Diary – 13 May 2005

The trouble with country life is that it is so unhealthy. Where I used to walk to the Tube I now take the car. Where I used to go out and see friends I now ruin my eyes watching television. After 20 years in Leicestershire I am almost blind and I have no muscle tone. But I have determined to go on a health and beauty drive. My first stop is the optician, where I demand tinted contact lenses — only to be told I can’t have them. They say you should suffer to be beautiful but, apparently, if you are long-sighted, stabbing at your pupils without blinking doesn’t earn you the right to be a violet-eyed lovely. Still, anything is better than glasses. For several days I practise putting in my new, colourless lenses. I have to strip naked to prepare for 30 minutes of panting and sweating until I get the hang of them, but at last I am ready to wear them — and to a party. But with the lenses on I feel as if I am looking through sweet wrappers. I see an old friend coming towards me. ‘Hello Bridget,’ I cry. ‘It’s Pauline,’ she says. Perhaps I should go back to the television for a while.

My closest friend from school, Lucy, has been off the social scene for even longer than I have. She joined an enclosed order of nuns more than 19 years ago. Last week, however, she was let out to spend a few days with her sick mother, and I seized the opportunity to call her. When she answered the phone I didn’t recognise her voice, which sounds strangely old-fashioned. The convent has minimal contact with the outside world, although she tells me that they kept in touch with the Pope’s election by ordering the Guardian Weekly.