Bridget Jones's Diary (Bridget Jones 1)

'I don't want to keep Mark company,' I said through clenched teeth. 'Oh. but he's very clever. Been to Cambridge. Apparently he made a fortune in America . . . '

> 'I'm not going.'

'Now, come along, darling, let's not start,' she said, as if I were thirteen. 'You see, Mark's completed the house in Holland Park and he's throwing the whole party for them, six floors, caterers and everything . . . What are you going to wear?'

'Are you going with Julio or Dad?' I said, to shut her up.

'Oh, darling, I don't know. Probably both of them,' she said in the special, breathy voice she reserves for when she thinks she is Diana Dors.

'You can't do that.'

'But Daddy and I are still fiends, darling. I'm just friends with Julio as well.'

Grr. Grr. Grrr. I absolutely cannot deal with her when she's like this.

'Anyway, I'll tell Elaine you'd love to come, shall I?' she said, picking up the inexplicable sewing machine as she headed for the door. 'Must fly. Byee!'

I am not going to spend another evening being danced about in front of Mark Darcy like a spoonful of puried turnip in front of a baby. I am going to have to leave the country or something.

8 p.m. Off to dinner party. All the Smug Marrieds keep inviting me on Saturday nights now I am alone again, seating me opposite an increasingly horrifying selection of single men. It is very kind of them and I appreciate it v. much but it only seems to highlight my emotional failure and isolation – though Magda says I should remember that being single is better than having an adulterous, sexually incontinent husband.

Midnight. Oh dear. Everyone was trying to cheer up the spare man (thirty-seven, newly divorced by wife, sample view: 'I have to say, I do think Michael Howard is somewhat unfairly maligned.').

'Don't know what you're complaining about,' Jeremy was holding forth to him. 'Men get more attractive when they get older and women get less attractive, so all those twenty-two-year-olds who wouldn't look at you when you were twenty-five will be gagging for it.'

I sat, head down, quivering furiously at their inferences of female sell-by dates and life as game of musical chairs where girls without a chair/man when the music stops/they pass thirty are 'out.' Huh. As if.

'Oh yes, I quite agree it's much the best to go for younger partners,' I burst out, airily. 'Men in their thirties are such bores with their hang-ups and obsessive delusions that all women are trying to trap them into marriage. These days I'm only really interested in men in their early twenties. They're so much better able to . . . well, you know . . . '

'Really?' said Magda, rather too eagerly. 'How . . . ?'

'Yes, you're interested,' interjected Jeremy, glaring at Magda. 'But the point is they're not interested in you.'

'Um. Excuse me. My current boyfriend is twenty-three,' I said, sweetly.

There was a stunned silence. 'Well, in that case,' said Alex, smirking, 'you can bring him to us next Saturday when you come to dinner, can't you?'

Bugger. Where am I going to find a twenty-three-year-old who will come to dinner with Smug Marrieds on a Saturday night instead of taking contaminated Ecstasy tablets?

Friday 15 September

9st, alcohol units 0, cigarettes 4 (v.g.), calories 3222 (British Rail sandwiches hideously impregnated), minutes spent imagining speech will make when resigning from new job 210.

Ugh. Hateful conference with bully-boss Richard Finch going, 'Right. Harrods one-pound-a-pee toilets. I'm thinking Fantasy Toilets. I'm thinking studio: Frank Skinner and Sir Richard Rogers on furry seats, armrests with TV screens, quilted loo paper. Bridget, you're Dole Youths Clampdown. I'm thinking the North. I'm thinking Dole Youths, loafing about, live down the line.'

'But . . . but . . ' I stammered.

'Patchouli!' he shouted, at which point the dogs under his desk woke up and started jumping about and barking.

'Wha'?' yelled Patchouli above the din. She was wearing a crocheted midi-dress with a floppy straw hat and an orange Bri-nylon saddle-stitched blouse on top. As if the things I used to wear in my teens were a hilarious joke.

'Where's the Dole Youths OB?'

'Liverpool.'

'Liverpool. OK, Bridget. OB crew outside Boots in the shopping center, live at five-thirty. Get me six Dole Youths.'

Later, as I was leaving to get the train, Patchouli yelled casually, 'Oh yeah, like, Bridget, it's not Liverpool, it's, like, Manchester, right?'