Helen Fielding - Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy

CONTENTS

WHAT DO YOU DO when a girlfriends 60th birthday party is the same day as your boyfriends 30th?

IS IT WRONG to lie about your age when online dating?

IS IT MORALLY WRONG to have a blow-dry when one of your children has head lice?

DOES THE DALAI LAMA actually tweet or is it his assistant?

IS TECHNOLOGY now the fifth element? Or is that wood?

IS SLEEPING WITH SOMEONE after 2 dates and 6 weeks of texting the same as getting married after 2 meetings and 6 months of letter writing in Jane Austens day?

Pondering these, and other modern dilemmas, Bridget Jones stumbles through the challenges of single-motherhood, tweeting, texting and rediscovering her sexuality in what SOME people rudely and outdatedly call middle age.

The long-awaited return of a much-loved character, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is timely, tender, touching, witty, wise and bloody hilarious.

HELEN FIELDING is the author of Bridget Joness Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, and was part of the screenwriting team on the films of the same name. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is her fifth novel. She has two children and lives in London and sometimes Los Angeles.

Cause Celeb

Bridget Joness Diary

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason

Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination

To Dash and Romy

2.30 p.m. Talitha just called, talking in that urgent, lets-be-discreet-but-wildly-overdramatic voice she always has. Darling, I just want to let you know that its my sixtieth on the 24th of May. Im not SAYING its my sixtieth, obviously. And keep it quiet because Im not asking everyone. I just wanted you to keep the date free.

I panicked. That would be great! I gushed unconvincingly.

Bridget. You absolutely cant not come.

Well, the thing is...

What?

Its Roxsters thirtieth birthday that night.

Silence at the end of the phone.

I mean, we probably wont still be together by then, but, if we are, it would be... I tailed off.

Ive just put no children on the invites.

Hell be thirty by then! I said indignantly.

Im just teasing, darling. Of course you must bring your toy boy. Ill get a bouncy castle! Back on air. Mustrunloveyoubye!

Tried to turn on telly to see if Talitha had indeed, as so often, been calling me live on air during a film clip. Jabbed confusedly at buttons like a monkey with a mobile phone. Why does turning on a TV these days require three remotes with ninety buttons? Why? Suspect designed by thirteen-year-old technogeeks, competing with each other from sordid bedrooms, leaving everyone else thinking theyre the only person in the world who doesnt understand what the buttons are for, thus wreaking psychological damage on a massive, global scale.

Threw remotes petulantly onto sofa, at which TV randomly burst into life, showing Talitha looking immaculate, one leg sexily crossed over the other, interviewing the dark-haired Liverpool footballer who has the anger-management/biting problem. He looked as if he wanted to bite Talitha, though for rather different reasons than on the pitch.

Right. No need for panic will simply assess pros and cons of Roxster/Talitha party issue in calm and mature manner:

PROS OF TAKING ROXSTER TO PARTY

*It would be terrible not to go to Talithas. She has been my friend since our Sit Up Britain days, when she was an impossibly glamorous newsreader and I was an impossibly incompetent reporter.

*It would be quite funny to take Roxster, and also smug-making, because the thirtieth/sixtieth birthday thing would stop all that patronizing pitying-of-single-women-of-a-certain-age thing, like theyre terminally stuck with their singleness, whereas single men of that age are snapped up before theyve had time to draw up the divorce papers. And Roxster is so gorgeous and peach-like, thereby somehow denying reality of ageing process on self.

CONS OF TAKING ROXSTER TO PARTY

*Roxster is his own man, and would doubtless take exception to being treated as some sort of comedy, or anti-ageing device.

*Crucially, it might put Roxster off me, to be surrounded by old people at sixtieth birthday party, and make some sort of completely unnecessary point about how old I am though of course am MUCH younger than Talitha. And frankly, I refuse to believe how old I actually am. As Oscar Wilde says, thirty-five is the perfect age for a woman, so much so that many women have decided to adopt it for the rest of their lives.

*Roxster is probably having his own party with young people squeezed onto his balcony, barbecuing and listening to 70s disco music with ironic retro amusement, and is thinking at this moment how to avoid asking me to the party in case his friends find out he is going out with a woman literally old enough to be his mother. Actually, possibly, technically, with the advancement of puberty due to hormones in milk these days grandmother. Oh God. Why did mind think such a thought?

3.10 p.m. Gaaah! Have got to pick up Mabel in twenty minutes and have not got rice cakes ready. Gaah. Telephone.

I have Brian Katzenberg for you.

My new agent! Actual agent. But I would be BEYOND late for Mabel if I stopped and talked.

Can I call Brian back later? I trilled, trying to smear pretend-butter onto the rice cakes, stick them together and put them in a Ziploc with one hand.

Its about your spec script.

Just... in... a meeting! How could I be in a meeting, and yet talking on the phone saying Im in a meeting? Peoples assistants are meant to say theyre in a meeting, not the person themself, who is supposed to be unable to say anything because theyre in the meeting.

Set off on school run, feeling, now, desperate to call back and find out what the call was about. Brian has so far sent it to two production companies, both of whom have turned it down. But now maybe a fish has bitten at the fish hook?

Fought overwhelming urge to ring Brian back claiming meeting had come to an abrupt end, but decided far more important to be on time for Mabel: and thats the sort of caring, prioritizing mother I am.

4.30 p.m. School run was even more chaos than usual: like Wheres Wally? picture of millions of lollipop ladies, babies in prams, white-van men having standoffs with over-educated SUV mums, a man cycling with a double bass strapped to his back, and earth mothers on bicycles with tin boxes full of children in the front. Entire road was gridlocked. Suddenly, a frantic woman came running along yelling, Go back, go BACK! Come ON! Nobody is HELPING HERE!

Realizing there had been a terrible accident, I, and everyone else, started rearing their cars crazily onto pavement and into gardens to make way for Emergency Services. Once road was clear, peered gingerly ahead for the ambulance/bloodbath. But there was not an ambulance, just a very fancy woman, flouncing into a black Porsche, then roaring furiously along the newly cleared road, a smug be-uniformed small child next to her in the front seat.