscles, and your bad day at work, and your headache, and the fuzzy feeling when you think and the odd way your shoulders cramp when you're adjusting the pillows, and secondly - if you're female - you get to indulge in three whole series of Dominic West before he gives up the booze, goes tame, and only starts appearing every now and again when, who cares, you can enjoy 'Cutty' who conveniently gets out of prison, decides he isn't cut out to be a soldier no more, and opens a boxing school.

Insomnia got me through the Barksdale Empire and Whine Flu has carried me from the Series three Finale, almost to the end of Series Four when Jimmy gets domesticated (please - with Beedie? Bring back the drunk, banging on the door at 3am Jimmy for the love of God!) and Cedric with his ridiculously buff body finally and repeatedly takes his shirt off. That's an event that's well worth waiting for.

I know, I know, it's supposed to be the best television program ever made, and despite (or perhaps because) there being no women in it, men love it, and sure - it's addictive and compelling with the greatest ensemble cast, as well having the most fantastic f*** scene where nobody takes their clothes off in the history of television. I love all the characters and feel a pang when they end up in the vacant lots, and can't even bring myself to imagine something happening to Omar despite the fact that he's murdered more people with his shotgun than I've had lipsticks, but - really, truly, honestly, the main reason I love it is because it's unashamedly homoerotic.

Which, now I come to think of it, may be why all the blokes at last night's dinner party insisted they couldn't get on with it.

Ring Ring:

'Can I speak to your Lean Coordinator or your Human Resources Development Officer?'

I can't help it.  I begin to giggle.

'Our what?'

She laughs too.

'If you don't have one of those it would be the person who deals with Health and Safety.'

Erm, well we don't formally have anyone who does that either.  It's a small company.

'What about Health and Safety signage - who looks after that?'

I have no idea what she means by signage.  Is it the green thing with a man running above the only door in or out that says FIRE EXIT?  In any case nobody looks after it.

She hangs up.

Another one down.

Just call me Marion the Telesales Slayer.

I'm still rolling along

So the train shuffles in and Camilla, who is driving Mike's Jag, is waiting for me imperiously in the bus lane at Reading station. Before I left the house I had carefully washed my hair and with no time to dry it properly, twisted it into a style that - if left alone like a sleeping dog and not disturbed - will result in long gentle, glossy curls. After twenty minutes in an open topped Jag, however, the sleeping dog was howling at the moon. People watched us drive past but I know it was the car they were admiring not us. Camilla is, well, teapot shaped, while I was really working the Kim Bassinger look in 8 Mile by the time I unfolded myself from the very low seat - which, for those of you who think the comparison a tad conceited - is not something to emulate. As my daughter reminded me - far from crawling around on her knees in a blindfold a la 91/2 weeks, in 8 Mile she lived in a trailer and was an alcoholic. Over the hill, Kimmie, here I come...

Mike and Camilla, however, do not live in a trailer but in a converted manor house deep in the country in one of those places hyphenated with on-Thames, which is full of dogs and sepia portraits of dead relatives; one of which (the dogs, not the rellies), having been left in the house a bit too long by himself, had spectacularly decorated the otherwise spotless, gleaming tiles of their entrance hall. From this echoing, glittering and hurriedly air-freshened, hall there is a vast sitting room full of white sofas attentively placed to worship the wide screen television rather than the (non-working) Adam fireplace, and another equally huge dining room which holds only a grand piano. The master bedroom in an adjoining room boasts a Camilla and Mike sized Tudor replica four poster on the basis that if it was big enough for Henry VIII then it would easily accommodate their expansive frames with plenty of wriggle room, which faces double doors leading out to the rolling parkland that surrounds the manor house. Each room, including the kitchen, is big enough to fit the entire floorplan of my house. However, at least my kids don't shit on the floor.

Yet.

The couple have just moved there needing, as Camilla put it 'a smaller place now that the kids are gone' and it fairly makes my teeth ache with envy when I hear the words 'kids' and 'gone'in the same sentence and then compare how we are all crammed into our tiny, overcrowded, stuff-filled bedrooms and have so much space that their dogs can use the marble entry hall as a toilet. What must the last house have looked like? However their place is also poignantly empty with not a trace of human habitation. The kitchen, with an Aga and the obligatory scrubbed pine table holds only dog food in sacks and a pair of slouching hounds, one of which, for reasons that become apparent when I stroke the other, lives in a cage. I pet the loose doggy and the other beast snarls, bares its sharp teeth and flattens itself to the bars of the cage, rabidly angry. I decide the kitchen is not my favourite room, and am glad of the gin that is pressed into my hand, though it's only lunch time.

