Page 197 - Bridget Jones's Diary - by Helen FIELDING

d) I didn't want any soup, I peered cautiously into the first carrier bag, where

there was something pleated and synthetic in bright yellow with a terracotta leaf
design. 'Er, Mum . . . ' I began, but then her handbag started ringing.

'Ah, that'll be Julio. Yup, yup.' She was balancing a portable phone under her
chin now and scribbling. 'Yup, yup. Put it on, darling,' she hissed. 'Yup, yup.

Yup. Yup.'

Now I have missed the news and she has gone off to a Cheese and Wine party,
leaving me looking like a door-to-door cosmetics saleswoman in a bright blue
suit with slithery green blouse underneath and blue eyeshadow right up to my
eyebrows.

'Don't be silly, darling,' was her parting shot. 'If you don't do something about
your appearance you'll never get a new job, never mind another boyfriend!'

Midnight. After she'd gone, called Tom, who took me to a party a friend of his
from art school was having at the Saatchi Gallery to stop me obsessing.

'Bridget,' he muttered nervously as we walked into the white hole and sea of
grunge youths. 'You know it's unhip to laugh at Installation, don't you?'

'OK, OK,' I said sulkily. 'I won't make any dead fish jokes.'

Someone called Gav said 'Hi': twenty-two maybe, sexy, in a shrunken T-shirt
revealing a chopping-board-like midriff.

'It's really, really, really, really amazing,' Gav was saying. 'It's, like, a sullied
Utopia with these really really really good echoes of, like, lost national
identities.'

He led us excitedly across the big white space to a toilet paper roll: inside out

with the cardboard outside the paper.