Bridget Jones: “I already feel like an idiot most of the time anyway”
I keep seeing the trailer and posters for Bridget Jones – Mad About the Boy popping up all over the place at the moment. I read the book when it came out and am looking forward to seeing it soon on the big screen. I love Bridget Jones – I read the first two books in 2000 and took my mum to see the first film in April 2001 just before we left to go travelling in Australia, which turned out to be living in Australia for 5 years. So I have happy memories of all these. It was also really refreshing to have a heroine in a book/film who wasn’t glamorous and perfect but was humanly flawed and prone to the ridiculous. I am a hugely clumsy and accident-prone person so it was nice to see someone like me on the screen and it validated being a ‘human’ human rather than a perfect one.
With this in mind I have been reflecting on my many Bridget Jones moments, something which I alluded to when I first started this blog but am as yet to follow up. They make me smile, they remind me that it is ok to not do everything perfectly, and that sometimes the things we view as our little failures are actually a humbling key to our successes. So here goes:
Oh Knickers!
I was a timid, shy child without much confidence and this was amplified as a teenager. I was very skinny so my appearance was all teeth and kneecaps. Not the best look on a teenager and I was (and still am) rather nerdy. I don’t think I looked like a nerd but it was there on the inside, the foundation to my whole being. These days I embrace this and enjoy reading the odd book on English grammar and the Facebook group ‘The Language Nerds’ (check it out, it’s awesome) but when you’re voluntarily taking an extra after-school GCSE in Latin ‘just for fun’, it doesn’t make you the coolest most confident kid on the block.
So when I left school and went to a different 6th Form to do my A Levels it offered an opportunity to show a different side of myself and shed some of the timidity that had accompanied me for so long. It afforded me the chance to wear a mask of confidence and to try and find the sophisticated 16-year-old that was surely deep down inside me. The first key to this was to look the part. Given that my entire school career had involved a uniform (except the stressful non-uniform fashion parade that was ‘mufti days’) the idea of wearing my normal clothes every day was daunting and needed careful consideration with regards to how I would be perceived. I didn’t wear much make up, I had nice skin and never suffered from spots, had straight teeth, very ordinary hair, so my outfit choices were the element that I needed to focus on to express myself. I didn’t want to stand out or be edgy, I just wanted to blend in with the crowd in an understated and fashionable way that made me seem normal, likeable, cool, the kind of girl you’d like to get to know.
The first few days were a fashion parade of my trendiest outfits. It was 1992 and in hindsight all these choices were pretty appalling but fashion, by definition, is of its time. There are some retro choices that I still love – Doc Martins, hoop earrings, an oversized jumper. I do still love a batwing. But overall, our choices move on pretty swiftly and we are soon appalled by past favourites.
One day in the first few weeks of the lower sixth, I was wearing a beige ‘body’ (do we remember these? Tight short sleeved leotards that would be worn with skirts or high-rise jeans. Thank goodness it was fashionable during my teens when I was stick thin). This ‘body’ was worn under a blue dress which was unbuttoned at the top, with tights underneath. On this particular day of trying to appear self-assured and confident, I went to the toilet block, then crossed back through the foyer into the main cafeteria where there were tables and lots of soft seating, the hub of downtime at sixth form where everybody hung out between lessons and at break. Thus, it was full of students milling around chatting and was the social space of the college. It was only on walking the full length of this crowded space full of my peers that I realised I had tucked my skirt into the back of my pants and proceeded to waltz around with my butt on show in front of the bulk of the college population! At once my air of sophistication and cool self-assurance crumbed. Yes, I was THAT idiot who walked around college with her butt on show, completely oblivious to it all!
Locked Up
Further into my sixth form career, the Bridget Jones fairy struck again. One of my A Levels was in Sociology. We had a really nice group of people in my class and our teacher, Mr Corrigan, was really lovely teacher. He was probably in his thirties, had two young children, and was a kind and knowledgeable teacher but was firm when he needed to be. We all liked and respected him, both for his knowledge and enthusiasm with regards to his subject, and for his teaching skills. However, at times I think he was slightly despairing of us all because, although we were bright and capable, I think as a group of gossiping teenagers, we could be hard work and prone to losing our focus.
