My life before marriage and mumanonymity... (try and say that fast three times)
‘Meow’ that’s the official mating call of the Trouser Hounds or more appropriately still; Wallet Hounds. I have borne witness to some pretty classy competitions when it came to looking for ‘Mr-Good-Porche’. Actually in London, it’s more a case of Mr-Yellow-Ferrari-Black-Amex.
It’s tough going for a nice grounded Aussie girl to be alone in a bad old city like London, with its enormous populace of early release mental patients.
I started out to my own detriment with a puppy personality, wagging my tail in a frenzy of indiscriminate befriending. As a result of which for the first six months, till I learned to snap and growl, I was stalked by a succession of scary bunny boilers and partying with piranhas in Prada, the sort of women who would eat their own young.
In the quest for a decent bloke, there were times I was literally trampled in the stampede towards some poor chap, with all due diligence on his income and assets having been completed by the surrounding team of social Pit Bulls.
It’s tricky making real friends in this environment, more like being absorbed into a hunting pack where friendship has little or nothing to do with it. Talk about your ‘Cinderella Complex’, this is the C.C. World Championship, and you’d better be wearing Kevlar if there aren’t enough princes to go around.
Social starvation often found me inadvertently thrown into the big league where public stoning was apt punishment for wearing last seasons Gucci.
You could literally be torn to pieces over an unfashionable choice of accessories and by unfashionable, I mean carrying or wearing something so ten minutes ago.
Preparation for hunting parties is both astounding and educational. Linda regularly used a lip pump for that natural (pul-eese!)trout-lip effect. Standing in the bathroom with a contraption, reminiscent one of those rubber drain plungers you'd buy in hardware store, over her face pumping away like her life depended on it. A wonder she could kiss after that without drawing blood or accidentally sucking her date right out of his chair – that would leave a nasty hickey, huh? But Linda was a seasoned ‘wallet sniffer’ from LA.
LA in my opinion smacks of the sort of city you would expect to give birth to such devices as ‘lip pumps’ and other curious, suggestive objects that “..conveniently plug into your car cigarette lighter”.
Although not immediately apparent, I was the oldest of the pack. But Deanne, our youngest and most competitive, whose petite frame and pretty face belied her Wiltshire-Stay-Sharp tongue and a ruthlessness that would scare al Qaeda, was constantly nipping at my heels trying to heard me toward the geriatrics.
If I uttered more than two words to a man, she would demand “have you told him how old you are?”. Similar situation to a convicted paedophile considering a career move into teaching kindergarten, in her opinion, I should have some kind of legislated requirement of immediate disclosure.
Deanne was a relationship saboteur of supreme proportions, with a penchant for married men on fat salaries. She was such a cat too; every dinner, one of us inevitably asked the nearest passing waiter to bring her a saucer of milk.
Then there was Scary Flatmate, as caustic as a bottle of Domestos, who could clear a dinner table faster than a fire alarm. Despite being thin and pretty with long blonde hair, all she had to do was open her mouth to turn any man ‘off’ as effectively as a king size box of Tampax. She was a consummate conversation Nazi, but with the inexplicable idea that everyone enjoyed her company enormously.
Miriam was a ‘professional girlfriend’. Draped in all things designer with a jewellery collection that could finance the national debt, she impressed everyone, managing to con some sucker into paying for several 20 grand a pop recording sessions in Abbey Road Studios, in spite of the well known fact she sang like a scalded cat.
Barely housetrained, lavishly lazy and with a 30-second attention span, she also never bothered to turn up to record her “hit CD”.
Another of her brainwaves almost took her to the bottom of the Thames wearing cement stilettos, when she decided it would be a fantastic idea to fall pregnant to a wealthy ex, so he would have to marry her and/or, keep her in luxury for the rest of her days.
But excessive as Miriam was, she decided, to hedge her bets and play a couple of ex’s at one time.
So things got a little ugly, when her ‘heavy’, whom she’d successfully engaged with floods of tears and pouting to put the squeeze on one prospective father, found out the baby could have any of several fathers. Heavy dude was seriously and perilously unimpressed, requiring a much larger flood of tears and truly excessive pouting. If ‘crying and pouting’ ever becomes an Olympic sport, Miriam will do her country proud and have yet more gold laying about on the night stand.
Notwithstanding the fact I had neither the purse for Prada, nor a killer competitive instinct, I found myself being energetically courted by a millionaire widower and forced to shop for bigger vases to accommodate the multiple dozens of long stemmed roses, regularly delivered in lovely green Harrods vans.
This clever man knew his target market: he also sent shoes! The lovely green van also brought me some leather ankle boots with chrome stiletto heels and Agent Provocateur fuscia, fur trimmed, satin mules, both of which really deserved to be in a display case at the Tate Modern.
They were so beautiful and unusual (and a perfect fit), which now strikes me as slightly disturbing. But alas it was a case of Crystalle goggles with pink tinted bubbly lenses. Eventually I sobered up and that relationship, along with my membership to the Trouser Hound Sorority, ended before it really got started.
