Page 130 - Bridget Jones's Diary - by Helen FIELDING

I hate this idea and toy with calling Mum to see if she had started her periods

when the war ended. Do eggs get produced one at a time, I wonder, or are they
stored from birth in micro-form until they are activated'? Could I have somehow
sensed the end of the war as a stored egg? If only I had a grandpa I could have
got in on the whole thing under the guise of being nice to him. Oh, sod it, I am
going to go shopping.

7 p.m. The heat has made my body double -in size, I swear. I am never going in
a communal changing room again. I got a dress stuck under my arms in
Warehouse while trying to lift it off and ended up lurching around with inside-
out fabric instead of a head, tugging at it with my arms in the air, rippling
stomach and thighs on full display to the assembled sniggering fifteen-year-olds.
When I tried to pull the stupid dress down and get out of it the other way it got

stuck on my hips.

I hate communal changing rooms. Everyone stares sneakily at each other's
bodies, but no one ever meets anyone's eye. There are always girls who know

that they look fantastic in everything and dance around beaming, swinging their
hair and doing model poses in the mirror saying, 'Does it make me look fat?' to
their obligatory obese friend, who looks like a water buffalo in everything.

It was a disaster of a trip, anyway. The answer to shopping, I know, is simply
to buy a few choice items from Nicole Farhi, Whistles and Joseph but the prices
so terrify me that I go scuttling back to Warehouse and Miss Selfridge, rejoicing
in a host of dresses at £34.99, get them stuck on my head, then buy things from
Marks & Spencer because I don't have to try them on, and at least I've bought
something.

I have come home with four things, all them unsuitable and unflattering. One
will be left behind the bedroom chair in an M&S bag for two years. The other
three will be exchanged for credit notes from Boules, Warehouse, etc., which I

will then lose. I have thus wasted £119, which would have been enough to buy
something really nice from Nicole Farhi, like a very small T-shirt.