Posted on by maryhadow · 1 Comment

Happy

“Hello Beautiful”.

Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.

Oh.

Oh.

How wonderful to wake up to those words! Followed by frothy Nespresso coffee and osteoporosis-busting ReadyBrek in bed.

I have never been happier.  I haven’t felt like this for literally decades.  Butterflies, indigestion, beating heart, loss of appetite, too much booze and fags, amazement, disbelief, loud music, dancing, and singing. I’m astonished that my stomach ulcer hasn’t returned. A soul mate. Connections on every level. Siamese twins. Matching Lego bricks.  Kindred spirits.

I’m so up myself that I had become convinced I’d never, ever, manage to find anybody I rated more highly than me; whose company I would enjoy day after day, even more than that of my best girlfriends.

Least of all via the last-resort loser-world of online dating.  How thorough are those computers?!  It’s a miracle.

But:

9 1/2 weeks looms. And after that, according to Google, thanks to changing chemicals in the brain my infatuation phase will end within three months, and our romance stage after one to two years.  How do I make all this stuff hurry up so I know where I am?

Just – eeek and ooer.

Posted on by maryhadow

Punching

This is a word young people use to describe someone who is ‘punching above their weight’ ie going out with somebody who ‘could do better’.

Presumably ‘could do better’ is a purely subjective assessment, but personally I think it’s pretty easy to spot the punchers.

I am resolved never again to get involved with one.  I don’t think Ex was punching, but I do think the majority of the men in my life were.

As a result of them living off me, expecting me to provide a lovely place for them to stay, food, drink, and fine-dining, just because I am richer (work harder) than they are, I have turned into an arch anti-feminist.

A feminist man, on the other hand, by definition finds it  acceptable for the woman to be more successful than he is, so then she can pay for him and look after him – handy!

Living the first thirty years of my life in the middle of what most people would assume to be the centre of male chauvanism – Eton College, one of the last remaining all-boys schools – I have been lucky enough never once in my life to have experienced the faintest whiff of it.  I’m sure it still exists in some places, but I do think the feminists are terribly vocal and rather unattractive in their views about what must be a relatively minor problem these days.

Well – ooops. This attitude of mine is beginning to get me into trouble.

Last week I had dinner with two barristers.  One of them had been at Exeter University with me; the other was Cambridge- educated; and all their children went to Oxbridge.

Conversation flowed with energy, warmth and enthusiasm, until I mentioned the jolly A’levels my daughter Faye, who wants to be an actress, is taking (drama, film studies and music tech). And how, to my delight, as a result of her achieving her dream (or, more likely, becoming a waitress) she will never have to pay back her student loan, so it becomes a generous gift from the government.

On top of which she will be able to respect a nice, mediocre, gentle, kind, moderately successful husband who will look after her, she can be an involved stay-at-home Mum and caring housewife, and live happily ever after, just as nature, over the millennia, has decreed.  As opposed to a lonely, bitter, manless, childless, over-achieving, stressed-out Cheltenham Ladies College/Oxbridge-educated terrifying merchant banker who makes men quiver in their boots.

The merry atmosphere froze, and we drove home in silence.

This Thursday we have Faye’s school’s parent/teachers meeting, where I shall be facing some renowned ‘FemiNazi’ who teaches Faye her fourth subject (probably to be dropped at the end of the first year), English Literature. Faye achieved a ‘7’ in English at GCSE, thanks to excellent teaching and elder brother Will’s input into her ‘The Inspector Calls’ coursework essay.  A knowledge of famous written works, we informed a reluctant Faye, will add depth and breadth to her overall knowledge and understanding of the Performing Arts.

Poor thing has found herself in a class of only eight children, two of whom achieved straight 9s at GCSE. These youngsters devour books for breakfast, for fun! It takes Faye a month to plough through just one! She is completely out of her league, indoctrinated by my old-fashioned thinking, and yesterday, the FemiNazi  bully made her cry.

I am enormously looking forward to a jolly good row on Thursday evening.

