2013-05-24T14:52:21-04:00 Sarah Bridge http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=sarah-bridge Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Sarah Bridge Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1872053 2012-09-10T17:23:57-04:00 2012-11-10T05:12:01-05:00

Sarah Bridge http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sarah-bridge/
So why, come nine o'clock that evening, was I hurtling down the road to the nearest pub to wave my debit card at them (I always forget to bring enough cash to weddings) and ask for a pack of cigarettes in return?

I, who haven't smoked properly for years?

All of a sudden, buying a pack of cigarettes had suddenly seemed to me to be the most important, sensible and vital thing I could ever do. And yes, I do know all about the danger, cost and generally negative aspects of smoking. That's why I gave up in the first place.

But it is impossible to be single at a wedding at which you hardly know anyone, and not smoke. Because cigarettes, as every current and ex-smoker knows, are like a secret password which lets you into a whole new world: a world where everyone talks to you. They have the power to transform complete strangers into lifelong friends at just a wave of a packet. A pack of cigs is like a membership to the most friendly club in the world, when just seconds before you had been cut off from all civilisation without a friendly face in sight. Smokes, cigs, fags - whatever you want to call them - are practically magical in that respect.

I had done pretty well without cigarettes up until then. I had arrived - as usual - on my own, and had walked down to the cluster of people under the oak tree expecting to meet people I knew. I could see no-one. It turned out I was the only person invited from all those years ago, which was lovely and flattering of course, but this meant that the only two people I knew where the bride and groom. And they were likely to be busy for, well, the entire day.

No matter, I am British and therefore fluent in small talk. I turned to the man standing next to me as we were waiting for the bride to arrive, and said: 'Gosh, it's such a beautiful day! They have been so lucky with the weather, haven't they?' My mum would have been so proud.
The response: a look of disdain and complete silence. My heart sank. It was going to be a long day.

After the ceremony there were a few hours to wait before the reception, and so everyone duly sat around in their family groups, drinking. As a singleton, you have no such luxury. You can't just loll around, secure in the mother ship of familiar faces you have surrounding you, you have to constantly crash in to established social groups, to throw out opening lines and hope that something will find a welcoming audience. You then have to cling on for dear life to your new friends and hope they will introduce you to other people, so before you know it there are several people to which you can hope to bump into in the queue for afternoon tea, and who will invite you to join them.

I did all that - a compliment here, a 'So, how do you know the happy couple?' there and survived until the proceedings moved towards the sit-down part of the evening, with food and speeches. That tided me over nicely as it was all named seating, so there wasn't the horror of trying to find a spare place to sit which wasn't being saved by someone for their significant other who had just nipped to the loo/bar/buffet.

But then it was 9pm. The couples I had been sitting with all headed off to the dance floor. The various people I had been chatting to before had all disappeared. My tent - many of the guests were camping, and I had brought my two-man tent but sadly, not even one man to share it with - was beginning to look very tempting. But I couldn't go to bed at nine o'clock could I? I had completely run out of energy to once again start going up to complete strangers and striking up a conversation, not least because the music and romantic lighting made chatting virtually impossible. I felt very, very single.

But then, the miracle flash of inspiration. Cigarettes! I remembered the last of the driving instructions to get here was 'Turn right at The Red Lion'. After a quick restorative drink in said pub, I was back with the cancer sticks to fight another day.

Standing outside a marquee in the dark seems a bit weird and pointless: standing outside with a cigarette, entirely allowed. Within seconds I had asked someone for a light and we were away, charging straight through the 'Wasn't it a lovely wedding?' conversation and onto the 'And how do you know the happy couple?' routine. Some more people came out to join us, more smoking and chatting ensued. When enough smoking had been done for a while, the group of us returned to the marquee and of course I was invited to join them. Inclusion!

When they went off to dance, or we all ran out of conversation, I could return outside to see who else was there to say hello to, and the party would continue. Just standing outside clutching my pack of Silk Cut was enough, people would come up and chat and be sociable in a way that would never have happened it I had just been standing there for no reason, or, most likely at this point, hiding in my sad little tent.

After the disco had packed up for the night, we headed outside for a campfire, chatting and bonding like our lives depended on it. We reluctantly called it a night at 2am, having put the world to rights while my cigarettes were barely touched, having served their purpose. I haven't smoked since.

