Love is all around
IT’S a leap year, gulp. As if the Valentine’s gush isn’t enough, now the girlfriends and single ladies among us must publicly announce our undying love by proposal. I’ve spent at least two leap years and nearly a decade of Valentine’s Days concentrating on my unequivocal singleness. Being a useless dating, compromise-fearing, one-woman island worrying about withered ovaries, over familiarity with cats, herds of compensatory godchildren and having all the romantic appeal of a drunk Duracell bunny.
“I whipped off my psychedelic catsuit and joined the scantily clad lot in the hot tub”
The notion of finding a date, let alone love, can, I baulked. This, I think, I combated well enough by detailing an honestly sparse account of all the hanky panky I wasn’t having and the complete absence of ‘true love’. The sorts of parties I like probably didn’t help on the romance side. I kept an eye out for ‘the one’ in all sorts of peculiar places, but thunderbolt romance never turned up at the same time I did. Memorably, I went to a small festival organised by friends of friends where, in the wee hours, I found a hot tub in a wood. I suppose it had once been filled with clear water but by then resembled, a giant, lukewarm pot of minestrone. Significantly squiffy, I was cajoled to get in and join a gang of guys and girls, who between them had approximately half the underwear that was actually required for moral decency. Not wanting to be called boring or end up cold and soggy, I whipped off my psychedelic catsuit and joined the scantily clad lot in my pants, with just a bottle of rosé and the murky liquid obscuring my boobs. After some hours, it seemed, I was left talking rubbish in the now stone-cold minestrone with a couple across from me clearly about to bonk in the gloop and an over-friendly Army officer who kept making attempts to fondle my bottom. Worried I was about to end up pregnant by immaculate conception, I shooed out the couple, scolded the officer and was left talking to a fairly agricultural bloke, and reader of . On establishing I was ‘Younger in the Field’, he kindly told me how bad my column was. He said it was irritating, too risqué ‘for the olds’ and seemed made up for effect. Nonetheless we got on and later conceded, as we lay platonically damp at 6am in a makeshift bed in the back of a 4x4 having drunk a bottle of port, sardined by my friend and her conquest (putting a stop to any fumbling under the shared duvet), that I was probably more truthful but just as useless at the love game as I made out in print.
