Mad About the Boy (Bridget Jones 3)

But at least am treating own body like a temple. Am going to Zumba.

8 p.m. Just back. Usually love Zumba, with young, dark, long-haired Spanish couple, taking it in turns to lead ‘numbers’, flinging their hair about, stomping angrily like horses, transporting one into a world of Barcelona or possibly Basque-coast nightclubs, and firelit Gypsy encampments of undetermined national extraction.

But this week, the thrilling duo were replaced by a zingy-pingy woman with blonde fringe, a bit like Olivia Newton-John in Grease. Exotically sexual Zumba moves were strangely juxtaposed with gay, determined grin, as if to say, ‘Super-dooper, nothing sexual or dirty about this at all!’

On top of that, the grinning woman made us do not only hand-rolling moves, but also ‘imaginary shaking-off-water-from-wet-hands’ moves, not to mention ‘starbursts’. As whole Catalan nightclub fantasy collapsed like house of cards, looked around to realize class was peopled not by wild Gypsy youths, but a collection of women whom members of an unenlightened male-dominated patriarchal society might describe as ‘middle-aged’.

Have sinking feeling that very concept of attending Zumba may be linked to attempt to relive long-gone days of sexual possibility – as evidenced by St Oswald’s House: even there, Zumba has entirely replaced the concept of ‘tea-dancing’.

Staggered upstairs to somewhat galling sight of tall, thin-without-Zumba Chloe cradling children like Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna and reading The Wind in the Willows. Children looked up excitedly for usual post-Zumba spectacle of me crawling up, red in the face, on verge of heart attack.

As soon as Chloe left, Billy and Mabel dispensed with The Wind in the Willows, to egg self on into hilarious game of throwing contents of laundry basket down stairs. By time had got them to sleep, cleared up overexcited vomit, etc., was so exhausted that stuffed down two giant fried turkey croquettes (cold) and a three-inch wedge of banana cake. Resolved to enrol in proper salsa or meringue class as soon as possible because, actually (airily), it is the purer form of Latin dance which interests me. Merengue, I mean. Not meringue.

GETTING ONLINE

Tuesday 2 July 2013

133lb (thank you, Zumba/tea-dancing), dating sites investigated 13, dating profiles read 87, attractive dating profiles read 0, dating profiles set up 2, number of disastrous relationships Jude has formed online 17, number of promising relationships Jude has formed online 1 (encouraging).

11 p.m. Jude, who is STILL going out with Wildlifephotographerman, just came round after the kids were asleep, determined to make me get online.

I watched her clicking on dating sites with messianic frenzy and making lists: ‘Scuba-diver’, ‘Likes Hotel Costes’, ‘Read A Hundred Years of Solitude’ – yeah, right. ‘You see, you have to make notes, Bridge, otherwise you’ll mix them all up when you message them.’

‘Don’t you ever want to just, like, give up?’ I said.

‘No, or I would have ended up sucking lollipops with a faraway look in my eye.’

Realized with embarrassment I had picked up a lollipop and was sliding it in and out of my mouth.

‘The thing is, Bridge, it’s a percentages game.’

Jude, having burst through the ‘glass ceiling’ of the financial world, is, I suppose, bound to see it in these terms.

‘You can’t afford to take anything personally. You’re going to get stood up, you’re going to get eighteen-stone people whose pictures are of someone else. But with enough experience – and skill! – you’ll weed through that dross.’

We then went into a Greatest Hits medley of the online dross Jude had successfully weeded through to find Wildlifephotographerman: Sexualhumiliationman (of course!), Marriedwithbabyman – who took Jude out, snogged her, then included her in the global text saying his wife had had a baby – and SkydiverGraphicdesignerman – who did turn out to be a graphic designer, but also, it emerged, a devout Muslim who didn’t believe in sex before marriage, but, bizarrely, also liked to spend his weekends Morris dancing.

‘And somewhere,’ Jude said, ‘somewhere out there, it’ll just take one click, and you’ll be home.’

‘But who would want a fifty-something single mother with two small children?’

‘Take a look,’ she said, signing me in for a free trial on SingleParentMix.com. ‘They’re just normal people like you and me. They’re not weirdos. I’ll put forty-nine.’

A column of photos popped up of strange men in wire glasses and striped becollared shirts hanging over the folds of their stomachs.

‘It looks like a line-up of serial killers,’ I said. ‘How can they be single fathers? Unless they’ve murdered the mothers?’

‘Yes, well, maybe that wasn’t a very good search,’ Jude said briskly. ‘How about this?’

She opened up the profile she’d made for me on OkCupid.

Actually, when I looked, there were some really quite cute ones on there. But oh, the loneliness – the profiles giving away months or maybe years of heartbreak and disappointment and insult.

Someone who’d actually picked as their username ‘Isthereanyoneout_there?’ had as their profile:

I’m a nice normal guy who just wants a nice normal woman. If your photo is from 15 years ago, then MOVE ON! If you’re fucked up, married, desperate, passive-aggressive, not a woman, shamelessly gold-digging, emotionally sadistic, superficial, self-obsessed, illiterate, just looking for quick sex, just looking to indulge in endless streams of messaging then not meet, just looking to get a date to massage your ego and stand me up because you can’t be bothered, then MOVE ON!

And then there were the profiles from married men quite openly saying they want uncomplicated sex.