Ever since smoking bans the world over have come into force, smokers know that the most sociable place to be is outside a pub or bar. I used to live in New York and Rome, and in both places you would be far more likely to make new and interesting friends talking to complete strangers outside on the street rather than stuck indoors with the people you came with. I'm sure there is another way of talking to a succession of complete strangers but I certainly haven't come across it. There are times when I wonder how non-smokers ever talk to new people at all.
And if you are single at a wedding, that toxic, dangerous pastime is a complete life-saver. Oh, the irony.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1831838 2012-08-27T19:00:00-04:00 2012-10-27T05:12:03-04:00

Sarah Bridge http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sarah-bridge/
At the age of 38 however, I realised that the gaps between relationships were getting to be rather long, almost never-ending. Over time, my social life had become less happily hectic: goodbye spontaneous nights out and lost weekends, hello making arrangements a month in advance involving babysitters, restaurant reservations and train timetables, and I just wasn't going out and meeting new people any more. It became clear that I needed to do something to halt my unwitting slide into permanent singledom.

So after much Googling and asking advice from friends - once I'd overcome my embarrassment about basically saying: 'Where can I find a man?' - I headed out on a one-woman blitz of the singles' scene. I went speed-dating, internet dating and dinner dating. I signed up for quiz-dating, wine-tasting dating and cocktail-making dating. I went on singles holidays - skiing in Austria, sunbathing in Greece, mountain-climbing in Morocco - as well as a singles' ball and Scottish dancing. I went to dating evenings where everyone drank through a red straw to show that they were single and wanted to meet someone and I went to things supposedly populated by single people, even if they weren't advertised so explicitly, such as dance classes, acting classes, cooking lessons and even pub poker nights.

And I have never felt more single in my entire life. From never minding being single at all, the fact that I was spending most of my time at singles events made me feel permanently, terminally single. The more singles events I went to - spending ages beforehand making myself look as good as possible, within the limits of time, ability and genetic make-up, then getting there and trying to talk to as many people as possible while trying to sparkle and shine and make the best impression I could - the more I felt as if I was getting further and further away from actually meeting someone. Why was this, I wondered?

For a start, it felt that actually deliberately working on not being single, meant my dreams were being crushed on a regular basis. A normal night I would go out, have a good time, not meet anyone special, but that was fine. On a 'date-hunting' night I would go out, not meet anyone special, and spend the long journey home on the tube thinking 'Well that was a complete waste of time', feel unattractive, a total failure as a human being, and vow never to do anything so soul-destroying again. Until the next night, of course.

Before each event I would resist the urge to just go home and hang out with my flatmates in front of the telly, telling myself: 'Tonight could be the night! There might be someone nice there tonight, you are never going to meet 'the one' sitting on the sofa, are you?' and this meant that every time I didn't meet someone, it made it even worse, my hopes built up, only to be dashed yet again. The more this happened, the more I found myself feeling miserable, convinced that nothing good was ever going to happen to my moribund love-life ever again, the more my face started to reflect my pain and growing desperation, and well, we all know how pain and desperation can be really attractive qualities to men.

It wasn't just my internal thoughts that were making this an uphill battle though. The events themselves left a lot to be desired. Many of the things I went on were always hugely unbalanced in numbers, with loads of women there, many who had signed up months in advance, but a significant lack of single men. One speed-dating event I went to had to have two waves of dating as there were so many women, so half the women had to sit out the first few hours (it's always great for the ego to go to a dating event and being made to sit in a corner and watch everyone else dating, like the worst kind of wallflower) while the men had to go round again. After two hours of dating they were all completely shattered. At another event the organisers had to hastily recruit guys from the bar next door - so I found myself dating Gianni, in London on a week's holiday from Rome, whose English 'is not so good' and yet another found the daters being friends of the organiser, and not even single.

One evening promised a fun-packed dinner with like-minded thirty-somethings, equally split between men and women. I got there to discover I'd paid £30 to eat pizza with seven other women in their forties, and just two guys, one of who walked out halfway through the meal and neither of whom had had to pay for a ticket. Time after time it was the same story: not enough men. Where were they all? Usually, in turned out, in the pubs I would dash into when I needed a stiff drink after yet another dating disaster. But they'd be watching the football and have no eyes for a lone female, particularly not one who was beginning to feel she should be ringing a bill and shouting 'unclean!'

The day I stopped going to dating events was one of my happiest days for a long time. No more walking into a room full of strangers and realising 90% of them were female. No more discussions with those women about the 'best' dating events because, let's face it, is there were any good then we wouldn't still be here, would we? Even at evenings where there were a decent number of men, such as wine-tasting dating, there still didn't seem to be any people actually coupling off. People were becoming such old hands at the dating game that all they could talk about was other types of dating events: which ones they'd tried, which dating sites they were on - there wasn't any of your usual flirting going on because people had become so stuck in the dating merry-go-round. Get a lot of single people together in a room with some alcohol and what do you end up with? It turns out, you end up with the same number of single people; they'll just be slightly more depressed about it at the end of the evening. Single people are a vulnerable class, and more than one poorly-organised, badly hosted event had started to make me angry at being ripped off.

