I was recently asked to give a talk about ‘Big-Hearted Man’ to the ladies of my village book group. They grilled me for nearly and hour and then asked if I was writing anything else. I told them I had recently completed another book, but that if they wanted to read it they should be prepared for a long wait. The book, based on this website, is about death and how to survive it. But having finished it, I am now faced with the depressing and daunting task of trying to get it into print and into the hands of all those people that I know are waiting to read it. I know death isn’t a sexy subject, and I’m also well aware that the manuscript contains no mention of either a boy wizard or the text life of David Beckham. No surprise then that four literary agents have already rejected the first three chapters, but I am determined not to put myself through another four years of disappointment, and to that end I have devised a fiendish plan; I am going to sell my book to potential publishers in a way that does not immediately disclose its content. I realise that a book on bereavement does not immediately scream ‘Bestseller!’ So I’ve decided that I’m not going to say exactly what it’s about. I won’t so much be lying, as being economical with the truth.

I intend to sell my manuscript to publishers as a cross between two hugely successful books, one about punctuation, and the other about sexual excess. To that end I have re-named my book ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves - The Sexual Life of Katie B.’

The publishers will think that they are getting a book filled with gross acts of debauchery, punctuated by a bit of sleep and lots of perfectly positioned commas and apostrophes, when in reality, what they will be getting is a manuscript littered with typos and tales of a sex life that has come to a full stop.

My punctuation is terrible. When I started writing I thought a semi colon was what you get to match your colostomy bag. I scatter commas about like Onan scattered his seed, but sometimes I get help from kind people who notice my errors. I don’t get any help at all with the other problem, but sometimes the assistant in the men’s clothing department of Debenhams lets me linger by the Calvin Klein underwear display. I stand in wonderment, gazing at all the fit male models, with the same look on my face that Homer Simpson gets when he sees a donut - although I do try not to dribble quite as much. And then I trudge forlornly out of the shop whilst the assistant looks on with the kind of pitying expression that only a man whose merchandise has been handled a bit too often can truly muster.

But one day it will all be different; one day I will stride purposefully into the shop and demand a pair of Mr. Klein’s finest jersey boxers, soft and gently cupping, for the new man in my life. He will have the finest undergarments that money can buy and I will be able to walk right past the cardboard eye candy without so much as a backward glance.

I did recently make a concerted effort to increase my chances of attracting a mate by purchasing a pair of sexy boots. I decided that these pointy, black beauties were going to be the catalyst to my meeting a new man. I had never owned a pair of FM boots before and I have to say that they had a startling effect on me. By the time I got home it was time to collect my girls from school, and so I wore my new boots into the playground. I was determined to show the other mothers that I still had it - I was fed up with being the bored-looking widow who leans against the chain link, I wanted to become Katie B, smouldering siren in stiletto heels.

It was all going to plan; I was looking sultry and my boots were looking pointy, and then I leant back against the chain link to complete my air of insouciance and drove one of my heels into the grating that runs beneath the fence. My foot was stuck fast: I was now faced with the job of trying to extricate my heel from the grating, without losing either my dignity or my sexy demeanour. I struggled for a while and finally got the heel out by combining one last, massive effort with a small but perfectly audible grunt. I thought I had pulled it off, and indeed I had, because as I walked away I realised that I had left the tip of my heel in the gutter.

I had sashayed into the playground and now I had to hobble out, looking every inch the sad, mad widow. But, hey, the boots are now mended, and every time I wear them I feel wonderful. You can’t put a price on feeling sexy, but you can put a price on being a durrr brain - £10.50 to be precise…

But boots are not the only things that have made me an object of ridicule. I was recently asked to appear as a guest on the Simon Mayo show on Radio Five Live; Simon was keen to hear about some of the embarrassing scrapes that I had got myself into during the time when I was mad with grief, and I made mention of ‘The Licky Dog Story’. The now-infamous anecdote was a totally inappropriate true story that I chose to share with eight uptight strangers at dinner one night, but Simon seemed to think I had also written about it on this site, in the ‘DIY - The Other Sort’ section. I didn’t think much more about it until I got home, checked my e-mails and found that hundreds of listeners were also desperate to know the full story of the licky dog. In the site I only mention a dog when I write about bizarre ways that widows might devise to provide sexual release, but then I put two and two together and came to the horrified conclusion that Simon Mayo and most of the listeners to Radio Bloke think that I have had sexual knowledge of a sheepdog. I know I have been alone for a while now, but not even I would stoop so low as to allow an obliging collie to indulge in a furtive spot of caninelingus.

I would like to state now, for the record, and for the benefit of Mr. Mayo and his listeners, that I do not have a pedigree chum, and that although I do have to handle my goldfish from time to time, there is no inappropriate touching…

And now, before I dig myself into any more holes, I’m going to dig my garden.


© Kate Boydell 2004. All rights reserved. e-mail: [email protected]. Close window.