Elegsabiff

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Keeping a keeper. Easy, really.

Nice guys are actually very straightforward. They say so, in a bewildered way, usually when they can’t understand why the last relationship went wrong. They’re so easy, so ready to settle down. When they’re pressing fifty or accelerating towards sixty-something, you have to know things have gone wrong before. Why? He’s such a nice guy. Ask Clarissa. She wrote the book, literally (there, see it, in the margin?)

Actually I don’t want to mislead you. The men she meets aren’t keepers. Interesting, but not keepers. In fact we’re slipping off the topic a bit, which is nice guys, aka keepers, and how to keep them. They are easy. They are looking for nice women who will gently but firmly move in, take control, run their lives and keep them happy. It really couldn’t be much simpler.

Ha Ha Clip Art_thumb[1]

So, all a woman has to know, to get the lovely man of her dreams and her happy ever after, is

A – when to turn up. He has to be over the last one, and just wondering when the next one is going to arrive

B – what to look like. He might want you to gain just a little weight, or lose a little. Grow your hair, or cut it. Wear skirts at all times, or occasionally wear jeans. Always be immaculate, or always look as if you wouldn’t mind being a little mussed-up. The tricky part is sussing that out, because he will inevitably say he doesn’t mind, until you go too far the wrong way and he does.

C – Good food should happen effortlessly, so have a core list of recipes you can cook from memory from stuff that hangs around most pantries. Time enough to get exotic when he’s addicted enough to your repertoire to run your shopping errands. Do housework and cleaning while he sleeps. If he believes tidy happens just because you’re there, you’re in.

D – get the sex just right. I’m not saying Clarissa’s book could help here, but it couldn’t hurt. At least you’ll be braced for all sorts, especially if you’re a bit on the naive and inexperienced side yourself. Sometimes he’s in a quickie mood, and sometimes he wants to be adored and seduced, and sometimes he wants to do the seducing and coaxing himself. Sometimes he doesn’t want sex at all, just a quick cuddle. You need to know instinctively know which mood he’s in.

E – last point, or maybe the first point – some men want to hunt, some men want to be hunted, and some men just want you to turn up at the door (see A), looking right (see B)  and be easy to live with (see C and D).

See? Couldn’t be simpler.

Go find one.  Let us know how you got on.

wrinklie love

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Aging overnight, hey, don’t I get any warning at all?

Remember playing Statues as a kid? You crept up on the person who was it but couldn’t move if they glanced at you. Ah, the games of children, first introduction to stress.

Age can be a bit like that. Glance away for a second and kapow, another chunk added into the mix. I still remember the nasty moment I glanced in the mirror and realized I’d inherited my father’s jowls.  I was barely forty at the time, and I’d turned into Deputy Dawg overnight.

Anyway a couple weeks ago I went on holiday and caught a chill on the beach – as only I can – and for a couple of weeks I’ve been resentfully thinking damnit, one long weekend, and the switch flipped and I got OLD. A bit stiff in the mornings, aching in numerous joints, even a little bit deaf after that hellish double flight back.  I finally went sighing to the doctor after a fortnight to see if anything could be done at least about the ears, because I’m now missing out on half the office gossip, and tell you what, I’m nominating that woman for sainthood. She’s a fresh-cheeked thirty-something, she could have glanced at my chart, recoiled, said yes you’re old, what do you expect at your age? And I’d have crawled out of there and ordered a zimmer.

Nonsense, she said instead. You have eustachian tubes dysfunction. You flew with a head-cold, you’re paying the price, and you should be as good as new in a couple more weeks. It will take as long as it takes.

So then I mentioned the stiffness and aching and she pushed and pulled at my legs and tied them into some pretty fancy knots and said nope, no problems whatsoever, you’re very fit and flexible, you just overdid things. Do a bit more exercise and the aches and stiffness will go away.

More? I hadn’t done any since getting back because I was feeling so ollllllllllllllllllllllllllld. So I started again and let me tell you, if you really want to feel ancient and decrepit, do your usual full exercise routine after a few weeks break. But I do feel better, already. Well, stiff and aching in different places, but I remember those places, they do stop whinging if you keep going.