It gradually dawned on me that the singles scene makes you act rather in the same way to people who go to the gym a couple of times a week but who spend the rest of their time driving to the shops rather than walking there, who pound the Stairmaster but stand motionless on escalators in their daily commute, who binge briefly on exercise but will barely break into a sweat for the rest of the week. My dating was all about scheduled events but the rest of my week I would put that to one side and get on with my usual routine of being with the same people, going to the same places, meeting no-one new.

Now I am learning to make every minute a potential door to a date. I sit at the front of the bus and make eye contact with people rather than heading straight to the back, plugged into headphones or buried in a newspaper. I take different routes, visit different places, get out of my routine. I walk with my head up, with open body language and smile or even chat to complete strangers in the coffee shop, at the supermarket, on the lift at work. People have been astonishingly receptive: it seems everyone is looking for a 'in', a reason to say "hi", and all it takes is a look, a smile, a "could you pass me that?" or "I'm reading that too, what do you make of it so far?" It's nerve-wracking, but fun and an ego-boost when a smile or overture is returned. Now that I've started looking around, it seems that everyday life is full of friendly single guys, while dating life - well, not so much.

At Tesco's the other day I found myself chatting to so many men that halfway round I realised I'd lost my credit card. I eventually unearthed it in the freezer next to the ice-cream. Now all I need to do is learn how to flirt without dropping things, and I'll be well on my way to wiping that anxious, desperate, 'single' look off my face.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1419778 2012-04-12T19:00:00-04:00 2012-06-12T05:12:01-04:00

Sarah Bridge http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sarah-bridge/ Evening Standard article entitled The Last Supper, diners at the HIX restaurant in Selfridges are being given the opportunity to sample the last meal enjoyed by first-class passengers on the Titanic. On the menu are such delights as Lindisfarne rock oysters, duck liver parfait, lamb cutlets and Warldorf pudding with cider brandy ice-cream. The menu has been given a 'contemporary twist' - presumably in case there are people who are so cutting-edge that they might shy away from eating such passé treats - and in, what could be seen as either a witty homage or the height of bad taste, there is even an iceberg-shaped éclair for dessert, called, surprise surprise, The Iceberg.

I can't be the only one who thinks that there are ways to mark such as tragedy as the Titanic and a menu consisting of the dishes eaten by people who were about to die, or lose loved ones, is not the way to do it. A heart-breaking 1,514 souls were lost on that terrible night and the lives of others changed forever. "We wanted to offer customers something a bit special to celebrate," says Mark Hix blithely, using entirely the wrong verb.

He is not the only one jumping onto the Titanic bandwagon. A commemorative voyage to the exact spot where the Titanic sank one hundred years ago has already set sail from Southampton. Its passengers, who have paid up to £6,000 for their tickets, are wearing period costume and will - again, what is it with the food thing? - be served the same meals as on the Titanic. The journey has already been dramatic. When its arrival in Ireland was delayed by a couple of hours due to some entirely typical spring weather, one over-wrought passenger was quoted as saying: "There is a bad feeling on board that maybe the voyage is doomed by bad luck."

Well unless the ship is equipped with the same (that is, totally inadequate) number of life boats and primitive iceberg-spotting equipment as the original ship then I think they're going to be okay, and a BBC cameraman who fell ill on board was airlifted off by a rather modern helicopter.

But it's hard to escape the feeling that the whole thing is in extremely poor taste. Later this year will New York restaurants begin serving the menu from Windows on the World which was on offer that terrible morning of September 11 2001? Will there be memorial flights over Manhattan where people will adopt the clothing worn by those people on board the doomed planes? What about other tragedies, such as the Hindenburg airship disaster, or Chernobyl, or the Columbia space shuttle? Will there be surfing trips to Japan to remember last year's tsunami, or a range of gas-fired barbeques to celebrate the Great Fire of London?

There are ways to remember those who perished in such tragic circumstances: by quiet reflection, a moment of prayer, a concerted effort to make sure such events can never happen again, or to try and minimise the damage and losses when they do. Remembering the Titanic can be done in many ways - a donation to the lifeboat service for example, or lobbying to ensure that passengers will never have to face such risks again (the Costa Concordia tragedy shows us that one hundred years on, there is still much to be done). But eating iceberg-shaped desserts? That just leaves a bad taste.]]>