At six, we all pile into the Jag, me in the back this time like one of the pets (who thankfully are left behind and not on either side of me with their his and hers tongues hanging out the side window, or worse, their teeth in my face) and on our way to Henley and the drill hall where a makeshift theatre has been assembled with folding chairs laid out in uneven rows. Mike sits on one side of me, Camilla on the other, both of their bottoms spilling off their allotted space, close enough to make me feel, well, very, very cosy. The play is called LOL which, for those of you familiar with modern shorthand will know means either 'lots of love' or 'laugh out loud' - in this instance, since it was a comedy, possibly both. It is a one woman show which, on reading the flyer, I discover, is about internet dating.

Ironic?

No, deliberate.

'We thought you'd like it,' smiles Camilla confidently, whispering ginly into my ear.

'What with you doing all the internet dating now you're single,' trumpets Mike. 'We thought it might strike a chord!' He and Camilla nodded at each other with me sandwiched in the middle, suddenly feeling like a very big gooseberry, as well as publically outed in Henley as a serial internet dater.

'I am not actually on the internet.' I protest.

'But you wrote that very funny article in Woman and Home, dear, all about it.' says Camilla.

'I write about a lot of things I don't really do. You know, exaggeration, hyperbole. I did have a few dates last year..'

'A lot of dates, Camilla said.' Mike protested.

'No, not a lot, one or two, Camilla.' I say reproachfully. 'And I'm not doing it any more. I am afraid to look around me at my fellow members of the audience being as I now had 'sad' and 'desperate' flashing on and off over my head.

'I am seeing someone.' I say loudly, just so the people in the front row can hear.

'And didn't you meet your new young man on one of those dating things.'

'My new young man is 49. And no, I didn't. I met him through work.'

'My mistake, dear, my mistake. I thought you met him on the internet.' Camilla pats my hand, and Mike my thigh being so supportive they were leaving bruises. I want, frankly, to die. But luckily, just then the house lights go down and the actress appearrs fake ironing, while a litany of all-too familiar profiles are read out parroting the cliches of men selling themselves on dating sites where they're all looking for love, but unfortunately have to make do with you.

Camilla chortles. Mike hoots. My hand and thigh are gripped in a way that I'm not by the story which, like their handholds, are a bit near the bone for me just at this moment. All in all, it is not the most comfortable hour I've spent at the theatre and, believe me, I've cringed through my fair share of drama. It's not usually quite so pertinent, though.

Afterwards we have dinner where I discover that the curse of the single woman seems to have extended to Henley. I don't quite understand why it is that when I was married I was often invited to dinner with my husband even though he rarely managed to go since he was often travelling. This meant I usually turned up alone. This didn't seem to be a problem with most people because in any case my husband hated socialising, made Bisto look exciting and his idea of small talk was to say 'yes' or 'no' to any question he was asked. It's not like he was exactly scintillating company. However, now that he's gone, I don't merit an invitation to those same dinner parties. Perhaps divorce is catching - like Swine Flu - and nobody want to risk being infected? Or perhaps the wives think I'm going to run off with their husbands who have been flirting with me and groping me for the past twenty years but whose advances, somehow, I've managed to resist - though interestingly, that's all stopped too now that the men are afraid I might take them up on it. Relax, chaps, I won't. In any case, apparently the divorced no longer eat, or at least can only eat at tables where there are no other couples they might contaminate. So of course it's just Camilla, Mike and me. I'm the third wheel. The only one in the restaurant.

'So tell me all about your young man.' Asks Camilla waving a large glass of red ominously in the direction of my pink frock which matches Mike's complexion.

'He's not that young, just a couple of years younger than me. I mean, I didn't get him at the Toy Boy Warehouse.'

'The what?'

'Toy Boy Warehouse - it's an internet site for men who like older women, or older women who like younger men, depending on how you look at it.'

'Oh dear.' Camilla looks a little shocked.

