Inner Poise!

The best place for it, too, my plumptious

I can’t believe we made it to April already, Bridget Brigade. This installment unfortunately will have to be brief, since I procrastinated about it all day as well as about the actual work I was supposed to be doing and now it’s 3:30 already. I also had 2 alcohol units last night (v. unusual, for me), two “coco-ritas,” a drink that combines aspects of margarita and pina colada, doesn’t that sound nice? My brain feels like someone rubbed it with Benzocaine. In summary, I apologize for not being able to bring my A-game to a v v v good chapter, in which Bridget starts out trying to emulate Kathleen Tynan “(though not, obviously, dead.)”

I just realized that I subconsciously plagiarized that line a little bit here:

Whoopsy doops!

Anyway: Bridget sets out to emulate Tynan’s “inner poise,” a quality that involves, being generally immaculate, sitting at a desk with flowers on it, introducing people to each other gracefully at parties, and not “putting on makeup as a hysterical displacement activity.” This goes exactly as well as you would expect and the end of the chapter finds Bridget behaving about as poiselessly as you can imagine, going right from a hookup with her married Australian downstairs neighbor (“Bridgid!”) to answering the pre-cel-phone equivalent of a “u up?” text from Daniel Cleaver. In the olden times, someone had to come to your front door and buzz and ask to use your bathroom, after which you would have unprotected sex with them and share Indian takeaways for two days. If you were Bridget.

Highlights:

“‘Thanks’, I said, practically eating the proffered fag.”

“Normally I would be snoring by now and having some sort of traumatized paranoid dream”

“I feel like a scientist who discovers that his life’s work has been a total mistake” (re: dieting)

“Must stop buying instant lottery tickets, but the trouble is I do quite often win” (this entire passage, about how the scratching off itself is “often quite a hard and skilled job” made me appreciate how Bridget’s bad habits are those of a person without access to a pocket-sized 24/7 addiction and reward machine.

Lowlights:

Not to harp on this but the dieting stuff, which is part of the inner poise quest, is so depressing and that is not what we’re here for! But the tapeworm passage is funny, I have to admit. “I love my new tapeworm.”

Bits and bobs:

I like how the publishing party has real Julian Barnes in it, being bored by Simon from Marketing.

Next: “May: Mother-To-Be,” ! (a fake !, Bridget won’t really be pregnant for like three more books)