Bridget Jones 3 and a Secret History.

Apparently the rumours are true and Helen Fielding is indeed writing Bridget Jones 3. I feel this is a huge mistake as dear old Bridget and her hapless guide to life epitomised the gloriously new days of singleton back in the 1990s and trying to drag her into the year 2011 and turn her into a yummy mummy (oh the horror!) scream out cash cow rather than literary endeavor.

Still at least Bridget has at least passing luck with men, I am still delightfully single though horribly and overwhelmingly in love with one of my lecturers... he is rather dishy and although ironically not a very good lecturer I do adore him. I am sure he has barely noticed me beyond very nicely answering all my questions, but then again who knows... Not entirely a desert on the man hunt as did have a jolly lovely time with a beautifully blonde boy at a party last week, most yummy and from Denmark I believe. Also been asked away by an old love interest to spend the weekend with him, but not so sure how I will reply to him. The idea of a fun weekend is most appealing but am not personally a great fan of one-night stands.

Busy with uni stuff recently but have just read the almost excellent 'Secret History' by the very badly named Donna Tart and the disappointing 'Never Let Me Go' by Kazuo Ishiguro which has just been made into a film starring Keira Knightley and Carey Mulligan. The latter was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize several years ago and I had heard terrific things about it, but I found it to be written in such a plodding dull way that although the central idea was most interesting I found it quite hard to stop myself skipping chunks of it. While the characters were all irritating, especially the narrator who seemed far too nice and forgiving of everyone else to be real. I suspect I found it so tedious largely due to having read a review of the film which gave away pretty much the whole plot. Roger Ebert is a fine film reviewer (in fact I think him the very best) but he did spoil this book for me.

On the other hand I got totally engrossed by 'Secret History'. It is about a group of elite students at a prestigious university who are all linked by a dark secret. That description makes it sound a bit slushy but it is very well written and the characters are all amazingly realistic and wonderfully flawed because of it. The students are all studying classics as am I and so I particularly loved all the little classical references and quotations in ancient greek.

Not sure what to begin next... I think perhaps 'The Chrysalids' by John Wyndham. 'Never Let Me Go' was likened to it by one of the reviewers and I can only hope that Wyndham made a better job of it!

Sam Vimes and his Lady Sybil...

Oh gosh I do hate Valentines Day when I am single. I have spent all day seeing couples everywhere, even when I went shopping I kept seeing couples holding hands and then the men paying for lots of lovely underwear and perfume and chocolates for the women in their lives... Arrgh!!!

At times like these I think of all the wonderful men in literature who I find deliciously romantic, Sam Vimes being at the top of the list. This is deeply ironic as he wasn't at all romantic, but what happened between him and Sybil felt so deep and just incredibly special. A real proper connection exists between them, they love each other truly and deeply and yes I do believe passionately, he just doesn't go in for gestures. Just as well he has Sybil as I am a girl who adores romantic gestures!

Last night I watched Braveheart and cried. I always cry at the end, I love it and his fight, but above all the deep and abiding love he carries for his dead wife. Rhett Butler speaks to me as well, he would have gone all out for a Valentines Day with Scarlet and would have done so because it meant a lot to her rather than because he liked roses and chocolates. Oh gosh what I wouldn't give for a man like that who made my heart beat hard and fast.

I am very intentionally not thinking about Germanicus... I have been an awful lot recently and I do hope it is because of St Valentine and his bloody day. I go round and round lots of different issues in general but then last night I got very upset. My flatmate and her boyfriend were giggling and having a lovely time in the other room and I suddenly felt hugely lonely. I felt this urge to get back in touch with him but then I remembered that I had tried to get us back together and he had said no... It is about time I took that as closure and moved on.

However, I refuse to mope or be in the depths of despair (a charming Anne of Green Gables reference there) and so I am going to my friend's flat (she of the married man affair fame... still to hear from him on whether he is going to give her up or leave his wife.... she has now been waiting almost 6 weeks!) and we are going to eat lots of yummy things and polish off a couple of bottles of champagne, pink to match the special day!