'So I'm told,' I add hurriedly. 'But why not? All men my age are looking for younger women. Why shouldn't we do the same?'

'Personally, I don't understand why a man would want a younger woman.' says Mike. 'I mean one would have nothing in common with them, would one?' He sips his own large glass of red, looks at me and muses. 'I mean, one might be able to get a gorgeous young thing instead of you, but one would be far better off with a nice ripe, mature woman like yourself.'

Gee, thanks, I think, Mike. I smile weakly, suddenly feeling like a hunk of Stilton.

'Darling, not all men want young things!' Camilla scolds. 'But it is a shame, isn't it? I mean you're not getting any younger, and in a couple of years you'll be...'

Stabbing myself with the fork, right into my neck...

'Well there's always Logan's Run...' says Mike, and laughs heartily.

Indeed.

Camilla and Mike, incidentally. Not my friends on Facebook.

How to stalk

Ah the life of an international playgirl - London, Worcester and this weekend... Reading.

I went to stay with my friend Camilla and her husband who I met a few years ago at The Italian Institute when Camilla took a course there after retiring from her job in the City. Her husband, a delightful, well-heeled and florid man called Mike had already taken the leap into golf and Sky Sports some years earlier and the two of them have subsequently grown rather fond of a gin and tonic. It was kind of them to ask me and even kinder that they had lined up tickets for a play at the Henley Fringe, at which I was confident, I would be the only unmarried woman, possibly even the only unmarried woman under 65. But never mind. There would be gin.

Alice calls me while I'm on my way there to tell him she has made her toy boy her friend on Facebook.

'You realise that now he'll know about every aspect of your life - and all about your kids too if they're your friends.'

'Ah yes, I never thought about that. But he seems very nice.  I can see what people have written on his wall  and he sounds very normal. I think he might have swine flu.'  She announces, breezily as I hope that's all he has.  'We had a really long chat yesterday...'

'I thought he had swine flu?'

'Yes but we chatted on Instant Messenger.  Turns out he likes art...'

'...as well as older women.'

She laughs. She really doesn't care. I love that about her.

'You're so old-fashioned mum, says my daughter later when I express my misgivings about people on Facebook which, frankly, I can't see the point of, except as an exercise in misery or envy.  'It's by far the safest way of checking people out,' she insists.

'How so?'

'Well you can see what kind of things they do - and who they're seeing. You really don't know how to stalk, do you?'

'Why on earth would I want to?' I mean, I've seen how upset she was after her ex boyfriend changed his status from 'in a relationship' to 'single' and I know that she gets bummed out when her current boyfriend writes on her wall and that of ten other people all on the same day. I don't want to know that sort of thing.  Ignorance is bliss.  The Internet leaves you nowhere to hide. Even from your own horrible insecurities. What with Twitter and Facebook and mobiles, MSM, Skype, Gmail, email and text messages, as Drew Barrymore says in He's Just Not That Into You (and yes, I know this all too well) it merely gives you a whole range of methods to miscommunicate as well as several different media in which nobody gets in touch with you.  The last time I had a barrage of texts - 14 empty messages - was when Mark the builder put his phone in his pocket and forgot to switch it off.

Alice gets lots of messages on Facebook from friends, she says.  I only have about 8 friends and most of them I see on a daily basis anyway.  I never even check my page or anyone else's.  Though I do get emails (so far, all lovely) from women who have read and liked my book who have Googled me, and this blog creates some traffic, of which only the dog-mad person was hostile - but also incredibly funny.   I'm not complaining, but I do like my compartments to remain separate.

The phone rings again as I'm approaching Reading. Alice tells me that she has arranged to meet her chap at her office in the afternoon.

'Alice! Do you learn nothing? Meet him at a pub for god's sake. Have you not seen Waiting for Mr Goodbar?'

'Waiting for who?'

I explain. 'Oh it'll be fine,' she insists breezily. 'But if I do end up murdered, his name is Dave and he works for Virgin.'

Yeah, and he likes art... I'm sure that's going to be very helpful for the CID.

'Just one other thing though..'

'Yessssssss...?'

'I need to ask a technical question.'

'Okay....' Be aware I'm on a crowded train on a Saturday morning. I had meant to drive but some upsetting news at home had rendered me unable to operate heavy machinery. I suddenly wished I was behind the wheel without access to the phone.

