Unfriending

Went to lunch with my friends yesterday. In the car was dismayed to find my expensive Philip Kinsley comb was severely damaged. Something or someone must have trodden on it.

“Look, it’s got half its teeth missing!”

“Well it’s getting on a bit, just like you!” said Ann- Marie. Huh! Some sympathy.

Over lunch, I moaned, yet again, about my weight while tucking in to a Caesar Salad. Sophie’s party was being discussed. A fancy dress one themed on the letter “P.” 

I was musing whether to come, being the shape I was, as a pumpkin, but I settled on Princess, yes, that was more my style I said, flicking my long blond hair.

“You could come as Miss Piggy!” chortled Ann-Marie.

You can go off people can’t you?

As I beat her about the head viciously with a paper napkin I wondered.

Now if that was said on Facebook, then I could unfriend her at the stroke of a key. But in real life you can’t do that. Real friends are the flesh and blood people sitting next to you, not some ersatz figure spouting one liners in the “Like” space on a computer screen.

Last week I happened to bump into an acquaintance at uni. We sat having tea in the students cafe, surrounded by undergraduates.

She was telling me about the storyline in her latest chick lit novel which she’d self- published. Well she calls it chick lit, I call it soft porn. There was one part where she was describing some unmentionable foreplay with a lipstick. As the youngsters’ aghast faces turned towards us two middle-aged ladies I really wished she hadn’t mentioned it.

 I wanted to shout-

“We’re not cougars (though I was wearing a leopard skin number at the time) and this is just stuff she’s made up!”

“Shhh” I told her, “Or we’ll get chucked out of here for corrupting the faculty.”

Now that was a case for unfriending, there and then, but I didn’t.