Love?

I am lonely... I would really like to stop thinking about my ex and to move on and find someone else. I do like that I have time now to do my ironing and read as many books as I like but I would love to have someone who cared about me and wanted to have dinners together a few times a week. To be the automatic person that I would take with me to the theatre this weekend since I have managed to blag some free tickets, the person I would call when something wonderful happened and the person I fall asleep with at night.

Bridget Jones would be appalled in public but would secretly agree that having a man around is jolly nice. My flatmate has been around a lot recently as her chap has been away but he got back this weekend and since then she hasn't been here and I have been a little lonely. Tonight when she got in she had her bf with her and I have listened to them giggling through the wall ever since. I am really pleased she is happy and begrudge her nothing, it just makes me realise more and more that I would also like to have a boyfriend around.

There is a man I like so very much and would love to go on a date with... but he is one of my lecturers and has not shown any interest in me. We both regularly arrive early for our two lectures together a week and chat together before other people arrive. He is so lovely but I have no idea if he is even single, and even if he were I don't feel I can ask him out incase he felt it was inappropriate... Gosh I do adore him!

A fool for love.

Recently I have  taken to thinking of my ex-boyfriend a good deal and about our relationship. I can't yet write that I forgive him or that I wouldn't care if I suddenly saw him again but I am a lot happier and calmer than when we were together latterly. I read a very interesting article in The Times about a study conducted over a few years whereby people kept diaries detailing their sex lives and how they felt about the amount, frequency, etc of it all. My sex life with Germanicus almost always left me wanting more...

I am now, some months further on, able to admit that he is a good person but he was never terrific in bed. Yes there were some good nights under the sheets but then we were together for years and so you would hope that there were some good nights. But mostly he was very boring in bed. I tried lots of different things to spice up our sex life: candles, incense, massage bars, different places, positions, sex books and so on and on and on and on. Those things did all help but mostly they would just help the first time or two and then he would revert back to his normal, and dreadfully boring, routine.

In The Times article there was one case in particular that hit me hard and that was of a lady in her fifties who was looking back on how her marriage first started out. She commented that when she and her husband were in the early years of their relationship they couldn't get enough of each other and had sex every opportunity they had... I would love to say that I have experience that with someone but the truth is I haven't and would like to. With Germanicus I certainly felt that way but sadly he wasn't keen on terribly frequent even in the very early days and certainly not later on either.

At the time I was forgiving and later as I thought we would be together for ever I was a little sad, but now I am anticipatory and excited as I hope to go out with someone who feels that way about me and who I feel that way about also. There are currently four chaps I rather like and so we shall see if anything is soon afoot, I do hope so! Valentines is only a week away but I have already planned a night of champagne with the friend who is still (almost 5 weeks!) waiting to hear from her married lover and lots of jolly anti-valentines chatting.

Men and boys.

I adore book shopping in charity shops. One finds so many hidden treasures and not only are you helping a good cause but you can try out books you would not normally have bought because they are so very cheap. A good 2/3 of the time the books I buy in charity shops end up being given back but the whole experience sits very well with me and although not on a par with the excitement and joy I feel when browsing through a second hand book shop the delights of the charity shop are numerous.

Recently I found the relatively new Tony Parsons book 'Men from the Boys' in my local Oxfam and having read both the previous two books in the series about the rather hopeless Harry Silver I forked out my £2.99 and gave it a shot. I was disgustingly disappointed...

The first about Harry Silver was 'Man and Boy' and although I found it jolly irritating in places it was all centred around a splendid idea: that of a youngish married man who had a one-night stand and then faces divorce, and as his world crashes around him he is left for a while to bring up his son alone. A very interesting concept which was well handled and led to much speculation about the state of modern man in our culture of divorce as shown by Silver and paralleled against his father who had had a long and happy marriage and been more of the old fashioned able to change a tyre and put up a shelf sort of man.

