Page 150 - Bridget Jones's Diary - by Helen FIELDING

infused with the paranoid notion that the reason you are not in a relationship is

your age, you have had your last ever relationship and sexual experience ever,
and it is all your fault for being too wild or wilful to settle down in the first
bloom of youth.

You completely forget the fact that when you were twenty-two and you didn't

have boyfriend or meet anyone you remotely fancied for twenty-three months
you just thought it was a bit of a drag. The whole thing builds up out of all
proportion, so finding a relationship seems a dazzling, almost insurmountable
goal, and when you do start going out with someone it cannot possibly live up to
expectations.

Is it that? Or is it that there is something wrong with me being with Daniel? Is
Daniel having an affair?

11.50 a.m. Hmmm. Nail really is scratchy. Actually, if don't do something about
it I'll start picking at it and next thing I'll have no fingernail left. Right, I'd better
go and find an emery board. Come to think of it, this nail varnish generally is
looking a bit scrotty. I really need to take it all off and start again. Might as well
do it now while I think about it.

Noon. It is such a bloody bore when the weather is so hot and one's soi-disant
boyfriend refuses to go anywhere nice with you. Feel he thinks I am trying to
trap him into a mini-break; as if it were not a mini-break but marriage, three kids
and cleaning out the toilet in house full of stripped pine in Stoke Newington. I
think this is turning into a psychological crisis. I'm going to call Tom (can
always do the catalogue stuff for Perpetua this evening).

12.30 p.m. Hmmm. Tom says if you go mini-breaking with somebody you are
having a relationship with you spend the whole time worrying about how the