Happy 50th birthday, Bridget Jones
Imagining mid-life for everyone’s favourite verbally incontinent spinster. Spoiler: she’s still single. But there are compensations.
Dear Bridget:
It’s been yonks since we chatted, but I believe March 21 is your 50th. Happy birthday!
Don’t say “what,” dear, say “pardon.” Did I miscalculate? Don’t go on like a complete berk if the big half-century mark is next year, actually. I don’t mean to sound like your old friend Rebecca, who you have very wisely avoided for the past 15 years. Rebecca could turn a social encounter into the conversational equivalent of swimming in the sea with jellyfish.
Pip, pip, old girl — 50 is the new 30. No time like the present to take stock.
Blimey, the world is a changed place since we first met in the mid1990s. That was a sparkly, giddy time. Singletons were always going out for pints after work and mini-breaks or jetting off to Thailand in manner of Spice Girls on a package holiday.
I guess singletons still do, but not single mothers like you, Bridge.
Yes, a new novel about you is due out this year and a movie next year. Rumour has it you have a baby boy fathered by Daniel Cleaver and your new obsessions are online dating and your lack of Twitter followers.
Daniel still calls you Mummy. Rightfully so. He’s living with his second wife, a 25-year-old stick insect lingerie model. Tarty cow.
Your mantra: You are complete without a man. Frankly, they deserve each other and I feel a little squeamish that you still make time for the occasional snog with the wanker. Messy, charming, hilarious, but, frankly, still a f***wit.
If popular culture worked in real time — which it does not — this would make you rather a menopausal mother, Bridge, but we can suspend disbelief.
Fitzwilliam. Great name for the little bloke, although mothering a kid at your age does leave you knackered.
I don’t know what you’re doing for a living now, but let me guess: After Sit Up Britain detonated due to the Prince Harry phone tapping scandal, you invented your own job writing an online agony aunt column. Jolly good luck that it’s sponsored by that pharmaceutical giant that sells both antidepressants and that longlasting erectile dysfunction drug.
Super job on that BBC panel “Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say” panel with Susan Faludi and Camille Paglia on the BBC panel on that. Heaps of inner poise.
Brilliant thing you said about the backlash to the backlash that got them both twittering.
Jude, who was a vice-president of investment at Brightlings Bank in 1996, has spent most of her working hours crying in her private loo. She got sucked into the financial collapse of 2008, but it all worked out swimmingly. Posh pied-a-terre in Cannes with Vile Richard living in France in manner of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
How’s Shazzer? I heard she got downsized with the ongoing on Fleet Street, but she’s got pugnacious attitude and that online cougar dating service is doing well.
And Tom. Fine since he tied the same-sex knot with the Famous Eighties Pop Star Sir-something-or -another and now he’s Laddie Tom, I imagine.
Thanks to surrogacy and buckets of money, he and Sir George have produced a playmate for Fitzwilliam. Chardonnay. Brilliant name. Nice photos of their Cirque du Soleilthemed nursery in Hello! magazine last month.
I knew you were almost prostrate with grief when Princess Diana died in 1997. You visited Althorp house to ogle the frocks, but you have adopted rather warm feelings for Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall.
Good on you for chucking the fags entirely. The evidence was starting to pile up. The link between alcohol and breast cancer scared you, but not enough to make you quit. And besides, where would one be without one’s vices? Just a matter of choosing judiciously.
Still keen on the Paleolithic diet, I imagine, especially if cut with Milk Tray and Emmenthal cheese right out of the packet washed down with gin and tonic.
When last divulged, you weighed nine stone, five pounds. There’s 14 pounds to a stone, so you weighed in at 131 pounds. You’ve gained and lost the same five pounds every year, except about half a pound would linger. Which would put current weight at 140 pounds. Or 10 stone even.
Made a rather astute investment in real estate when you bought your apartment after you graduated in 1986. Yars, the economy has been off, but living mortgage-free in central London and don’t have to move back to Grafton Underwood, although that bedsit is a bit squishy with Harry and the nappies and cuddly toys and pushchair.
Perhaps you should think about investing in a pension scheme. Ticktock.
Sorry to hear about the death of your mother. Bit of a sandwich generation conundrum. Your dad has been lonely, but Una Alconbury and Penny Bosworth-Husbands have been buzzing around since their own husbands have inconveniently popped off.
Glad to hear that you’ve resisted to the temptation to move to Grafton Underwood. Not much scope for a woman of your talents, especially as Una insists on pushing you into the path of the new vicar.
Your life — messy and full of misadventure but essentially optimistic — was a happy-ending fantasy. It gave us permission to be needy, neurotic, self-indulgent ourselves and to have faith it would all work out. We revelled in your confessions of insobriety, insecurity and imprudence. It gave us license to feel smug.
Deep down, we knew you never had any intention of reforming. Besides, you were fictional proof that others in the world were in more need of sobriety, security and prudence than ourselves. Where’s Mark Darcy in all this? Probably off doing top human rights barrister stuff. In real life, he would have scarpered long ago.
For you in your fictional world, Bridge, there were always second chances and third chances. That’s part of the fantasy, too.
Perhaps the most important thing you have taught us is that happily-ever-after is bollocks. It’s not so much about the big happily-everafter, but the little plots of happiness to be pruned and cultivated. And that’s just brilliant. As long as one has friends who likes one just the way you are.