'He says (noise of her fumbling with her phone and tapping) "Do you like to be (LOUD STATIC)?" but I'm not sure what he means.'

'I didn't hear you, can you say it again?' I ask with some trepidation.

'Reading, Reading, all change for Reading,' says a disembodied voice inside a tin can.

'(MORE STATIC).'

'Nope, still didn't get it. Spell it for me.' I say and brace myself.

Daunting women

My friend Alice has tickets for Hilary Mantel at Daunt's.  I'm a huge fan of both the venue and the author; and though we're reading Wolf Hall, the subject of the talk, at the next book group, I find my ancient copy of Experiment in Love, in which the mother character is scarily close to my own, and whack it into my handbag.  However, Worcester man calls when I should be getting ready and instead of looking professional and prettifying myself for the evening out which is going to include supper at Peter Gordon's Tapa Bar nearby, I loll on the bed like a teenager with the phone glued to my ear.  As a result I'm still in some disarray (and I hesitate to tell you, his coffee cup continues to sit on the floor like a holy relic) when I turn up to collect Alice from the tube station; my hair wild, three pounds in change, a tube of Germoline and a bandage (Mark the builder cut his hand when he was moving the fridge), and some redundant make-up falling out across the passenger seat, which I hastily clear to let her sit down.

She's pleased to see me and bristling with barely suppressed glee.

'Spill,' I tell her, not actually meaning the further contents of my handbag which she kicks with her feet as she settles herself, her holdall, her book bag, her bicycle bag, and a large red umbrella.

'I'm being a bit ridiculous,' she confesses.

Oh heck.  Sinking Feeling.  Prickling Neck.  I know what's coming...

'Not the website for young men?' I ask with dread, remembering a recent conversation we had after Liz, another friend of mine, wrote an article in the Evening Standard about, I kid you not, the Toy Boy Warehouse.

'Yes.'  She says and she throws her head back and laughs delightedly.  The car lurches at the traffic lights.  Alice is many things, but she's not small and sudden movements tend to have considerable impact, something that her prospective suitors may well have to factor in.

'I've had fifteen replies.'

I keep my hands on the wheel and my eyes firmly on the traffic on Praed Street as I cross over Edgeware Road.

'And I'm going to meet one of the men tomorrow.'

'Men.  Are you sure you're using the right noun?'

'Oh I haven't answered any of the really young ones. None of the twentysomethings.  This one is a writer.  Mind you,'  she muses, 'He has about three spelling mistakes on his profile, so he can't be much of a writer.'

'And so you've told him you're in publishing...'  I'm shaking my head like Claire Rayner at a Family Planning Convention in Tower Hamlets.  'Do you have any idea what you're doing?'

'I'm going to have fun, that's what I'm doing.  Look, I've done marriage, I've done kids, I've done business.  Now I just want to enjoy myself.  All the other women on the site are very successful, high achieving women, just like me.  He sounds nice.'

'Nice?'

'Well you'll see him for yourself tomorrow at the book launch.'

'You haven't told him where you work have you?  You can't be serious.  You've asked him along to a work thing?  Isn't that a bit...  I mean, what if he's a nutter?'

'I know,' she says cheerfully.   'He might murder me in my bed.'  She chuckles.  'Guess how old he is?'

I am afraid to.  'Please say he's thirty fiv...'

'Yes, he's thirty.'  She interrupts, deliberately not looking at me as I turn the ignition off in a parking space on Marylebone High Street.  'A bit chubby, but nice looking.  He's sent me about a hundred texts.'  She snaps open her phone and proceeds to read some of them to me.  Modesty permits me from repeating them.  Sadly, it did not have a similar effect on Alice.

'Alice, you know he's only interested in one thing.'

'So am I.'

'...plus dinner and possibly cash gifts.  It's a sugar momma, he's after.'

'Don't worry, I'm not planning on paying for anything.'  She protests.

'Remember that guy we met a couple of months ago at the South Bank who told you about his son who lives at home in his spare room and spends all his time on the internet before taking off for weekends all over the country to rendezvous with older women? You might meet someone like that.'

'No, mine has "roommates in Chiswick"'  She says.

So you are going to have a date with a boy who lives in a shared flat?  Haven't you "done" that too?  I'm still bloody living it at home with my kids.. If I started sleeping with someone like that it would be like being 21 again, but not in a good. way.'

