‘Ooooh, just look at the rock too!’ I squeaked. ‘Shiny shiny shiny. Put it on. Oh, blissful bling, it’s gorgeous! And can I help you plan the wedding? Please say I can? What about a dress? When is it? Oooh, you should totally have one of those vintage shabby chic weddings in a barn, with hay bales and antique bottles full of wildflowers and wellies under your wedding dress!’
‘Ellen, does it ever occur to you that you spend a tiny bit too much time on Pinterest?’ enquired Sam.
‘No. There is no such thing as spending too much time on Pinterest. And anyway, I am the one who got Hannah and Charlie together, so I should totes be the wedding planner extraordinaire. And the guest of honour. Oh, frabjous day! I can finally buy my dream hat. Oh, I’m so glad you are getting married, Hannah, and I can get a hat.’
‘Firstly, Sophie informs me that “totes” is also one of the things only lame, sad old people say, and secondly, some people might say that getting Hannah and Charlie together now was the least you could do, after breaking his poor heart at university and letting poor Hannah pine after him for all those years, so that they ended up marrying unsuitable other people,’ said Sam, rather unkindly, I thought.
It is true that Hannah and Charlie and I do go back a very long way, and it is also true that I might have once led him on a tiny bit and then made out with Simon instead, and possibly, yes, if I was a better person then maybe Hannah and Charlie would’ve got together twenty years ago, but I did do the right thing in the end when I bumped into Charlie a couple of years ago, and so really I think I do deserve all the credit. And the best hat at the wedding.
‘We are talking about hats, Sam, not past indiscretions,’ I said with dignity, before babbling more at Hannah about my Vision for her elegant, rustic, Pinterest-tastic wedding.
‘I don’t want to get married in a barn with wellies under my dress, though,’ protested Hannah. ‘And anyway, we haven’t even set a date yet, so put down your phone and stop bidding on vintage bottles on eBay, Ellen!’
‘I was just looking!’ I said indignantly. ‘There’s no harm in looking. Ooooh, just think, we can go dress shopping. And get shitfaced again on the free champagne in the posh dress shops.Oh, just think … A wedding dress. An elegant, tasteful one, not a confection of taffeta monstrousness like last time. Can I be a bridesmaid? Can I still wear a hat if I’m a bridesmaid? Emily and Sophie and Jane could be bridesmaids too!’
‘Ellen, I’m forty-two, and we are both getting married for the second time. I’m not having dozens of bridesmaids – this is not the Royal Wedding, you know!’
‘It would be nice,’ I muttered sulkily.
‘I’ve DONE the big wedding, Ellen. And had no control of it, because my mother arranged most of it, and what my mother didn’t take over, my bloody ex-monster-in-law did, as she did her best to make the day all about her, right down to the old hag turning up at the church in what looked suspiciously like a wedding dress herself, before trying to claim that it was “tradition” for her to dance the first dance with my new husband. I want this day to be about Charlie and me. And you are my best friend, and so of course I want you to be involved and help me plan it. Just don’t get carried away!’
‘Can I get carried away with my hat at least?’ I demanded.
‘Do what you like with your bloody hat!’ said Hannah.
Monday, 12 September
Today is my birthday. I am now the grandly depressing age of forty-two. And it is a Monday. There should be a law against having birthdays on Mondays. It is absolutely the worst day of the week to have a birthday on.
My forty-second birthday was not nearly as good as my fortieth. I had been rather in dread of my fortieth, convinced that it was nothing more than the marking of the inexorable slide into cronedom and haghood, that it would be the bringer of sagging and wrinkling and walking into a room only to announce that I couldn’t remember what I had gone in there for (actually, that is happening more and more). But in the event, Simon swept me off to Paris for a gloriously romantic weekend (though I do not recommend having sex after you have been eating croissants in bed, the crumbs get everywhere and are very hard to remove).
We walked hand in hand by the Seine, and Simon grumbled yet again about why I felt the need to buy old postcards (‘Because I just do, OK, Simon, it’s not my fault that you have no soul’), we baulked in horror at the queues for the Eiffel Tower, and Simon was forced to bundle me out the Louvre when I took exception to the crowds of tourists clustered around the Mona Lisa, as I was very hot and rather over people and was remarking loudly that I was not at all impressed and wasn’t it rather small and dingy a painting for people to make such a fuss about, and some of the tourists, having travelled halfway across the world to make a dream come true by seeing the Mona Lisa, were muttering and taking exception to my views on Great Art. Due to the many people in Paris, I also found it necessary to frequently pop into bijou cafés and have my equilibrium restored with delightful pichets of vin rouge, which meant that I largely spent the weekend in a splendidly blurry haze.
There was one quite unfortunate moment, though, when Simon left me alone in the very posh hotel, as I wanted a soak in the bath, and he decided to go down to the bar for a drink. The hotel had the most gloriously huge, deep, wide bathtub I had ever seen – not only that, but it was a Jacuzzi bath! Oh the bliss, I thought! How relaxed and reinvigorated I would be after a good old wallow in that!
I tipped the tiny little bottle of ‘complimentary’ bubble bath into the splendidly deep, hot bath I had run, hopped in and set the Jacuzzi settings to ‘high’, but instead of lying back and enjoying a tranquil moment with lovely warm jets of water soothing my aching muscles, I found myself being spun around into a vortex. The bath was so large, and the Jacuzzi so powerful, I was sucked into a whirlpool in the middle of the bath, unable to reach the controls on the side and turn the bastarding thing off. In addition, the VERY FUCKING TINY bottle of bubble bath had been whipped into a giant foam mountain, obscuring my vision, disorientating me as to where in the bath I was or where the control panel was, and very shortly spilling over the edge of the bath.
Simon, thank God, had got downstairs to the bar, realised he had forgotten his phone and come back upstairs for it. He opened the door to our room to be greeted by bubbles pouring from under the bathroom door, and me screaming for help. When he finally finished laughing he did at least turn off the bath and rescue me, but it is very difficult to attempt to maintain any illusion of poise when one has had to be fished from a killer bath, looking like a drowned rat.
This was also the evening that I insisted we went to a jazz bar in Montmartre so we could be cool and Parisian and sophisticated. Simon had warned me I wouldn’t like it, and sure enough, within about ten minutes I was grumbling that it was just noise and there was no proper tune. Simon looked smug and pretended he was enjoying it, while calling me a philistine. He wouldn’t let us leave till we had finished our drinks, and as I had demanded a Campari and soda, thinking it would make me look very European, as well as being pretty and pink, it took me quite a long time to choke it down. It turned out that Campari and soda actually tastes like very nasty cough syrup and Simon said that he wasn’t buying me another drink if I wasted that one, as it had been the princely sum of €15 in the over-priced jazz bar. Sometimes Simon is very cruel.
Anyway, now I am forty-two. Quite irretrievably into the realms of the fortysomethings, which is even worse than when I turned thirty-one and had histrionics because I was now a thirty-something (mainly because I remembered watching Thirty-something in my teens and thinking how terribly old they all were, and now I was a fucking thirtysomethinger myself,
