Bank Holiday Washout

It's been at least six years since I spent the second May bank holiday weekend in London, and this one certainly is a washout in all sense of the word.

I was always making my way back from Cannes this weekend, and last year I was at the Hay Festival. This year I've got pink eye (conjunctivitis) and I'm sitting around half-blind (can't find my glasses – fear they may be a casualty of the move from BN2's) doing my taxes, awash in memories.

The first and only other time I got pink eye it came on at a ball BN2 and I attended the day after my birthday in 2008. (And a ball, I can't help remembering, he attended without me last year, a long and tortured story, as anything involving him seems to be, related to our breakup on the first May bank holiday weekend.) There were huge problems I already was ignoring in 2008 – which contributed to my bingeing on my birthday and at the ball -- but the morning after the ball, when I could hardly open my eyes, I do remember he drove me to the hospital and waited patiently. A couple of days later I left for Cannes, then came back midway through the bank holiday weekend, just in time to catch a train to Devon to meet his parents for the first time. (I just went back and read my entry about it. If I'd only listened to my gut...)

And yesterday and today I sat with every line of every credit card bill, every Oyster card top-up location (and God, I spent a fortune travelling back and forth across London), every restaurant receipt unleashing a flood of memories of the two years I spent with him. (Don't worry, I don't for one second wish I could be back with him – it's just that I haven't spoken to him for more than two months and it's strange to spend so much time in his company, so to speak.)

It's useless to regret the past but I couldn't help doing a bit of that as I got on the cross trainer next to a super-slim woman I chat with occasionally at the gym. Our conversations are not exactly deep: Usually I admire one of her handbags (she works in the City, and so can afford to own fabulous ones), or we commiserate about how little either one of us feels like working out. But yesterday somehow we ended up chatting about dating in one's 30s – she is in her late 30s, and has been with her boyfriend for a year and a half. She dated him for six months a couple of years ago, when he cheated on her with a "hot blonde" (her words) called Mickey who's now at the Priory. (In a bizarre twist, the guy she dated just after this one also cheated on her with the same woman, though City Girl herself has never met this woman and the two men don't know each other.)

She told me she didn't meet a single man when she was single from age 30 to 35, and that that was part of why she agreed to get back together with a man who cheated on her.

"And all of my friends who were single when I was single are all still single," she told me. "And all the men that were around then are all still single, too – they're still messing around. I had just about given up," she said.

***

This same woman (maybe I should call her Little Miss Sunshine, hmm?) earlier this week decided to vent to me about how much easier it is to put on weight after age 35, and how much harder it is to lose a couple after one had overindulged. I shook my head in sympathy and mentioned the Dorset pounds, which I'm beginning to fear I will never shake. (I can't be too grumpy with her – at one point she did say, "We're both still slim.")

Why do I fear I'll never shake them? I've got less than 2 weeks before I fly to the US for another wedding – 2 weeks that include a champagne tasting, a blind date (literally – I don't even know what this guy looks like), a splashy book launch party, and a dinner with a PR at an Italian restaurant (not delighted about this – usually it means lots of food pushing). Then the wedding weekend: rehearsal dinner and the affair itself, on top of two transatlantic flights. Then I'm back and have a week's work with the British Army, which means crappy, calorific food. Then probably another trip back to the US to escort my grandma up to see the triplets. And so it goes... When I was in New York a Harpers Bazaar editor asked me if maintaining weight loss is hard, and I paused before answering. It's not so much that it's difficult as that it requires constant vigilance. Which, OK, I guess is hard.