'Oh that's the other funny thing.  You'll never guess!  His name is Dave.'

Dave is her son's name.  The two are seven years apart.  They may have gone to school together.

"Freudian much?  You haven't even met him and you're already letting him walk into the middle of your life.  And what possessed you to ask him along to a ruddy book launch?  What if he introduces himself to people and tells them how he knows you?'

'That would be embarrassing,' she allows. 'You will come along tomorrow, won't you, and check him out?'

'I can't.  I've got pub quiz.  And first I'm going to IPC to have a drink with some people.'

'Which people?'

I remind her about Stacey on the picture desk of a magazine I sometimes do the odd article for, who I thought was a girl, but turned out to be a boy.

'Isn't he very young too?'

'He's thirty eight, darling, but I didn't find him on Toy Boys' Warehouse, he is a work colleague.'

'But he liked your picture.'

'No he didn't. He's just being polite.  You know, that's what young people used to show when they spoke to their elders.  Politeness. Not a list of their sexual fantasies.  And we've had this drink planned off and on since Easter.  It's not a date. It's a meeting.  He has a wife, for goodness sake.  And a kid.'  I'm shocked at the suggestion.  Poor Stacey, suddenly demoted from picture editor to chancer trawling the internet for cougars, which - let's face it - working for a woman's magazine with the demographic of ABC women between 45-55, he has a large sample group of better looking well-preserved women than me to choose from.  I have a look in the rear view mirror, and see my hair a waving sea of frizz.    Disheveled old cougars would not make the final cut, I'm sure.

'Bring him along to the book launch with you.'

'What, so they can play together while you and I go off and do important grown upthings?  Don't be daft.'

'They can talk about bands,' she says and then bursts out laughing.

By this time we are settled in our seats near the front of the hall as 'ilary sails down the aisle and sits on the dias next to Will Buckley.  It's very, very warm and I begin fanning myself with a copy of Dante's Inferno (which I failed to return to the shelves afterwards, sorry Daunt's).  Will's face goes flame red.  I feel like I'm going to spontaneously combust.  The woman next to me nods off.  Alice squints around the room.  'Everyone here is so old.  Is this all we've got to look forward to?  Is this what you do when you've had the menopause, go to bleeding readings?'

I remind her that she was the one who got the tickets, and that since we are both, ostensibly, in the publishing business, we luuuuuuuuuuuuurve the book buying public in all their many forms.  She sniffs.

I tell Alice that Mathilda in the office thinks that in order to meet quality, well-heeled men you should hang out at bookshops or in University Libraries.  I met my husband in a University Library so I don't necessarily agree with this, and certainly Daunts, even with the draw of Hilary Mantel, does not seem to be much of a haven for the quality and well heeled single man. But given that I'm sitting next to a woman who shops at Toy Boy Warehouse I can hardly claim the moral high ground for women of a certain age.

Hilary stops talking when the geriatric audience are sufficiently tired of the sound of their own voices to cease airing their own opinions in lieu of asking questions, and some of us knock over the people in Zimmers to get to the top of the signing queue.  The man after me (sweet, under fifty-five, perfectly presentable and disarmingly modest) says 'I feel a bit wet doing that, but I just couldn't resist it.'

'Don't worry, I actually work in publishing and I came with the express purpose of getting my book signed.'

'Me too,' said Alice, with her enormously fat copy of Wolf Hall on page 22 where it has been for the last month.  ('I can't get on with it,' she had confessed earlier.)

He smiles in relief and we and other autograph hobbyists stand in a huddle and compare dedications.  I take my own book from its exile on the shelves and put it out on the top of a pile of The Secret History of Bees which, I confess, did nothing for me, before we get on to the more serious business of the evening of deep fried egg (a dish of utter and complete deliciousness, trust me) and ham hock and squid salad at The Tapa Bar.  Fabulous, zingy, interesting and different food - almost my favourite place in London.  Why don't I come here more often, I wonder?  Alice takes the bread from the basket (£2.20 a portion) that we didn't eat, and wraps it in her napkin to take home with her.

I guess we know that what the chap from Toy Boy Warehouse is going to get for breakfast.  I wonder if she cuts off his crusts for him.