This week our columnist Liz Frost faces singledom, kips on Fee's sofa and dons nipple tassels... only to be pleasantly surprised that there is life after love
Splitting up is never easy to do and with a live-in boyfriend it’s 100 times harder. Following several gruesome nights peppered with angry looks, heavy sighs and a generous squirt of The Silent Treatment mixed in for good measure, it was over between me and Charlie.
“If you think I’m the one moving out, forget it,” he’d said of our rented flat in Angel and I didn’t have the energy to square up to him, so three days later I found myself surrounded by boxes (only 20, you’d think I’d have more…) on my friend, Fee’s, sofa in Hackney.
The thing with breaking up is, for a brief moment when you wake the next day, you forget it ever happened. For your first few waking moments, you’re plagued with a slideshow of the two of you skipping through fields and petting small animals (even though you never did either of those things), before the truth comes crashing down and you realise there’s an empty space next to you in bed and hey, actually, it isn’t your bed at all, it’s your mate’s sofa.
Luckily Fee is an expert in such matters and there she was outside my door with a cup of tea in her hand and something that looked suspiciously like a tutu. Ridiculous, you might think, until I tell you that Fee is a Burlesque dancer.
“Come on, it’ll be fun!” she was saying, sloshing tea on the carpet with her excitement. She’d been on at me to join her burlesque troop for months now. She could tell I wasn’t enthused.
“You’ll be fine!” she said as she plonked the steaming cup in front of me (cure all remedy for the recently boyfriend-bereaved). Now, you might say I’m an independent girl, I love my own company and think nothing of a trip to the flicks on my own, but at that moment in time, sleeping on a sofa with the contents of my wardrobe poking out of a box, I had trouble believing her.
It seemed she wasn’t taking no for an answer though, so an hour later, still puffy-eyed with the effects of a sleepless night, there I was dressed in a large purple tutu and nipple tassels, in a complete stranger’s house.
“Hi” I said sheepishly to the bloke in the kitchen. I still had my cardi on over my costume, but it didn’t prevent me feeling stupid. “I’m Greg” he said trying hard not to look at my tassels. Fee hadn’t said anything about a photographer! I eyed his tripod nervously.
“Shall we get started then?” he said to a group of 12 scantily-dressed ladies who had just entered the room. And me.
A reluctant start (it took them three hours to prise my cardi off me) and several glasses of wine later, I was really beginning to get into the swing of things and by the end of the day I was even laughing a bit. Plus Greg had said I had a nice bum. I’ll never be a burlesque dancer, but I hadn’t thought about Charlie all day. Turns out Fee was right. I would be fine after all.
Liz Frost is a freelance writer specialising in features for women's magazines. She writes for Company, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Zest, B and Bliss. Email her at liz_frost@yahoo.co.uk, even if it's just to say hello!