When it came to our A level exams, two of us (myself and my friend Bec) had clashing Sociology and Law exams. We were the only two in the college with this situation and I am sure such an occurrence was pretty rare. This meant that we had to sit our Sociology exam after the rest of the country and as such we had to be contained and supervised so that we didn’t have any communication with anyone who had already sat this exam and therefore could leak the questions to us. This was, of course, before the days of mobile phones and the internet so as long as we didn’t use a landline or speak to anyone then we were perfectly safe from restricted information. What this meant however was that we had to be chaperoned after the end of our law exam, wait to be picked up by Mr Corrigan, then go back to his house with his wife and super-sweet children for the rest of the evening, stay overnight and then be taken directly to our delayed Sociology A level exam. We weren’t able to speak to our families about how our law exams had gone or have any contact with anyone at all. At least there were the two of us. But it really doesn’t matter how much you like and admire your teacher, you don’t ever want to temporarily move in with them.
On the subject of the lovely Mr Corrigan, and his despair at having to calm down our rambunctiousness in class and his going above and beyond by taking us home to supervise, he was also privy to one of my classic Bridget Jones moments. I had gone with a friend to the toilet at sixth form, it must have been before or after a Sociology lesson, and the door lock broke resulting in me being trapped inside the toilet cubicle. All our attempts to undo it were unsuccessful, so we had to seek reinforcements. For reasons I don’t recall my friend went to get Mr Corrigan who had to then come into the girls’ toilets to try and break me free from my lavatorial captivity. That poor man really did have to engage in scenarios with us that were far beyond his pay grade!
It’s Raining Men
When we first moved to Australia I was an avid swimmer; I loved it and I was good at it. It was such a luxury to have fantastic indoor and outdoor pools everywhere we went. Lagoons, rock pools, open sea swims, Olympic sized pools, campsite pools, it was great. Lots of the outdoor pools were filled with salt water which makes you extra buoyant and therefore makes it easier to swim. My favourite pool was the Olympic diving pool at Milsons Point in North Sydney. It is situated underneath the harbour bridge and the sides have open arches so as you swim you can see the bridge above you and the beautiful azure waters of the harbour alongside you – it is just breathtaking.
At the time my husband didn’t like swimming very much and didn’t have much stamina in the water. Since then he has started a midlife crisis and taken to training for and competing in triathlons so his swimming has improved vastly. He has also become quite obsessed with it, reading books on swimming, having adult improver lessons, and even had a swim-spa erected in our garden so that he can train.
Ironically, he wasn’t into swimming when we lived in the land of the super-pools so I would either swim alone or with a friend. When we were living in Brisbane for a bit, I went off in search of a pool for a swim. We hadn’t long arrived on the Gold Coast so were getting used to orienting ourselves around Brisband and seeing what was on offer. I found a pool at the University and went to go for a lunchtime swim there. My husband went off to engage in some land-based activity and agreed to come and meet me later at the pool.
I had a great swim, powering up and down the lanes. Unlike here, most Australians can swim well so pools are full of people speeding up and down doing front crawl (which they call freestyle). In the UK pools are predominantly full of older people slowly milling about doing breaststroke and trying to keep their heads out of the water. Having spent an hour or so swimming, my legs became tired and I suddenly got a cramp in my calf which wouldn’t un-cramp and I was struggling. A young man who was swimming alongside me saw me, grabbed me, and hoicked my leg up over his shoulder to relax the muscle and relieve the cramp. At which point my husband returned poolside to find me intimately wrapped around an antipodean hunk in the pool. “So this is what you get up to when I’m not around….”.
I would like to say that I could recognise my husband anywhere. There are experiments that reveal that babies can recognise their mothers by their scent alone and I would like to think that I have a similar level of identifiability with my spouse. He has a very distinctive way of walking – he walks with his feet at ten-to two – so his gait makes him easy to spot at a distance. But of course if he is still then this is not a helpful factor in identification. On such an occasion many years ago, we were in a bookshop browsing (and in my case probably also smelling) books. I love the smell of new books, it is one of the best aromas in the world up there with clean linen, lilies, barbeques, and Fahrenheit. On this particular occasion we were perusing the shelves separately and I looked up to see where he was. He was wearing a light blue jumper and jeans and had short blonde hair. I spotted him easily, walked up behind him, slid my arms around his waist and nuzzled into his neck. Except it wasn’t him, it was another tall blonde man in similar clothing that I had decided to publicly embrace! Oops!
Cup of Tea?
