22 April - Thirties suck

Life may be hard at 42 odd extra years. For example, I run into a colleague who’s got an art magazine and he told me his next issue’s theme is ‘the future’ and would I perhaps want to contribute to it. I told him the future scares me. Because now there’s much less of it to f uck around with and f uck around are we still, no doubt about that. Still finding it hard to take decisions that would alter life for the better (like, disappear from these rainy shores for example) and certainly not possessing any impetuous ways any more. Everything is sort of planned and as I said plans are forever procrastinated. Till eventually you die when least expected.

But boy, is it so much better than being 35ish. As exemplified by a recent evening when I took Toph and a younger spare male friend of his out for dinner with a couple of women I know who are in their mid thirties and high achieving - (o be not achieving in your mid thirties is a sin… it’s only later that you can relax into a sort of ‘it went the way it was meant to go’ motif about your (lack of) career.

At dinner S. was giving Toph her thoughts on work – she works too hard, has just applied for a better/higher position in a rival firm but her other half of the brain is constantly telling her she should slow down, slow down, not be this hard nosed bitch who can jet off to see a fuck buddy in NY and go skiing with him in Aspen, but come back to London and on a Friday night have dinner only with the same old g/friends whilst endlessly discussing their sparse lives and agreeing to go run half a marathon on Saturday morning because they’re not busy in bed with a lover. Then they’ll have coffee and then they’ll ring around to see what anyone is doing on Saturday night etc. Which will be much the same and then they’ll go play tennis or run again on Sunday morning.

After dinner she’s still talking to Toph about all this and trust a man to spot the contradictions. In the car back he says ‘One minute she’s saying she doesn’t want a Ken and Barbie life, and two sentences later she’s saying she wouldn’t mind a Ken and Barbie life because she would like a man who’s more than a shag – she says she can get those any time. So which does she want?’. I point out that she would need to shut up first and let the conversation go elsewhere. I know she knows Toph’s taken and so was talking to him like you talk to a girlfriend, but I don’t know that away from business meetings, she can be normal with a man and just not make him part of the interior monologue about life. I also point out that Ken and Barbie are two unfortunate figures to aspire too. It’s well known that they’re both airheads with cash for swimming pools and personal horse drawn carriages but they’re not a great couple are they??? Toph says he enjoyed listening to her (gave him a chance to offload where he also thinks he went wrong in life) but that at no point did S. talk about movies, books, friends, family.. it was all ‘Should I keep working to get somewhere and how do I meet the right guy’. Not at the Walmer Castle on a Friday night counselled Toph. I disagree. We were there and we brought an eligible friend though he’s at the same stage as the girls. He sort of half wants a relationship that will be stable and has legs but he’s still not able to buy groceries for his fridge and compromise on basic stuff like participating in some sports if the g/friend likes them. No, he’d rather stick to being himself and keep his nose in a book. It can never work if it’s ‘me first, you later’.

But I also had to come off my high horse and try and remember what I was like at 35. Similarly banging on and on and on about what seemed like an unsolvable dichotomy. You have to remember that back at that age, the choice of partner is totally complicated by the ‘Would I have kids with this guy and if so, when? AS am so busy working /making progress and I want to be equal’.
It was damn easy to look at my watch at 11pm and say ‘We’re going home’ and leave the girls to it. But they chose to leave at the same time. They are Europeans so not for them the picking up drunken guys two hours hence.

20 April - Pimping for friends

I have been pimping for a friend lately, because I’m reasonably good at it. G. and g/friend split up around Xmas and it had been a long time coming, basic incompatibility I diagnosed, despite strong mutual attraction As it took a while, when it ended, he wasn’t exactly heartbroken. In the meantime he had met a woman through work and they’d gone to dinner a few times in a town where they both find themselves working, she during the whole week, he a couple of days a week, not every week. He was smitten, though it took this lady two meetings before she disclosed she has a boyfriend of 15 years back at her hometown. Sort of historic boyfriend who never visits her where she works and probably doesn’t understand her anymore and who has yet to marry her and she wants to leave him but….

So, of course she’s unavailable and of course he’s smitten. I point out that they only seem to meet at drinks or dinner and it’s kind of hard to get a full picture in the cosy limbo of expensive restaurants. They like each other because they can talk and talk and he buys her dinner but they don’t know much about each other really. I suspect they’re both lonely in the city they have to work in and provide a great respite from tiny flat for her and hotel room for him. Still, after 3 months of dinners, drinks, constant texts and emails declaring ‘you’ve changed my life, you’re my god’ and gifts from him to her, she’s still not gone further than some taxi snogs with him.