I hope I’ve learned a lesson from this and won’t automatically hit the pause button when the next symptom, real or false, pokes its head up. I could kick myself. I blether on and on about the benefits of exercise and (fairly) healthy diet and forget everything the minute I feel briefly under the weather.

What are you doing, reading this? Get out there and dance!

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Here we go again – travel meltdown

I’m off again. Portugal, for a long weekend. Never been there. And, as usual a few days before any trip I ever take, I am convinced I will never get there, and should just cancel now and hide under the bed.

It isn’t fear of flying. It isn’t fear of the holiday itself, even though this particular one is a bit weighted on the expectations front, because I have absolutely no idea what will come of it or even – wait for this, from your mature singles guru – what I hope will come of it. It isn’t that I am set in my ways and a little twitchy when taken out of my rut, because frankly my life has been a roller-coaster for three years now and I can’t remember what a rut looks like. They sound peaceful, though.

Just general meltdown. Here we go again. I may be getting too old for this. Never too old! But yup, I could be getting too neurotic.

meltdown

I’m bracing myself for two, count them, two, impossible connections between flights, and I thought it would soothe me to chat about it a bit. The first, I have just over an hour to make the connecting flights but they are in the same terminal at Gatwick.  It’s a big terminal, I shall probably land at gate 1 and have to get to gate 3 zillion and 20, but surely do-able at a sprightly canter, spots flashing in front of my eyes, cabin luggage bouncing on my hip, as I set a personal best for the half-mile-through-holiday-crowds-sprint.

The second, an hour and a half between flights – piece of cake – until the incoming flight decided to go to the other terminal instead. I tried to book a peace-of-mind second, later, flight to Edinburgh. Turns out, the only affordable flight of the day is the one I’m on, the next one is a breezy three hundred quid more. There are cheaper, later flights, all at least double the price.

Breathe. Ommmmmmm.

Oh, there’s no point to this blog. Did you think there would be?  Just trying to talk myself down. Hasn’t really helped.

On the bright side, I haven’t any panic to spare re the actual holiday bit. I’ll worry about that if I make that first connection. Okay, it’ll be too late by then to worry. So that’s a bit of a silver lining.

Ommmmmmmm.

 

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Men on understanding women

Well, men don’t. Even mature single men who have known many women over many years have a formula they cling to, and they duck and run when that stops working because they’ve given up trying to understand women. Women don’t always understand women. You’d think as we all got older we’d mellow but it doesn’t seem to work that way, we get a little bit weirder. Or, as we all, men and women, like to think, more interesting.

I like men, some of my best friends are men, and I sometimes envy them their confidence. But every now and then they ask me, usually sounding a bit bewildered, why their woman, (or the woman they would like to make their woman) acts irrationally.

(Okay that sounded like that old joke, “my girlfriend thinks I’m a stalker. Well, she isn’t really my girlfriend yet”)

The thing is, half the time I can only take a wild guess. Women can be bonkers. So can men, but that’s another blog.

I wrote a book about second-time-round (mature) singles which is mainly for women – lots of advice and warnings wrapped up in a story with sexy bits – and you know what, men could do worse than read it for a sneak peak into how women think.

Oh, and if you got here too late for the special in the next blog, click on the cover in the margin – see it? A Second Rainbow? that’ll whisk you off to your closest friendly Amazon. Read the sexy bits, sure, but then re-read the bits about how women think. You’ll thank me. Tell your friends. Don’t tell your rivals.

Ever researching on your behalf.

Elegsabiff.

 

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Setting expectations …

I’ve talked before about setting expectations when you’re meeting someone.  Launching a new book has a lot in common with a new relationship. The writer, for example, is expecting the reading world to fall on the book’s neck. At last, a fun novella about the issues facing the mature single woman who is re-entering the dating world after a long, sedate, and frankly slightly boring marriage!