I worked up in North Lincolnshire as an Assistant Psychologist for a couple of years in a CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health) service on my journey to Clinical Psychology training. An assistant post is the holy grail on the pathway to psychological enlightenment, or rather clinical training. They are fairly poorly paid and are extremely competitive posts; my boss told me that he had had 200 applications for the post I had secured. These were the halcyon days though, these posts are now often ‘honorary’ which means that they are voluntary unpaid positions but they are still in high demand as it is experience needed if you want to follow this particular career pathway.
I was very fortunate to get that position and also lucky to work with such a lovely team of inspiring professionals. I look back at my time there with great pride and fondness and although I prefer working clinically with adults, I learned so much from my time and experience there. I also learnt the invaluable lesson: don’t use your butt when your hands are full!
One of the offices we worked from was a prefab building which extended the preexisting clinical space. It was situated right at the end of a very long corridor through a series of doors which joined the buildings together. There was a kitchen and then several doors leading to our office space where several of us would work at desks in-between clinical appointments. We would make each other tea and coffee in the kitchen and bring it down to our space. On one such occasion I made four mugs of tea and carried them down the corridor, two in each hand. I used my bum to slide the handle of the first door open and push through. However when I got to the penultimate door, I again tried to use my buttock mobility to manipulate the handle. This worked well but the handle sprang back up getting caught in the belt loop of my trousers, yanking them upwards! I was then tethered to the door handle with two mugs of boiling liquid in each hand and unable to reach the floor to put them down and release myself. Given the remoteness of our part of the building and having another door to get through to reach my colleagues, I was well and truly stuck and no-one could hear me. Which raises the philosophical questions – are you actually making a sound if nobody can hear you? Are you really stuck if nobody can see you? The answer is yes, and the tree does also make a sound when it falls! Given that my yelping went unheard I had to pour tea all over myself and the carpet in order to release my shackles. I learnt two things: don’t use your buttocks as a tool, and never offer to make the tea!
Costume-Jewellery
More recently I had a similar situation of being imprisoned by my own outfit. I was wearing a pretty bracelet which comprised of lots of little silver loops on a chain. It is quite dangly and sparkly and feminine. At work I spend a lot of time writing notes, both process notes during sessions and progress notes after sessions. I write the progress notes at my desk, but the in-session process notes are written on my lap. I hadn’t considered my bracelet to be a handicap but on one occasion I was writing on my lap and realised, to my horror, that one of the little silver loops had caught on a thread on the front of my trousers and was quite stuck. Which meant that my hand was tethered to my crotch, unable to move away without either breaking the bracelet or ripping my trousers. Certainly neither of these options could be done discreetly. My client noticed that I was stuck and I had to explain that I was not fiddling with myself, nor was I a frotteur taking an enthusiastic liking to my notepad, but my wrist was in fact stuck to my own trousers. I tried to use my left hand to cut myself free with a pair of scissors but they wouldn’t work with my left hand. I therefore had to use the only option available to me which was to ask my client to cut me free. It was not one of my more professional moments….trust me, I’m a doctor!
Worzel Gummidge: “What’s the use of having smart legs if you don’t use them!‘”
My most recent moment of ridiculousness occurred during the relatively mundane activity of picking up my seven-year-old daughter from her dance class. I was running late which seems to be standard for me. My eldest daughter reflected to me the other day that “you are so very organised mummy but somehow you are always running late for everything”. She’s not wrong.
The dance class is at our local village hall but there are currently building works taking place so the whole side is cordoned off but the front of the building was clear. Given my lateness I sprinted down the front path towards the entrance but in the dark I was unaware that this part of the building was now also cordoned off. I found this information out by running straight into the fencing, bouncing off it but then somehow ricocheting over the top of it, subsequently falling on my front from both height and at speed. I landed hard on my front, my chest and stomach hitting the solid mud, my hands in the mud, and my knees and ankles hitting the concrete. It was a giant bellyflop onto dry land.
It was so painful and I winded myself and just wanted to cry, which feels pretty lame as an adult. I was covered in mud with grass and leaves stuck to me akin to some kind of camouflage SAS member crossed with Worzel Gummidge. I had grass sticking to my coat, the bottom of my dress, leaves and grass in my hair, and an overall coating of mud slathered generously across my body. I had fallen because it was pitch black with no lighting as the security light comes on as you leave the building, not as you sail through the air in front of it. It was embarrassing enough to turn up to the dance class limping, covered in grass and mud, on the verge of tears. I cannot imagine the embarrassment of this calamity being witnessed by other parents. Thank goodness it was so dark that hopefully my idiocy went undetected!