Meanwhile, I am so over-educated, over-achieving and over-competent that I have inadvertently emasculated almost every man I have ever gone out with.  And now, reduced to scouring Encounters and Muddy Matches nationally, I still cannot find a single man of any appeal. My new skinny brownness, not to mention my up-my-own-arsedness, is not going to help with this punching problem.  I’m hoping that Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine’s ‘Week of Love’, focussing on on-line dating every day this week, might help further reduce the taboo, and that some decent men might finally sign up.

So I think I might have another go on Tinder. Although round here I shall probably find myself swiping cows and ponies left and right, as opposed to actual human beings.

My dermatologist friend’s daughter is about to marry somebody she met on Tinder.  Both are Cambridge graduates.

Oh no.  I have discovered that neither my mobile phone nor my ‘Google Notebook’ are up-to-date enough to accept the Tinder ‘app’. Excuse me while I just disappear pop out through the garden gate for a minute, to shag a sheep.

Posted on by maryhadow

Meet the Author – Moi!

“Are you sitting down?” I exclaim.  “His grandmother taught me and everyone else I know the piano til we were twelve! She had blue hair!”

This is the result of my meeting with the MD of the Dating/Events company who’s asked me to speak at her ‘Author’s Talk’ in September.  She appears to be more interested in matchmaking me than in my books which she hasn’t read.

She’d given me his name, and original family name, so obviously I stalked him on Google the minute she was out of the door, and top of the entries was an article he’d written in the Scottish Daily Mail about his famous composer grandfather, married to my ex-piano teacher.

She says he’s brainy and quirky – well I love all that; and shoots, so he understands my world.

I told her I’d give her a million quid if she found me the man of my dreams. But since then I’ve reduced my offer to a grand, as I don’t actually have a million.  And now I’m worrying about how and when you can actually tell that this is finally ‘the one’.  Perhaps there should be a scale of charges.  Maybe thirty quid if you find yourself sharing a thoroughly enjoyable, stimulating meal together, that gets you all excited.  A hundred quid if you sleep with them; three hundred if you’re still with them after three months; and a thousand if you marry them.

Meanwhile the 6′ willowy blonde vision of loveliness that comprises Nell, the agency owner, explains that the Author’s Evening will probably comprise only around eight people sitting in a circle in a very relaxed way, and I won’t need to have prepared a talk or anything. God – I could actually look forward to this. Two hours of talking about myself without stopping, to a rapt audience! Lovely jubbly!

 

 

 

 

Posted on by maryhadow

Chippy People

I’m losing my nerve re going public with this blog malarky.

To do so, one of the things I suppose I’ll have to do is post about it on my Facebook page. My page currently boasts 268 so-called ‘friends’, most of whom I would imagine are Faye’s mates from the local pony club, and at the moment it’s listed under my maiden name – Mary Nicholson.

On the one hand, there’s boring close friends and foreigners witless with monosyllabic complacent me me me posts from my comfortable middle-class home, moaning on that I’m too broke to buy a new horse or something, and that none of my on-line dates feel comfortable discussing private schools, hunts, and yacht moorings.

But it’s rather different, putting yourself out there in front of people such as those following Rachaele Hambleton’s occasionally extremely dark posts – where women can’t actually afford to feed their own children; or are living in genuine fear of having their throats cut, or of their children getting stabbed to death by their abusive crazed fathers.  Despite all her selfless campaigning, Rachaele still receives some unpleasant and very negative messages. Yet hers is a completely different scary alien world to the comfortable, privileged, easy, complacent, smug place that I inhabit – what on earth are these sorts of trolls going to say to me? Perhaps they’ll stick a bomb under my car?  Do I really want to get involved, and be completely shafted as a result, by people who aren’t interested in reading jolly, life-enhancing, lightweight drivel about how posh people ‘live the life’, by chippy women who prefer to stick a pin into everything? My skin is not very thick.  This might turn out all to be a very hurtful, self-indulgent, waste of time.