She`s Marie Sharp, and she`s simply wonderful. And oh- so- familiar to a whole lot of us.
She has a caustic tongue (very Brit) but a heart of gold. She`s older than us but young enough to dance wildly to (olden golden alert!) music from the Seventies and Eighties when she needs cheering up; to feel the sharp tug of sexual attraction for a younger man; to go climb a tree as a mark of protest against unscrupulous developers. To walk to the grocer`s, then spend half an hour frantically searching for her car which she was sure she parked somewhere on that lane. To feel dizzy all day and ask her BFF to drive her to the doc, only to discover en route that it was coz she had on her reading glasses instead of her seeing ones.
She`s not fighting age --- well not too much, except she does go in for a facelift; she goes pale and sweaty when technicians ask her piercing qs about her washing machine, mixer or computer; she intensely dislikes Skype; she is addicted to the pulpiest of pulp tabloids (NO MORE FISH IN OCEAN! MORE RATS THAN PEOPLE IN LONDON!) ; she hangs out with the strangest people: Jimmy a gay friend who snaffles a cutie called Ned from under Marie`s nose, her lodger who speaks the strangest English, assorted drug dealers and their slavering dogs... and she has a `worrying space` in her brain that is fast expanding.
Gals, guys, folks, read Virginia Ironside`s No! I Don`t Need Reading Glasses! It`s what happened to Bridget Jones when she grew...up. It`s a riot.