All I want for Christmas is

All I want for Christmas is…

Ours is a quiet Christmas, just me and mum being all veggie and atheist (well, slightly pagan in my case).

For a few years a close friend spent it with us but now he’s all partnered up, so back to eating too much food, watching ‘Dr Who’ and ‘Eastenders’ and I will toast (mum’s teetotal) other singletons.

I have been single for way too long. It is my fault; I allowed a (very) bad experience to scare me back into to my fat shell and now only peep out once in a while. I don’t have kids or a partner and very little family. This makes you feel removed from the angst on Eastenders and the perfection shown on other TV dramas. Neither is true, I know that, but way to make me feel inadequate. I could go all ‘urban family’ but no money and widowed mother put paid to that and I’ve never been part of the cool crowd anyway.

In fact, I rather like being with mum having our own little ‘thing’: we have our own traditions, our own jokes and it is nice and cosy and takes me back. New Year is a bit different. I’ve spent the last few in as I couldn’t be bothered and not sure I can be this year, either. For me, New Year means standing around paying through the nose for drinks, being banged about by strangers and getting depressed about what to wear as whoever I go out with I’m always the fat one and now the old one. Can’t win, me!

However comfortable I am about my appearance day to day, as soon as it means I might be on the ‘pull’ it all goes to pot. Which takes me back to that bad experience: I fell for the wrong man and so did he. He slept with women afterwards even though he considered himself gay; he just didn’t find ME attractive and what little ego I had crashed and burned in his hands. You can’t force someone to fancy you, or love you back. It’s just that no-one told me.

So… still single, still hiding and having Christmas with my mother.