Waiting for Darcy
A sign outside the Globe Tavern on the south bank of the Thames reminds you of its antecedents of being a pub located close to the original Shakespeare’s Globe. But that is not its only claim to fame, one of its recent ones being that Bridget Jones’s Diary was shot there.
It was not my intention to go looking for Bridget on a recent trip to London but when I asked to read back issues of The Independent to figure out whose baby Bridget is now expecting and how she was coping with her pregnancy (Days since baby due: 6 (bad) contractions:0 (bad) Babies: 0 (embarrassing)), friends thought I was a bit loony but soon started pointing out little trivia like the one in para 1 and an ale at the tavern was certainly not amiss. And as we discussed the merits of the movies and the reviews which had made even the men go out and see it, I looked around. There were women in black suits, looking supremely confident, having an after-dinner drink with men. Dateish maybe but certainly no Jude and Shazzer affair.
I knew few other young women in London. The Italian friends were charming and the French so proper. And C with her job at a metals magazine (ooh, let’s put a close-up shot of an aluminium sheet, that will have readers drooling) was lovely and funny but didn’t ring any singleton diary bells.
So it was that as I sipped my beer at a pub in Hampstead that I sat up alert when J sat up at the mention of an online community that could help her find singles and dates. Long skirt, roots showing, J was drinking ‘Pimms, my dear, I’ve been drinking since 2 in the noon, so unlike me’ and talking about how friends were concerned when she decided to rent and not buy a house. “We need to have a talk, they told me__like I was going to marry this ghastly guy or going to go off chemotherapy,’’ she said. After the merits of mortgages had been discussed through, she suddenly announced that her mother’s dentist was in jail. “She’s very upset, you know. It’s so strange. He’d been looking for a girl and she’d been trying to pair him up with me.” J (male) with a cat that wears a collar specific to the cat flap on his door offered his sympathies. Conversation flowed as easily as the beer and soon J had another distressing story to recount. “My parents recently had a fire at their place and they didn’t even tell me! I was furious,” she said. “They had six firemen in the house and they didn’t call me.” Something to do with men in uniform, of course. What can I say? Truth is stranger than fiction? Durr.

(PS: Is it just me or are there only Daniels left in this world?)