Convent 0 - Canary Islands 1

Salut, mes amis! I’m back. I repented. A bit. My apologies for the absence of ecclesiastical up-dates, but clandestine trips to the convent’s computer were not as easily achievable as I had imagined, and I was confined to my cell a fair amount. Fortunately, I had brought my Bazooka that Verrucca with me, so that kept me occupied, and the daily administration of said medicament yielded spectacular results; I never knew such massive pleasure could be derived from pulling the annoying little bugger out. My other solitary occupation (you can only confess and pray so much after all…) was finding fresh and laterally thought out uses for the beeswax candles I’d nicked from under the altar. More of that later.

In the meantime, however, mega outrage and spitting!

I can’t remember if I mentioned my friend and colleague Jo to you in an earlier blog. She’s on the same dating website as I am, and when she told me she was getting no hits, I invited myself to her house to investigate. The reasons were simple; in a very half-hearted attempt at self-promotion, she’d included a close-up photo (by that I mean a more or less a direct route up her nasal cavities) that made her look like an escapee from a Victorian psychiatric institution, and also her profile was diazepam dull. Anyway, things picked up marginally when we tweaked a few of the more obvious flaws in her marketing strategy and uploaded some of my David Bailey shots, although there were still no candidates to make her juices flow.

I had hardly walked in to work today when she came bounding over with what can only be described as glow. Her complexion seemed to have improved significantly.

‘I kept thinking about your blog and the floppy tits, but I did it anyway!’

‘Did what?’ I said.

‘I had a shag!’

‘You had a shag?’ Yes, I know how cruel that sounds, but I didn’t mean ‘What? You (of all people) got laid, while I, vision of youth and uberpulchritude, who have been depilated, coiffed, coloured and lasered, can barely scrape a second date and am still languishing unfulfilled in the leg-over department?’

That wasn’t what I meant. Well, not much anyway. Jo has only ever slept with one man, her husband, and the last time that happened was three years ago, which was why she was being such a wimp about her website profile: nerves.  Transpires she went on holiday to the Canaries, got courted by some local Spaniard for a whole week, and on the night before her departure thought ‘Sod it’ and went ahead. Totally burkha-less. Must have been with the lights off then... I'll check that out tomorrow. 

‘Was it good?’ I asked.

‘It was OK,’ she said. ‘But that wasn’t the point. All week he was attentive, charming, complimentary, never pushy; he made me feel like a woman. So I had a Shirley Valentine moment (you must watch this for the clichéd ocean waves metaphor – haha!), why not?'

And she accomplished this just by being herself, which incidentally is an attractive, lovely, modest, gentle person. Ugh, I hate her. The bitch.

‘And now I’m over it,’ she said. ‘The fear’s gone. I’m not going to wait for them to look for me. I’m going to start making the first moves.’

And here’s a bit of Byron for you literary bods – seems appropriate. “A little she strove, and much repented, And whispering, ‘I will ne’er consent’ – consented.”  Go Jo! You shameless trollop! 

So, dear follower, if the website has not come up trumps for me by the end of July, where do you think I should go on holiday?