You know that segment in Bridget Jones’s Diary when she bumps into a woman who delivers ‘jellyfish’ stings?
I’ve just had a jellyfish to stay for the weekend. This is what happened. I picked her up from my local station, Darlington, which is an hour-and-a-half drive from my new home in the Dales National Park. Her train had been cancelled, so she was an hour late.
Michael the sheepdog and I froze on the platform. She can’t afford a mobile phone, although she chain smokes, so we had no idea if she was still coming or not.
We got home. I showed her to her room, right next to her own bathroom. I had bought her: 1 A Diptyque candle.2 A set of travel-sized organic unguents.3 Hand cream.4 Toothpaste and mouthwash, and a new Bamford soap.5 Tulips and a flowering hyacinth in a pot.
She said she was cold. She said she couldn’t use the moisturiser I had given her as ‘it’s probably frozen’.
Sitting in my lovely Grade II listed sitting room, she said (jellyfish alert!), ‘What a shame you can’t divide it up into two rooms.’ She said I should buy coal to make the logs burn brighter.
She said, ‘I never knew milk came in such small cartons.’ I took her out to eat every day, she ordered three courses each time, and hardly ate a morsel; come the evening, she said she was ‘starving’.
She didn’t go out to see the horses once, though I spent each evening looking at photos and videos of her daughters.
Why do people think they can be rude to me while accepting my hospitality?
She said my chair gave her backache. The worst jellyfish moment came when I was driving her back to the station, having bought her ticket (and I paid for the meals, too; why is it whenever I have gone to stay with someone I always pay when we go out for dinner?), and she said, ‘Are you going to settle here?’
‘What do you mean? I have settled here.’
‘But what about the stairs? How will you manage them when you are a bit older?’
Don’t you think that is a bit strange? Never mind the stairs are wide and not steep, and beautiful as they twist and turn before a stunning view through the original 1766 glass of a river, and hills and woodland.
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Or that I walk the dogs about 15 miles a day. And don’t most people have stairs? But it was rude, too, as well as incongruous. When I went to the home of Mary Berry, who is in her 70s, still works 12 hours a day, and didn’t once complain during a long day’s shooting, I didn’t say to her, ‘Lovely Queen Anne house, but don’t you worry about the stairs?’
Why do people think they can be rude to me while accepting my hospitality? It’s the same with my family.
Not one of them has picked up the phone and said, ‘Well done for buying your sister a cottage. How hard you must have worked to do that. How are you, by the way?’ They think that just because your job involves going to fashion shows, you are a rich b**** without children whose only function is to pay for things.
Not once did the jellyfish say, ‘How are things with you? How is work? I hear you won Columnist of the Year.’
She wants to meet up in London. ‘I’d love to see your flat. Maybe we could go out to dinner. Maybe you could take me to Gatwick.’ Like that is going to happen.
Do I look like a taxi? And you wonder why I’m always alone, if this is how people treat me. And they do treat me like this.
This was one weekend, but it’s a metaphor for my entire life.
I run around frantically making things perfect, paying for things, driving places (Trevor, he of the high-waisted trousers, always made me pick him up from Euston station when he came to see me: just get a bleeding bus, you lazy sod!), apologising for my lifestyle, and what for?
Certainly not scintillating conversation; the jellyfish not only didn’t help, she didn’t make me laugh once. So I am not doing it again. It’s a shame, because I’d been excited about her visit. I want to share how lovely it is here. My circle of trust just got a whole lot smaller.