Colleen Smith

I AM going to be spending most of this weekend dressed as a dwarf, complete with grey beard, in the nightclubs of Belfast.
It’s a hen weekend. Which sounded like a great idea several months ago, but now I’m starting to worry about my capacity to keep up, keep awake and keep upright with all these much younger hens.
The bride-to-be reassured us that she wouldn’t be asking us to dress in the usual tacky hen party outfits.
Instead she decided on her dressing as Snow White and us as the 11 dwarves (in Ireland’s fair city, where the dwarves are so pretty), purely because the idea of us all going clubbing in beards makes her laugh so much.
She is having T-shirts printed with suitable name tags (Dumpy, Stumpy, Grumpy, Lumpy and Trumpy spring to mind). As I am the oldest hen by a good 10 years, I fear mine might be “Frumpy”, but she’s not letting on.
All we have to supply are our own shorts and boots. When I told my teenagers that their mother was going to a nightclub in a pair of shorts they were even more cruel and suggested my dwarf name tag should be “Cellulite-y”. Nice children.
I have never been on a hen weekend. Our generation didn’t do them. When I got married in 1983, even a hen night was fairly unusual. A small handful of friends and I went for a quiet drink to a harbourside pub a couple of nights before my wedding. There was no dressing up, no getting wrecked and no stripper.
All I wanted was to get home nice and early for my beauty sleep so I looked good on my big day (I was 24 and felt very old).
So when the invitation to a wild weekend away with a great group of girls came along, I jumped at the chance.
But now that it’s nearly here, I’m worried because we have to leave here at about 5am and will be out clubbing until about the same time the following morning.
My biggest concern is my feet. I only have two pairs of boots and neither is comfy enough for eight hours of partying. I still have a scar on my ankle from dancing all night in the black boots at the Herald Express Christmas party.
I may have to wear my green wellies. Which will make me hot and smelly, to add to the beardy and chubby combo.
I’ve decided that the only way I’m going to keep awake and anaesthetise the pain in my feet is to get fairly drunk. But I still haven’t really mastered the “fairly drunk” thing. I get tiddly after one, very silly after two and lose all inhibitions (including the one that stops me getting totally paralytic) after three or four.
I have asked the bride if she can also supply wrist identification bands in case I forget little details: like where we’re staying, or my real, non-dwarf name.
At least I know that I’m not likely to attract any unwanted male attention (except possibly from a Leprechaun), what with the beard, the smelly wellies and the wobbly thighs.
I hope you notice that I said “unwanted male attention”. That is because I have had three bits of feedback about my column this week.
First of all, a friend of mine pointed out that, no matter what the subject matter when I begin, I always end up talking about one thing: men. Or rather the lack of one and my sad singleton status.
I now I see that she’s right. I obviously just can’t help it. It must be on my mind more than I realise.
My editor also made a passing column about “it all getting a bit Bridget Jones” after I wrote about my excited attempts to log on to Sarah Beeny’s mysinglefriend dating website after finally finding one man in the county (albeit in Taunton) prepared to date a woman in my age group.
Imagine my excitement tonight when I find there are now two men in Devon.
Then imagine my frustration when it still won’t let me log on! Everything else is working fine. I am too embarrassed to call in my computer expert chap purely to help me get on to a dating website…
And I have also had a really nice email this week from a kind man who said that reading my column had given him the courage to finally sign up to a dating website (I have looked on mysinglefriend but can’t spot him, unless he’s using an assumed name and is  the new man from Torquay who’s appeared this week?).
When I told my editor about the email he got all excited and suggested that I should go on a “Would Like to Meet” style blind date, complete with a panel of experts in the background giving me relationship advice, flirting tips and a style makeover!
Well, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, and I know I’ve been a bit of a failure on the dating front, but I hadn’t realised people thought I was in need of quite so much technical support in getting back into the dating game.
And then there’s the small fact that my email writer didn’t exactly ask me out. He might be 22 for all I know.
Even if he had asked me out, I’d have no chance of  getting a second date with any man ever again if he’d turned up to find me, notebook poised, accompanied by a Herald Express cameraman and sexpert Tracey Cox hovering over my shoulder telling me to smile and make more eye contact!
And finally, there’s the fact that despite all my brave words, I’m totally terrified at the prospect of coming out from behind my laptop.
Maybe I’ll stick to the beard and hope to strike it lucky with a Leprechaun at the end of my Irish rainbow.
 

Popularity: 14% [?]

Share This

MY youngest had us in fits of laughter again this week, when he started talking about “the Belgian Mary”.
We had no idea what he was talking about, so he explained that he’d been learning about the Belgian Mary at school, when the vicar came to talk to his class.
It wasn’t until he said: “You know, Jesus and the Belgian Mary” that it clicked, and we all fell around laughing.
His sisters and I told him that it was the Virgin Mary, but he carried on insisting that Jesus’ mother was the Belgian Mary (I worry about his hearing sometimes) and that it was the rest of us who’d got it wrong. He’s only six (bless!)
From now on, in our house at least, the mother of Jesus will, I’m afraid, always be known as the Belgian Mary.
And his sisters were quite happy to leave him with this much funnier misapprehension.
But I felt it was my duty to put him straight.
In my efforts to convince him that she really was the Virgin Mary, and not from Belgium at all , I found myself trying to explain both the Virgin birth and what a virgin is.
I’ve always tried to be completely open on the subject of sex, and had a policy of “blind them with science” when my older two daughteres asked me anything biological.
This approach seemed to work better with his big sisters though. Maybe it was because there were two of them, with just a two year age gap. From about the age of five they were constantly bombarding me with questions on the subject.
We had an illustrated children’s book called “The Body”, which they found hysterically funny and fascinating in equal measure. This was their main reference book for three or four years and they rapidly had enough information to choose it as their specialist subject should they ever get on to Mastermind.
In contrast, my little boy seems totally disinterested. And because he’s never asked any questions, I now realise he is blissfully ignorant on the subject. Which is either really good or really bad. I’ve not made my mind up yet.
So to explain what a virgin was, I had to tell him what sex was. I expected a stream of questions, or giggles. But he just listened in a disinterested sort of way.
I don’t think I did a very good job though. Because when I finished he asked: “Does that mean you’re a virgin mummy?”
As good as, I told him.