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.