The reader, on the other hand, has to be coaxed, titillated, seduced, into parting with hard-earned cash to try out a new book by a writer they never heard of.   And an unfamiliar subject – mature. What do mature singles know about sex, breathless excitement, expectations, heartbreak?

Actually, think about that. Long term singles know more than most readers (unless also mature, single and very active) will ever learn!

Not Dorothy, though.  Having spent most of her life being told what to do by the people in her life, she is possibly the most naïve woman you’ll meet, although you know the type – my husband takes care of all that sort of thing.  When her husband starts taking care of someone else, her daughter signs her up on the Yellow Brick Road singles website. Her first date is with a man who calls himself Scarecrowe …

Innocent hopefuls looking for the perfect mate, time-serving singles only interested in the next adventure, the easily-bored, the destructive, men and women who have avoided commitment for years and intend to continue avoiding it:  every character in A Second Rainbow is a common type, tweaked just a tiny bit further to fit the underlying Wizard of Oz thread, and the result is a romp with love, sex, betrayal, tears, determination and laughter.

Right now it’s on a pre-publication special price: put it this way, would you gamble the price of a cup of coffee?

You would? yayThen click on the image below to be taken to your closest Amazon.  The price goes up within 24 hours of launch,

Before you click on the cover, a couple of things you should know:

  • It is only available as an eBook at this stage
  • You’re ordering it for delivery to your reading device on April 14th
  • You can download an app from Amazon which will let you read Kindle books on your computer or phone
  • If you click on the cover image, it will take you to your closest friendly Amazon. It can only be ordered through Amazon

A second rainbow (4)

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Virtual friends – part two –

On the costa del sol March 2016 A couple years ago I did a fairly breathless blog saying I was about to fly several thousand miles to meet someone I had been talking to on line for several months. I hadn’t a clue, I gushed, whether he was my long-lost twin brother, my best friend, or my future.

Well, none of the above, as it turns out laugh  although we’ve stayed friends, but on the strength of that meeting having been interesting, I flew off into the blue again last weekend. This time I was going to meet four strangers – two men and two women – who were not only strangers to me, but to each other. Age range, forty-something to the sunny side of sixty.  Why not? Safety in numbers, a gathering on the Costa del Sol, and two of them had, over the past year or so, made me cry with laughter with our brisk on-line banter. Three of them live there year round – one previously Australian, one a Londoner, one from Southern Africa – and the fourth was holidaying in the general area for a week from Ireland.

I say the general area, Spain is HUGE, but they would all be within an hour of each other. I suggested, rather enviously, that they meet up. Go ON, I urged. Tell the rest of us what you’re like. Okay, they said, you come too. Eek no, I said, I couldn’t – then I thought of all the advice I give on my blogs about getting out there. So I went. Taking, it must be said, some fairly Scottish weather with me. Coldest week they’ve had this winter!

SUCH fun. I’ll say right now that you have to pick your company, we’re talking mature single men and women here, they could have been gloomy and weeping into their second drink, we could certainly have exploded our virtual friendships into smithereens, I knew all of that. I’ve written loads of blogs on that, on what to expect. And yet – when would I get such a good chance again?

I knew the Irish woman would be worth meeting, whatever happened, even if she had needed elephants to carry her emotional baggage, (she didn’t) because she is both clever and howlingly funny. We’ve been giggling on the blogs for over a year and virtual is virtual, sure, but you cannot talk that much and hide the sort of person you are, over that long a time. I didn’t have a clue what she would look like – you don’t have to have a pic up, and she chooses not to be recognisable. Turns out, fantastic hair, fantastic skin, taller than me (I’m not used to that, men or women) and she annoyingly looks way nearer 30 than 50. I would have hated her if she hadn’t been such good company.

The other woman startled me by being absolutely tiny, I somehow expect Australian women to be strapping tanned Amazons with a surfboard tucked under one arm. I know, I know, but I worked for the company that marketed Fosters in the UK for many years. You get brainwashed. She’s a dynamo of energy, more fluent in Spanish now than in English after 30 years there, and herded us briskly around for the weekend like a tiny border collie working a herd of rather laid-back sheep.

