You're not from round 'ere then?
I am surrounded by delightful young families, happily retired couples, or contented empty nesters, enjoying their return to pre-children companionship and some freedom from parental responsibility, as well as a large number of women who have escaped their marriages and bought a dog, preferring long walks and book clubs. One of the imbalanced things about living in the west country, as with living in the farther reaches of Scotland, is that there is a surfeit of single women and a dearth of suitable single men. The men are wage slaves, and to be found in the south-east whereas women, on the whole, like a bit of a view.
This must be the centrifugal effect, as though single women have been flung out from the frenzied middle of a dance, and have landed, like so many wallflowers on the hard chairs all around the dance hall. I can tell you; those chairs are hard; and sitting on them makes you invisible; not, however, to the sort of man who has an emotional disorder, a twitch, one eye and a limp. I have become known to my colleagues at work as the ‘weirdo magnet.’ It is hard to extricate myself from getting into unintended entanglements by merely pleading that I was only being friendly. I am so misunderstood.
I worked myself up into a frenzy of my own today, whirling like a Dervish from house to house with what felt like hundreds of people, and no time to engage properly with any of them, let alone to sell one of them anything and, to my utter astonishment, one man asked if he could take me out to dinner. I gaped at him. I have quite forgotten how to behave.
I am surrounded by delightful young families, happily retired couples, or contented empty nesters, enjoying their return to pre-children companionship and some freedom from parental responsibility, as well as a large number of women who have escaped their marriages and bought a dog, preferring long walks and book clubs. One of the imbalanced things about living in the west country, as with living in the farther reaches of Scotland, is that there is a surfeit of single women and a dearth of suitable single men. The men are wage slaves, and to be found in the south-east whereas women, on the whole, like a bit of a view.
This must be the centrifugal effect, as though single women have been flung out from the frenzied middle of a dance, and have landed, like so many wallflowers on the hard chairs all around the dance hall. I can tell you; those chairs are hard; and sitting on them makes you invisible; not, however, to the sort of man who has an emotional disorder, a twitch, one eye and a limp. I have become known to my colleagues at work as the ‘weirdo magnet.’ It is hard to extricate myself from getting into unintended entanglements by merely pleading that I was only being friendly. I am so misunderstood.
I worked myself up into a frenzy of my own today, whirling like a Dervish from house to house with what felt like hundreds of people, and no time to engage properly with any of them, let alone to sell one of them anything and, to my utter astonishment, one man asked if he could take me out to dinner. I gaped at him. I have quite forgotten how to behave.
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