Page 68 - Bridget Jones's Diary - by Helen FIELDING

This was an immediate giveaway. My parents do not describe their friends by

their Christian names. It is always Una Alconbury, Audrey Coles, Brian
Enderby: 'You know David Ricketts, darling - married to Anthea Ricketts, who's
in the Lifeboat.' It's a gesture to the fact that they know in their hearts I have no
idea who Mavis Enderby is, even though they're going to talk about Brian and
Mavis Enderby for the next forty minutes as if I've known them intimately since
I was four.

I knew straight away that Julian would not turn out to be involved in any
Lifeboat luncheons, nor would he have a wife who was in any Lifeboats,
Rotaries or Friends of St. George's. I sensed also that she had met him in

Portugal, before the trouble with Dad, and he might well turn out to be not so
much Julian but Julio. I sensed that, let's face it, Julio was the trouble with Dad.

I confronted her with this hunch. She denied it. She even came out with some

elaborately concocted tale about 'Julian' bumping into her in the Marble Arch
Marks and Spencer, making her drop her new Le Creuset terrine dish on her foot
and taking her for a coffee in Selfridges from which sprang a firm platonic
friendship based entirely on department store coffee shops.

Why, when people are leaving their partners because they're having an affair
with someone else, do they think it will seem better to pretend there is no one
else involved? Do they think it will be less hurtful for their partners to think they
just walked out because they couldn't stand them any more and then had the
good fortune to meet some tall Omar Sharif-figure with a gentleman's handbag
two weeks afterwards while the ex-partner is spending his evenings bursting into

tears at the sight of the toothbrush mug? It's like those people who invent a lie as
an excuse rather than the truth, even when the truth is better than the lie.

I once heard my friend Simon canceling a date with a girl - on whom he was
really keen - because he had a spot with a yellow head just to the right of his
nose, and because, owing to a laundry crisis he had gone to work in a ludicrous
late-seventies jacket, assuming he could pick his normal jacket up from the
cleaner's at lunchtime, but the cleaners hadn't done it.

He took it into his head, therefore, to tell the girl he couldn't see her because