The second book was 'Man and Wife' and didn't work as well as the first but was still rather interesting as it focused on Harry's second marriage and how that fit in with his relationship with his son, his step-daughter and his ex-wife. As I said it was not as good, but it did still work.

However, the third book 'Men from the Boys' is rubbish... it does not work at all. I always found Harry Silver a very irritating character but I could still feel empathy with him in the earlier books, but in this one Tony Parsons has made him into a parody of useless 20th century fatherhood and he fails at everything. The book is dreadfully boring and I only managed to finish it by skimming a good deal. Parsons has always struck me as the poor man's Nick Hornby but in this book he is totally bargin bucket.  Although I didn't think his other two Silver books were remotely high literature this one is dreadfully bad and I am rather appalled it was even published.

Men are most peculiar creatures and the appeal for me of the first two Silver books by Parsons was the idea of the struggle for manhood of some 20th century men. An acquaintance of mine clearly struggles with this for though he appears very camp indeed he is straight and at great pains for the world to know it. Last night at a wonderfully fun party (no action for me sadly) he admitted to me that the girlfriend he mentions from time to time was all a lie... I immediately thought he was going to come out of the closet to me but instead it turns out he is pretending to have a girlfriend because he has slept with one of my friends who then took to pestering him to sleep with her again or go out with her afterwards but he is interested in her best friend but thinks her too good for him and so the best way to avoid situations was to create a fake girlfriend... As I say men are strange creatures!

Pure Fantasy.

Neil Gaiman's 'Stardust' was the book I carried around with me last week. It really was very enjoyable and I thought it heaps better than 'Neverwhere' which I was given for Christmas the year before (in fact the same friend gave me Stardust this Christmas being a huge fan of his herself). It is a fantasy book of the purest sort which I am not at all used to, the nearest I get to fantasy being Terry Pratchett but since he draws so many parallels with the real world they don't feel as alien to me as proper fantasy novels. Although Gaiman writes very fluidly and creates worlds that are terribly interesting and fantastical, he always leaves me feeling unfulfilled. His characters are never properly drawn and are always one dimensional so they are hard to like or care about, his fantasy worlds are certainly jolly exciting but are not described well enough for one to feel they really exist or to even properly picture them, unlike the fantasy world created by J. K Rowling for example. But above all what leaves me feeling he can't craft a book properly is that large amounts of it will be written in such a simplistic style that I get bored and feel that really he should be writing for the young adult market instead, but then there will be a big sex scene, and so clearly he does intend his book to be for adults... Not an author I am much impressed by.

I am currently very annoyed with my flatmate. Since we moved in together last summer I have always been the one who organised the bills, did the majority of the housework and so on and I got used to it and although it irked me a little sometimes I had pretty much thought that would happen before we moved in together and she is easy to live with so it was okay. Then she met her boyfriend and they have spent every night together since at his flat. I was a bit lonely at times but I got used to it and after all it was none of my business where she choose to sleep as long as she paid her share of the bills etc. However, since Christmas she and her boyfriend have sort of decamped to our flat on a regular basis and I am not loving the extra company... I suppose I got used to having the flat to myself a lot of the time, but the fact that she is around more but still doing no extra stuff with the flat is bugging me a tad. All made worse by discovering this morning that she had piled my mail from over a month ago, including bills in my name but for us both for which we had incurred late fees as I thought no bill had arrived, personal invitations and letters, she had piled all of this under junk mail and not bothered about it! I am cross and doubt she will apologise... but then I do rather wonder if deep down it is more to do with the fact I am not at all sure I like her boyfriend and am not wild that he is spending so much time in our flat. When there are only two of you having another person around makes a big difference I find.

