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Furniture on the Fylde
Last night at the University: a disappointing talk by Terry Eagleton, a scattergun run through Marx. I got the time and the venue wrong and it ended up all very rushed, with no time to chat with Seriouscrush.
Straight afterwards, it was the Readers' Party at the Literature Festival. We ignored the startling, overlit surroundings. Hardly anyone was drinking. We had been asked to gift wrap a book to take along. I took Colm Tóibin's Brooklyn, as something I won't miss much.
Then, from other tables scattered with books, we were invited to take "a treat, a challenge, and something you wouldn't touch with a bargepole". My treat was Caitlin Moran's How To Be A Woman; my challenge was something by some male Latin American author whose photograph had the comical seriousness that only South American men can pull off - hair in a bun, thin moustache, probably still living with his mum.We were asked to go round and talk about our choices. A youngish Brazilian woman was being interesting and witty about the level to which one should assume knowledge of other languages; then the deathly words "my husband".
I went to collect my books and they'd all been packed up and whisked away by a caretaker who was getting understandably impatient with us standing around chatting when he wanted to lock up. I wish we'd all swapped email addresses or something. It seemed a pity not to continue meeting. And of course, talking about books always attracts many more women than men.
If you were a woman trying to attract attention with your photo on a dating site, perhaps you might choose that one when you dusted off your little black dress to meet your friend in a swish bar in Manchester; or perhaps that friendly-looking one from that weekend away, your wind-tousled hair and Edinburgh in the background.
But not for Emma from Blackpool. She chooses to advertise herself to the menfolk of Lancashire with a picture of a wardrobe.
If anyone can can shed some light on what to me is the opaque reasoning of someone who puts a picture of a wardrobe on a dating site, I'd be glad to hear your comments. And there's something a bit strange about those curtains. What's she got in there?
18 comments
Since first here and no one else has said it… I’ll be boringly predictable with… possibly “A lion and a Witch?”
Are you going to ask her the meaning of the photo? I’m curious and that’s the only way we’ll all find out. Please report back.
Being a tramp has its charms but the pay is awful.
I’m not messing with a woman who puts curtains on her wardrobes. It’d be like visiting Duke Bluebeard’s castle.
Once, I was talking about careers with the girls and Melanie (who was then aged 11) said “Daddy, how do you become a tramp?” My burningly intense drive of career ambition has clearly rubbed off on my offspring.
WLTM… from 30-63. That’s just gone up from 60. So, who’s the 63 year old you want to bump uglies with?
Well, I was thinking, the sex with Frances (who’s now 58) was brilliant. So after bumping into her in the pub on Friday and still wanting to, and seeing as I will probably still want to do that in at least five years’ time, I thought I’d up the upper range a bit.
i have never seen a wardrobe shot, but i’ve seen hundreds of photos women take of themselves in their cars. never understood this phenomena. when i get in my car, the LAST thing i think is “Oooh! i should take a picture of myself and post it on the dating site!”
I thought pictures in cars was a man thing, a symbol of the power that men like to fantasise about having. But no, I can’t work it out either in a woman. Perhaps it’s an American thing. Women here tend to go for pictures of themselves either up mountains or on boats. Sod that, too much effort. The ones I go for are leaning on their elbows with a glass of wine in the foreground.
Is she trapped in there? Maybe she wants you to come and unlock it.
I can’t say why, but I find something about that photo very disturbing. The vibe I get says she has shelves full of dolls with terrifying porcelain heads and expensive dresses on the other three walls of that room. But do tell us if you figure it out.
Yes, it’s a little bit Nightmare on Elm Street, isn’t it, but then it was taken in Blackpool (a seaside resort, a pit of degredation full of lads on the piss and screaming women in cowboy hats on hen party nights).
Bill Bryson on Blackpool: (I can’t remember the exact words of the first sentence). “The Council have spent half a million pounds cleaning up Blackpool. Now the turds sparkle.”
A wardrobe? Maybe it’s a veiled comment about how she’s yet to come out of the closet?
Or it could be that she’s just super ugly.
I thought at first it was a cack-handed attempt to say “come into my boudoir", but if you were going to do that, wouldn’t you at least choose a better made and more attractive item of furniture? I bet Mata Hari never lured men into her bed with the promise of looking at a bit of curtained laminated medium density fibreboard.
Looby I think you owe it to the nation to click on that profile and bring Wardrobe Girl out of the shadows and into the light. Although if she responds to your beachside entreaties by proposing a meeting somewhere halfway, like ‘beside the coffee table’ or ‘under the standard lamp in the back bedroom’ then that might be the time to make your excuses and leave.
Ahhh, the rich cut and thrust of academic life. I miss it not.
Look looby, you’re beginning to sound a tad desperate. The “right girl” will turn up, but probably not on an internet dating site or such sad pretentious literary chatfests. You should have brought along a copy of viz, and discuused the post-modernest angst of the “Two Fat Slags” and the Socialist Ennui demonstrated by the cry of “Get Your Kit Of For The Lads”
BTW, IMHO, (don’t you just love these crappy abbreviations) the lass with the wardrobe is a closet lesbian, trying to attract a nice girl whom she wants to entice into opening her doors and exploring her hangers.
Twisted: I’m slightly insulted by the fact that you think I’m a tad desperate. I’m far more desperate than a tad.
Everyone says that the right girl will turn up, if only you sit there and twiddle your thumbs and be all the things that women (who lie constantly in these matters) say they want. I tried that tactic and I didn’t have sex for a decade. Women do not “turn up", not in Lancaster. They’re all married or depressed or talk about themselves constantly, (as opposed, for example, to spending almost the equivalent time as that which is spent on a full time job writing an autobiographical blog).
Lancaster’s a small city and there are absolutely zero single clever sexy available 40/50something women here. I’m only 47 - I should be doing it several times a week.
Barry: She may well be, but I don’t think I’m the one to draw her out of her shell.
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