I’d chatted on and off for a year on Skype with the oke from Southern Africa, so I was pretty sure what he would be like, and he was exactly as expected, another tick for using skype to talk to strangers, a very nice guy, and without his organizing we’d probably never have got the plan past wishful thinking into reality, despite all of Titch’s energy. One-time army men who now run their own businesses are good at organizing!

I’ve exchanged messages with the drily-witty Londoner for even longer, he’s even (unknowingly) featured once or twice giving advice in these chronicles, but he’s had the same pic up since I joined the website and we had no idea what to expect. Ten years older than he said? Five inches shorter? That’s pretty standard on singles websites, but it didn’t matter, this wasn’t a dating-type meetup. (He turned out to be exactly what it says on the box, that was a first!)

It really was fun. We ate a lot, drank gallons of coffee and a little alcohol, and talked and talked and talked. I didn’t get to bed before 3 am on a single night. At least twice before I set off I would have cancelled out of sheer nerves, but I was used to that from my first venture, we never met without me having a mini meltdown beforehand. Apart from anything else, any reader of this column knows I don’t much like flying.  grin However, carpe diem is one of my mottoes. If not now, when? is another.  Not to mention the less thrilling, if more prosaic, you aren’t getting any younger. So much for that one, I felt like a yearling all weekend. It was great.

Do it. Seize the day.

Ever researching on your behalf,

Elegsabiff  wave

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When it sucks to live alone

When the lights suddenly go out and the house starts to creak.

When the cat has left a dead rat in the middle of the hallway.

When you’re woken in the middle of the night by a tapping at your (upstairs) bedroom window which, sure,  is probably the tree. Probably.

When you are neck deep in a wonderful hot bubble bath and the phone rings. Stops. Rings again. Stops. Rings again, and it is obvious the caller is not going to give up.

When you have to climb a wobbly ladder.  When you are trying to put up a 6′ curtain rail and you only have a 5′ arm-span. And a wobbly ladder.

When you are watching a scary movie and there’s a sudden crash in the kitchen.

When – no, you take over now. I have to work out how to dispose of the biggest dead rat I’ve ever seen. I write about bodies all the time, sure, but they aren’t four-legged, bald-tailed, and possibly just playing dead. If it suddenly roars back to life, I’ll, well, I’ll set the dog on it, that’s what I’ll do. From the safety of the hallway chandelier.

It does occur to me that with more singles every day, and more of us in our second flush of vibrant youth rather than the first, that it’s time we got together and formed a few co-operatives. I’d move into my fictional corpse-dotted village for those over 55 in a heartbeat if it existed but until then I’d rather like to know there are some local hardy types I could call on. I’m not entirely sure what I could offer the co-op in return. I can bake and roast, but am otherwise a fairly dire cook, and I don’t iron. I’m beginning to realize why I’m single, but there’s sure to be some skill I take entirely for granted which would be co-op currency?

Talk among yourselves. Post any good ideas. Ta.

 

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I give up. I will never understand men

I don’t understand men, and where in blazes is the handbook? How can we have evolved alongside each other for hundreds of thousands of years and not have a CLUE? I don’t even understand my male friends any more.

My brother was full of advice. “Always tell the truth, say what’s on your mind, and tell a man what you want, we’re not psychic.” Yeah, THAT worked. We fell out a few years back! Without him there to translate men to me I gave them a wide berth for some years. That all changed in 2014 through a series of events and by the time 2015 crawled out its nappy I was with a man who was so violently, passionately and intensely in love it was frankly unnerving. Because I don’t understand men at all I thought he was in love with me  but turned out he was violently, passionately and intensely in love with the pedestal I hadn’t even realized I was on and one day I suddenly had a lot of time on my hands.