He seems so unfriendly and pretty much ignores me, while she is so wrapped up in him that when he is there she barely manages to say hello. He was round on the night I got in with my highest ever grade for an essay and I very excitedly told her the news to have her half heartedly say well down while he continued to watch tv, she then turned to him and started talking about something else... This is only her second ever boyfriend and I understand she is absorbed by him but I do feel she is taking it too far. I vow never to become such a girlfriend and I definitely think spending every single night together is too much; everyone needs some free time on their own and time with friends without their boyfriend. When I was with my ex I did spend a lot of time with him and although I do consider I spent too much time with him on balance, I still spent time on my won doing things and lots with friends... I can't help feeling that being so focused on a man (everything they do revolves around him and his schedual and preferences)  is jolly pathetic. Plus such intensity cannot be sustained forever, perhaps their relationship will burn out?

Interestingly although they are so together and clingy with each other (or at least she is), they are not planning to move in together this summer when we would have the option of letting our lease expire... It kind of makes me wonder if he is less serious than she is but that he just likes having a girlfriend. He is certainly a serial relationship person which I dislike intensely. He was with a girl for 3 years, within 2 months of splitting he was with another for a year and within a few weeks he was with my flatmate! Rather horrifying and it does imply that he doesn't like being single and just goes for the first girl he quite likes. I hate that sort of thing and would much rather be single for a long time to get over the previous person and also to find someone good enough to go out with. Maybe he just likes the fantasy that Hollywood sells us whereby everyone gets coupled up and so he goes from girlfriend to girlfriend as he has been sold the dream that being in a couple is preferable?

Can you forgive her?

I adore the books of Anthony Trollope, though telling people I do so can be rather awkward as they horribly often get confused and think I am referring to Joanna Trollope... He really is not terribly well known nowadays but he is without a doubt one of my favourite authors.

Over the years I have steadily worked my way through the bulk of his work, though since he wrote dozens of books I still have some great treats left. Nowadays, aware as I am that the numbers of Trollopes unread by me is dwindling I tend to save them for when I go on holiday. Typically long, deliciously familiar and always wittily entertaining (in a more masculinely amusing Jane Austen style) they make perfect holiday reading.

To his critics the books take a very long time to get to an ending you can rather predict from the beginning and they often claim that nothing happens in them. However, I would heartily disagree as the whole point about Trollope's books is the character development that occurs and the minutely perfect character portraits he creates of his often extensive cast for the reader's delight. His books also happen to be set in the wonderful world of the 19th century which I find endlessly delightful to read about.

'Lady Anna' is my current Trollope (half of it is left over from a city break I took last weekend before uni started up again) and is deliciously class conscious. 'Barchester Chronicles' of which there is a series are utterly terrific, but his very best work is 'The Way We Live Now' which was also made into an excellent BBC adaptation a few years ago starring the magnificent David Suchet.

Partying again tonight which should be jolly good fun though not on the dating front as all will be friends and none of the men are attractive to me. Actually one of them I did find rather enticing last year, however, I later worked out that that was almost solely because he was the president of the society I attended and it was the power that I found so attractive... I am now on the committee of the society myself and his stock has rather dropped with me, though I do still think him a very nice boy.

About 7 months since I became single which is lovely and I feel most comfortable and happy as a busy single girl. At the weekend I attended a tea party held by a friend (we all wore charming tea dresses) and after the tea and cakes we moved on to prosseco and started to confide. We got to talking about exes and the host told me about her ex-boyfriend whom she split up with around the same time that I split up with mine. They went on a break and she kissed someone, nothing more, yet he could not forgive and so they did not reunite and her broken heart has plagued her ever since. My ex would not forgive me for splitting up with him when I tried to reunite... I still don't know why not. Forgiveness is a hard thing to master, but I do believe that if you want to forgive then you can always find a way, where as if you have other reasons or even just feelings like stubbornness etc then you deny yourself the ability to forgive and so have to carry on indefinitely with the weight not forgiving leaves with you.

But forgiving too much is also a mistake. I have a very pretty friend who forgave her ex-boyfriend several times for cheating on her for he just kept doing it. While my friend with the married man I believe to also have been far too forgiving. She is currently waiting to hear if he is going to split up with her or leave his wife... I do not know which would be best for her in the long run, but for her sake right now I do hope he gives her a decision so that she can get on with her life.