Page 154 - Bridget Jones's Diary - by Helen FIELDING

'How's your diet going, Rebecca?, said Shazzer.

Aargh. Instead of denying it, Jude and Shazzer were accepting my premature
ageing as read, tactfully trying to change the subject to spare my feelings. I sat,
in a spiral of terror, grasping my sagging face.

'Just going to the ladies,' I said through clenched teeth like a ventriloquist
keeping my face fixed, to reduce the appearance of wrinkles.

'Are you all right, Bridge?' said rude.

'Fn,' I replied stiffly.

Once in front of the mirror I reeled as the harsh overhead lighting revealed my

thick, age-hardened, sagging flesh. I imagined the others back at the table,
chiding Rebecca for alerting me to what everyone had long been saying about
me but I never needed to know.

Was suddenly overwhelmed by urge to rush out and ask all the diners how old
they thought I was: like at school once, when I conceived private conviction that
I was mentally subnormal and went round asking everyone in the playground,
'Am I mental?' and twenty-eight of them said, 'Yes.'

Once get on tack of thinking about ageing there is no escape. Life suddenly
seems like holiday where, halfway through, everything starts accelerating
towards the end. Feel need to do something to stop ageing process, but what?
Cannot afford face-lift. Caught in hideous cleft stick as both fatness and dieting
are in themselves ageing. Why do I look old? Why? Stare at old ladies in street
trying to work out all tiny processes by which faces become old not young.

Scour newspapers for ages of everyone, trying to decide if they look old for their
age.

11 a.m. Phone just rang. It was Simon, to tell me about the latest girl he has got