Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy



LET’S FACE THE MUSIC AND TEA-DANCE


Saturday 29 June 2013

Just set off for Hampstead Heath and had to come back as seemed like giant bucket of water was being emptied on our heads. Weather has been disgusting this summer. Rain, rain, rain and freezing cold, as if there is NO summer. Is completely intolerable.

Sunday 30 June 2013

Gaah! Is suddenly boiling hot. Don’t have sunblock or hats and is too hot to stay outside. How are we supposed to manage in this unbearable heat? Is completely intolerable.

Monday 1 July 2013

6 p.m. Right! Am going to stop being so sorry for myself lest I end up accidentally drinking Fairy Liquid. The end of the school year is almost here with its absorbing matrix of plays, school trips, pyjama days, emails about presents for the teachers (including a very strict one from Perfect Nicolette about everyone sticking to chipping in for the John Lewis vouchers and not buying their own Jo Malone candles), and – generating the most unfeasible number of mass emails of all – Billy’s Summer Concert. Billy is going to play ‘I’d Do Anything’ from Oliver! as a solo on his bassoon. The concert has been organized by Mr Wallaker, who seems now to be including half the music department in his military-style takeover, and is to be held at sunset in the grounds of Capthorpe House, a stately home up the A11.

Presumably Mr Wallaker will be dressed as Oliver Cromwell and his ‘so nice to meet someone with a real face’ wife will have had four pints of extra filler put in her face to celebrate. Oops, back in the knife box, Miss Sharp. Must read more of The Little Book of Buddhism: ‘We do not possess our home, our children or even our own body. They are only given to us for a short time to treat with care and respect.’

Oh, no! I still haven’t made the dentist appointment for Billy and Mabel. The longer I leave it, the more I daren’t, since clearly their teeth are now riddled with holes, they will end up like extras in Pirates of the Caribbean and it will be all my fault.

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’.

Helen Fielding's books