Like Bridget Jones, I’ve had my fun with toyboys

Poet and artist Frieda Hughes finds something to relate to in Renée Zellweger’s latest romance

BRIDGET JONES’S BIG PANTS

The spectre of a dead Mark Darcy is a souvenir

Of three films that went before this one,

In which the last happy ending is undone

And now Bridget is on her own, with children. Enter Roxster,

The most irritating nickname and his youthful torso, Bridget’s age

Being a challenge to his self-perception. He reminded me that when

My marriage to an older man had ended, my next love was at least

A decade less, but my destiny did not include him either.

In Marks and Spencer, choosing knickers and bras

For my new husbandless life, just as Bridget junked her big pants

For something less containing, I collected an assortment

Of black lace, leopard print, underwired, over-the-top,

See-through and silky underthings, and waited like a loaded camel

In the till queue to find that behind me stood a long-married friend.

In her hands she held half a dozen plain white cotton underpants.

She looked at mine and I looked at hers, strangling a comment

That would have made something of her married whites,

My divorced blacks, her cotton, my lace, my hope, her experience.

Bridget Jones did find her other man, hidden in plain sight,

And I found mine.