condition, fuck shaving the armpits, brush teeth extra thoroughly, no one will see my legs, to hell with exfoliating, towel, where the fuck is the moisturiser, who cares, deodorant, perfume. My sartorial motivation today is comfort. So I turn to some very old Levi 501s, a soothing, eight-year-old grey T-shirt I call Ol’ Grey, a brown cardigan, woolly socks and Converses. I look like a Smashing Pumpkins fan. A male one. In 1992. This isn’t working. Normally, when I doubt my outfit, I give myself the ‘if I think it works, it works’ speech, but I can’t make this one fly.
I take everything off and think for a moment. What else is comforting? Living in the 70s would be comforting, I think. No email or mobiles, you could smoke everywhere, and use a typewriter. How simple. So I put on some very flared blue jeans, a ribbed white top, my Converses again, pull my damp hair into a side plait, lace a mildly retro silk (polyester, whatever) scarf from H&M through the belt loops and tie in a side knot, and consider myself again. Ah yes. Vaguely Co-Ed 1972. This will do fine. Thank fuck I work in advertising and can wear anything I want; if I had to put on a suit right now I’d slash my wrists…Make-up…hmm. My eyebrows are being blatantly annoying, and I don’t have the patience to deal with them today. Lots of mascara, some bronzer and blush to fake good health, lipbalm. I add a beige checked men’s coat I bought in a charity shop and voilà. Slightly watery-eyed, but not bad. I check my watch. It’s taken me twice as long to get ready today as yesterday. This is the reason that I don’t drink. (Much.)
On the tube on the way to work I ponder the Dating Sabbatical. Obviously, it’s kind of a silly idea. But also so easy. An easy way to put off dealing with being back in the singles game.
I could go on a Dating Sabbatical and nurse my aforementioned bruised heart—OK, OK, so it isn’t bruised and I didn’t really give Posh Mark much thought at all yesterday. (Jeez, you’re a tough crowd.) But my heart is very shy right now and it doesn’t feel like coming out to play for awhile. It would rather eat chocolate in the bath and read Jilly Cooper’s Polo.
I open my lucky yellow clutch to take out the Dating Sabbatical Rules for a quick review, and pull out a bunch of receipts from drinks last night adding up to over £60. Yikes. I mentally add this to the spreadsheet I keep in my head of incomings and outgoings. (No, it’s not a foolproof way to plan my finances, but it works for me. Ish. Since I don’t earn much money, I have to make some sacrifices to spend as much as I like on what I consider essentials, like clothes and vodka and black cabs. So I don’t belong to a gym, never get my hair done, and spend almost nothing on things like, you know, food. I eat a lot of baked beans, tinned tuna, bananas and toast.)
I get to work, the perfect coffee in hand, and email Bloomie:
Duuuuuude. I’m still in.
She replies:
Ha, really? Fine. You can test it tomorrow night at Mitch’s party.
I reply:
Roger that.
I hide behind my computer all day. Andy doesn’t look at me once, and though I’m meant to talk to him about a new brief, I decide to send him an email about it when he’s out at lunch. I just can’t face him today.
I’m meeting up with Kate for dinner. She’s the third in our trifecta from university, but is slightly more absent from our social lives over the last year or so as she’s in a ridiculously stable long-term relationship. We meet near her work in Mayfair at The Only Running Footman, a pseudo-rustic pub. It’s packed with finance-type people drinking away their worries but we find a seat in the restaurant bit downstairs. I notice quite a few very good-looking men here. Shame I’m on a Dating Sabbatical and not looking, I remind myself.
Over burgers and beers I explain the theory of the Dating Sabbatical to Kate. She nods very seriously and poses relevant and poignant questions, all of which I answer with what’s becoming rather slick aplomb, till—
‘Alright, Sass. This all seems like a very you thing to do. But what if you meet someone you actually want to go out with?’
I pause, chip in the air.
‘How do you mean?’
‘What if you…you know, you meet someone you really, really fancy and want to go out with?’
‘A guy? That I fancy? And want to go out with?’
I’m flummoxed. This idea hadn’t even occurred to me. I haven’t met someone I really wanted to date in years. I just sort of do it as it seems like something to do. And if they’ve gone to the trouble of asking, unless I find them ugly or sleazy or loserish or I’m positive they’re a bastardo, then I think I should say yes, and then just see what happens. (Though this approach, as history shows, hasn’t really worked out.) But I can’t exactly tell Kate that. It sounds stupid.
‘Hmm…well…I guess I never want to go out with anyone till he asks me out. I might think someone across the bar is hot, or whatever, but I just don’t think about it much more than that till he’s made the first move. Why waste the energy?’
‘That seems kind of…reactive,’ says Kate carefully, dunking a chip in the huge dollop of English mustard at the side of her plate. It’s really weird how much she likes English mustard.
A little more about Kate: very pretty, very short and thus kind of adorable. Probably my sweetest friend. She and Bloomie and I have been close friends since about day one of university, when we met in halls, got hammered together on cider and discovered a shared love of Jeff Buckley (yep, such clichés). She grew up in a little town in Cambridgeshire, going to Brownies and riding horses, and still has that milk-fed prettiness such girls always get. Boys always loved her. Men love short women, have you ever noticed? I’m on the tall side, by the way. And I’ve never had a boyfriend tall enough to wear three-inch heels with. (Does my dating agony ever end, I ask you?) Sorry, back to Kate. She’s an accountant, though I don’t really know why, as she read Italian and French at university. She even spent a year in Florence. She’s always been a bit of a control freak, the person who makes plans weeks in advance and panics when things change unexpectedly. Perhaps that’s what accountants are like.
Kate lives with her boyfriend, a guy called Tray. Bloomie and I referred to him as Tray Nice when we first met him, then Tray Serious. Now it’s Tray Boring. He’s perfectly nice, but brings nothing to the conversational table. It’s not that I don’t like talking to him, exactly. It’s just that I like talking to everybody else a lot more. I guess they must have some crazy connection to make Kate stay with him for three years. As my dad always says, no one sees the game like the players. (He is a bottomless well of sporting/relationship analogies.) She seems pretty happy these days—a bit quieter and less prone to silliness than she used to be, and we don’t see her as much as we used to, but happy.
‘Did you like Tray before he asked you out?’
Kate squints in thought. ‘I don’t know…I just thought he seemed very intelligent and sort of…kind. Kind and interesting to talk to. And I’d decided I wanted that in my next boyfriend. Yeah, I guess I did like him first.’
‘And sexual chemistry?’
‘Oh, yes, yes, all that too,’ says Kate quickly. ‘And you know, I really was intent on having someone kind. I’d met so many, uh…bastardos. Remember Dick the Prick? And The Missing Link?’
I start laughing. Dick the Prick was a guy she met when she first moved to London, but he cheated on her and she dumped him. The Missing Link wasn’t awful, but he wasn’t particularly