In fairness, it’s been raining men since then. I could, and this was something of a shock, be having a lively sex-life with all the trimmings and a choice of partners, why did no-one ever tell me I could be having more fun in my fifties than in my thirties? I wouldn’t have wasted a couple of years wondering if it was time to learn to knit, or order a gross of cats. The single baby-boomers are out there in force in their thousands, casting around for women to make a fuss over, and I’ve had men from mid-forties to mid-sixties trying their spiels on me, with varying degrees of success.

smitten Huge fun. I seem to be a magnet for weird, though. Fortunately also a magnet for the talkative, which has been good research for the novel I’ve been writing, on just how different it is to re-enter the dating game at a mature age. I’m a cynical old broad but my heroine is one of those nice submissive ‘I leave everything up to my husband‘ women who suddenly loses her husband to a determined younger woman and naively drifts into the world of the second-timers. The more research I did on her behalf, the more dodgy stories I heard and the stranger men I met! At this rate I’ll never finish the book and it will be longer than War and Peace instead of a light-hearted bit of froth to read on the way to exciting places and / or encounters. It tries to cover the commoner types of older single men, in a tongue-in-cheek way, as Dorothy bumps and drifts for one complication to the next, and I’d very much appreciate it if more and more types wouldn’t keep popping out of the workwork. Or if the ones I’d already classified didn’t become mystifying in completely new ways. Then there’s the latest Lawns book which has been stubbornly stuck at the written-but-I’m-not-happy-with-it stage for months.

Nothing for it but to officially hand in my lipstick, give up on this social life stuff, finish the books, and then see what else is out there. So if you spot me wasting time chatting on social media, just wag a finger at me and point me back at this blog. Elegsabiff, you should remind me, you have things to do. Ends to tie up, first.

Ta.

But I’m not learning to knit. That’s a definite. There is way too much going on out there.

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Friends come in all shapes and sizes

Friend, buddy, chum, pal. They are just words, not instant summaries. I started counting up different types of people I like in different ways, and got bogged down. They can’t all fall under the same umbrella word ‘friend’, can they?

I’ve been on a singles website for nearly two years because it has a lively blogging facility  roll eyes and have got to know some people really well, to the point where we chat almost on a daily basis. I’ve never met them, probably never will meet them, although I would go out of my way to have a drink or a coffee together if the chance ever came up. Virtual friends, oh yes, but it’s hard to hide behind the written word for that long without exposing fatal flaws.

I follow, and am followed by, hundreds of people on Twitter – I’ve met, hmm, about twenty of them, a fluctuating group of us meet up several times a year, always fun. Friends.

I have friends on Facebook – some genuinely are, scattered all over the world, we often haven’t seen each other in years and may never meet again, but we share news and photos. Some are colleagues from earlier jobs, and some are writers I may one day meet. Facebook calls them all friends.

One penpal, a writing contact, has been a great friend and support, yet we’ve never met and will never meet. ‘Penpal’ doesn’t begin to cover it!

Real life, a handful.  Very highly valued. It’s easy to find out who’s a true friend – screw up, or go through a challenging time, then see who sticks around.  Okay, easy isn’t the right word. But definitely interesting!

Yet what is a person who is entertaining, amusing, but ducks out whenever they have something more interesting on, or you aren’t as much fun as usual? When you are back to yourself, there they are, entertaining and charming, fair-weather friends who can make the sunshine seem brighter, but you can’t rely on them the way you can on a real friend.

My books are about friendship, but it tends to be the tried-and-true type. There is a place for these others because they are in my life, and in yours too. What do YOU call the different types?

sigh

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I remember, I remember – actually, I don’t

There’s a joke doing the rounds on Facebook, which says ‘If my memory gets any worse I’ll be able to plan my own surprise party’

I’d probably then make other plans for the same night. sigh

 
My favourite cousin is having a milestone birthday down in That England later this month. Eight hour drive. No worries, count me in, wouldn’t miss it.

 
A good friend here in Scotland is having a milestone birthday later this month. Great, count me in, wouldn’t miss it.

 

Same day. I really should get a diary.

 

I was getting quite depressed about these little moments until I realized how many other people (all ages, yay) are having them too. What can we blame? Solar flares? The internet? ADD brought on by social media? I’m not looking to sue anyone, just to avoid getting worse!

 
Please make me feel better, tell me what you forgot. If you can remember.