I think she’s treating him like the gay friend and she’s the one who goes home at the w/end and shags her boyfriend who she wants to leave but .. blah blah.
Eventually he reaches the point and gives an ultimatum and decides not to be in touch with her until she’ll have sorted out her situation one way or another. I predict she’ll stay with boyfriend. In the meantime he’s truly upset. For something that never happened! This must be like what courtly love was all about… Courting and hopes…

So time to take action and distract G. At a party in London I introduce him to J. who’s a high flying PA to movie directors and jets off to NY and LA often enough. I don’t know her at all (friend of a friend) but he likes the look of her and so they arrange to meet. I predict second base will be reached in no time but I forgot she’s 35 and so she’s also playing the long game and in order to do this, there’s no concessions except some minor snogging and once again he’s busy dropping hundreds on dinners and cocktails. J. sweetly buys breakfasts at the w/end but .. not post sex obviously. And after the breakfasts she’s off to Harrods for a massage in her cute BMW and he has nothing to do but read the Sunday papers with us. He finds himself invited to some wedding with her in Portugal, or to NY where she stays at the St Regis or to the forthcoming wrap party for latest movie. Clearly he’s interested and intrigued but his mind is still on the unavailable one… and was considering J. only as a one off, whilst now he’s being sucked into a relationship that hasn’t gone sexual yet.

In the meantime he’s being told off by a female director in his company who he’s close to because she says that J. is not blue chip career enough for G!. How dare she criticise my r ‘n’ roll acquaintances? I think she’s jealous. And she’s just moved out of her boyfriend’s flat. Another 35ish… Scary times.

Time for more distractions … this time I take him to dinner with a hedge fund lawyer I think he’ll like the look of if not the lifestyle (she’s very extra sporty and he doesn’t do sports, she’s very intense and he’s very laid back, but you know, am hoping chemistry will do the trick.)

However at dinner it’s clear that they’re not in a hurry to speak to one another. They’re not sat opposite each other. Darn, I didn’t manoeuvre that fast enough. He talks most dinner to A. who’s opposite him but she’s recently hitched up so I doubt she’s interested. At the tail end of dinner this other woman L. who I don’t know but is some kind of consultant/accountant friend of A. turns up and boy does she wades straight in. As a confident 37 year old she probably thinks that she has no allegiance to the other woman who invited her along…She ends up monopolysing him the rest of the time at the bar and then they disappear off to a club from which he returns alone at 3am. Snogging took place again but no deal.

Now, am beginning to suspect he doesn’t know how to close a deal, or is a very bad snogger or… he’s still thinking about unavailable woman, to really take a step in another direction.

Which will it be? He’s back again next weekend and this time he’s going to tell J. he has nowhere to stay and let’s see if she finally takes him home? As for the wedding in Portugal, I’ve advised he should go only if guaranteed that there will be top glamorous/interesting people in attendance, otherwise, why bother. Have become very straightforward with my advice these days.


But then I get a pang of guilt about the women.. Little do they know how many he’s juggling… but of course he’s not doing anything wrong. All is up for grabs and he’s not getting laid.

13 March - TV watch & hardly ever

Don’t do TV in general, but sometimes you have to check it out. So I watch an episode of ‘Life on Mars’ mainly because Toph has never seen it (I caught one in the first series) and I feel he’s missing out on some good entertainment. My prediction is spot on, he likes it, though what makes him laugh the most is that John Simm chooses as a fake name for his undercover cop going to a was swapping party ‘Tony Blair’. His ‘wife’ is called ‘Cherie’ and his cop pal is ‘Gordon Brown’. My how we laugh.
Immediately after they’re showing the first episode of a new US series ‘Kidnapped’. As have ignored all the CSI’s , Greys Anatomy, Ugly Bettys and so on, again I feel we should watch this. Fortunately a handsome hunk appears from the beginning. I recognise the voice before the face. Never knew this actor’s name. We’re trying to place him. ‘Was he in 30 Something?’ says Toph. No he wasn’t I mean, he’d have had to be then the age this actor is now so clearly not. Was that 20 years ago? Or 18? Was it the same year/s as Twin Peaks? What a bonanza we had in the 80’s. How did I manage to see every single episode it seems and still go out as much as I did? Or maybe I think I saw them all but I didn’t. Like now, catching one is enough to know about a series and exchange a few words on it. Till you go on holiday in India or Brazil and realise every country has their indigenous TV stars that you’ll never know/care for and so why should we care for whoever is in the cast of ‘Lost’
I spend the time it takes to make a cup of coffee thinking about who he is (reading his name in the paper, Jeremy Sisto, does not enlighten me in the slightest’. Eventually the TV library in my head throws up the solution. He was the schizo brother in Six Feet Under, the brother to the Australian actress who was Nate’s g/friend in the show and he also tried to go out with the read-headed kiddie sister of Nate (can’t remember any other names real or characters of the cast and wasn’t that long ago but I need space in my head. Oh there’s another name, Nate is Peter Krause. There you go, am happy now. .Toph can’t quite see that this guy is that guy, but then I don’t think he was a fan. It’s a long first episode with plenty of criss crossing leads to further stories and other well known actor. That Timothy Hutton has aged badly, Linus Roache is not as fanciable as I normally find him. Toph likes it because you have to keep up with the plot. I think this is now just typical of some of these serials where you pat yourself on the back for being clever and remembering how it goes, till you give up like I did with ‘The West Wing’ –saving all of that together with the Charles Dickens to read when I’m really old. Eventually it ends. ‘I really liked that’ says the boyfriend. ‘Must have cost a heck of a lot more to film than Life on Mars’ says the accountant in moi. Clearly, I shan’t be waiting with bathed breath till next Tuesday. What’s wrong with me?